So I built a new computer the other day and there are some things that I want to comment on.

[daemonspudguy]

Last Saturday, I finally built my new computer after having the parts for 4 years.This was my first time building a new computer in 10 years. The specs are an AMD Ryzen 5 3600X CPU, 16 gigabytes of DDR4 ram running at 2660 megahertz, an XFX RX 580 GPU (literally the only card in stock in the entire world when I bought it), all connected to an MSI B540 Gaming Max Plus motherboard (remember that one). The process was mostly smooth but having sat in its box for 4 years the motherboard obviously needed to have its firmware upgraded.I obviously thought that would be no big deal. I was wrong. The name of the chipset for my motherboard is the 7B86v1, but it reports to my computer as simply a 7B86, so I tried to get that firmware. Didn't recognize it. Then I tried an earlier version of the firmware for that model. Again, nothing. And then I checked again and found MSI's page for the B450 Gaming Plus Max, which apparently has a different chipset despite having an almost identical name to the B450 Gaming Plus. This was a pain in the ass to figure out. But, ok, I flashed the BIOS and now everything would be smooth sailing, right? NOPE! The flashing process wiped the boot settings, including where my EFI System Partition was, so I needed to go reinstall my bootloader. I couldn't find my flash drive with the Arch Linux install image so I had to make a new one, but the only other computer I have working atm is my Chromebook, so I needed to learn how to make a bootable USB drive on a Chromebook. I finally got the damn thing up and running fully today.

[Emdy]

I understood several of those words!

Are you using this computer for any sort of audio work? I don’t know if I’ve seen Linux brought up in any conversation related to DAWs, I’d be curious to know what sort of software and external hardware would be compatible with a machine like yours, and how it would compare performance wise to more common setups.

[daemonspudguy]

No I'm not, other than occasionally recording audio for a YouTube video, for which I use a cheap USB mic directly into either Audacity or OBS Studio.

[daemonspudguy]

An addendum: my motherboard doesn't appear to be able to properly manage my case fans at all, so it was getting convinced that it was overheating because according to the Smart Fan Controller they are off. I disabled that and locked all the fans to be running at full speed at all times. It's noisy but it does work.