Ah yes - Native Instruments. It's both HW and SW. I should have been more clear. No joy on Ubuntu - the issue is the HW driver. The HW is simply unsupported. (someone wrote a driver to partially allow midi mode on an older version of the HW, but it's completely hobbled and, I fear, makes my point more loudly than I could if it didn't exist. FWIW, only the older Native Instruments installers will run under wine - the new ones leverage certain features of windows that apparently will never be supported by wine, so I have little confidence in wine-based solutions for anything I need to depend on going forward.

Apple makes great computers, but... I can't stand them. You're in a walled proprietary garden and it drives me bonkers. I also have similar suspicions wrt their privacy practices.

Windows, for me, works well enough (I can get it to do everything I need) but I have grave concerns about privacy and a really, really don't like their AI direction. It's the opposite of what I want in a computer.

I've considered going full Linux as hypervisor with Windows as guest, but it's really not that easy to actually use beyond a theoretical proof of concept once you start managing large sound libraries.

Would like to get back to Linux as daily driver as I did years ago and actually do run it on a few old laptops. (I wish there was a better email client - the only one that seems to successfully support oauth2 is thunderbird, and it's more than a bit unwieldy for large mailboxes (especially with its circa 1997 design aesthetic...)

Anyway - I really, really want to find a way to make a leap to Linux (again) but it's currently not feasible, no matter how hard I bang my head against that particular wall...