Haiku could theoretically fill a niche for music production workflows. Ultra tight MIDI timing and sequencing, low-latency audio and a beautiful desktop. I hope this dream comes true eventually.
I worked on a Elektron MachineDrum firmware fix that corrected the MIDI jittering due to incorrect ISR configuration.
MD itself is pretty tight already with its RTOS but the fix brought it down to microseconds.
I was pretty proud of it because it solves a few phasing problems.
I then turned this over to a friend running a lot of Elektron boxes, and his reaction was, "you mean the sound we've got is wrong? how strange!"
So while I feel the same urge to have ultra tight MIDI timing, I doubt this would be a general interest of the non-technical musicians out there.
IMHO, it's not just DAWs keeping people on main OSes, but plugins. On the Linux side, Reaper, arguably one of the most popular options on Windows/macOS, has been available since 2018, BitWig is a good Ableton-like experience, and Ardour is also decent. But on the side of plugins - in my case drum VSTis and amp sims - the selection is still quite limited.
