Weird. That's one issue I didn't have, luckily.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the sound driver thing has been sorted since pipewire came out, it acts as a sort of bridge between the different sound servers. As far as your plugins, I found two posts from the old place about it: here and here, I wouldn't know specifically on those since I mostly use the open-source ones in the Arch repos. If neither of those help, you could try yabridge, which would be available from your distro's package manager.

As far as DAWs, I'm using Ardour, which is completely free, but there's also a couple of paid ones, REAPER, at $60 for individuals or $225 for a commercial license, and Bitwig, which costs between $100 and $400 depending on which license you buy. Personally, Ardour's been fine for me.

Low-latency can be achieved a few different ways, Ubuntu has a distro called Ubuntu Studio that uses their own tricks to make it happen, it also comes with a bunch of extra stuff for graphic design and video editing. Personally, I went with Arch, and followed the instructions on the Arch wiki, and I see latencies in the low single digits of milliseconds. There's also AV Linux and KX Studio , but I haven't used those, so I couldn't tell you much about them, other than that I hear good things about them.

That was a longer reply than I had intended, but if you make the switch, good luck and rock on!