Hey! I just found this post, too late to vote. I am interested in this stuff though. I have some basic gear that should be enough for my needs. I may do a post on that some time. I use Linux for various reasons and it has some decent audio tools. The Ardour DAW is powerful and you can get plugins for most things. It may even be possible to use some that are for Windows, but I have not looked into that. I need to do some fiddling to get it all working properly as some things have not worked since I got my newish Focusrite interface. I may get motivated to fix that soon.
Please write more about such things and I will check it out.
!BEER