I have a very good friend who built and operates one the largest and most high-end recording studios in the Philadelphia area. They have a crazy level of top-end gear in place, including (but not limited to) their computer audio interfaces. Gear that cost thousands and thousands of dollars. There’s a company and a support number and a help forum. The interfaces routinely do not work correctly, and the engineers at the studio have received no useful help whatsoever from the company’s support mechanisms. They have eventually figured out a sort of ad-hoc folk wisdom that means that things work OK most of the time (i.e. they’ve worked out what sorts of things they do typically cause problems, and now they don’t do them). I’m not naming the companies involved in this, because I don’t think it is useful, but let’s just say that if you were using Apple hardware and macOS and wanted “the best” audio interface available, this is one of a very small number of companies you’d be considering.
Going back some years to when I was first working on Ardour, I discovered that using ADAT clock on many “professional” devices in the studio I was using for testing and observation simply did not work. We contacted the companies, and they’re response was, essentially “meh, yeah, we know, it’s not reliable, don’t use it”. No Linux involved.
Another example: a very well known audio tech company that made a hard disk recorder that was really a computer. A friend owned one, had several important unfinished sessions when the motherboard in the HDR died. The company could offer no help whatsoever. They said “we don’t make that unit any more and there are no replacement motherboards available from anywhere”. Their only solution was to propose that my friend drove for 4 hours to a studio of someone who owned a similar device, plug the hard drive in, and bounce the sessions into a different format.
Having been around the audio tech industry for more than 20 years now, I can say that there are very few companies that will provide you with the sort of support you probably want.
As others have noted, the newer breed of USB class compliant audio interfaces are your best bet at this point, and will likely work “forever” without issues. If they have issues, they will be ones that the manufacturer likely will not help with, no matter what platform you are using. And there will likely be highly experienced technically-savvy users of the device who will be able to provide you with better help and advice than anyone who works for the manufacturer.
An example: the MOTU Ultralite AVB that I use (24 in/out) has problems with channel swapping. It was noticed first on Linux, and when reported, MOTU both denied it and said “it’s Linux, we don’t support it”. Then it was found to happen on certain other platforms too, and MOTU started to respond by saying it was a firmware problem on their side. They claimed it was fixed - it wasn’t. Then it was fixed. Then they broke it again. You will get far more information about this issue from within the Linux audio community (including specific firmware versions that do not suffer from the problem) than you ever would from MOTU.
