I don't know much about DAWs beyond messing around in them but I have a w11 VM with a recent nvidia card passed through (VFIO) and latency is not a concern in the slightest.
Was your experience with no graphical acceleration? It makes a world of difference. KVM/QEMU is also a good bit more performant than something like virtualbox if that's your frame of reference
Ive been wanting a mini PC for a while now, enjoy your beelink!
Most are staying, but there's a growing shift to simplex among privacy/anon focused people
Signal uses closed source and centralized servers to deliver all your messages. Some people don't like their communications being dependant on a corporations computer, and would rather maximize data sovereignty when possible.
phone number requrement is unacceptable to some people
If SimpleX makes bad choices it can be forked and self hosted, whereas we would be locked in with signal and at the compamys whims
It's OK to stay on signal but to say no one is switching is untrue.
It was pretty small numbers before (darknet) but a youtuber called Mental outlaw did a video on it recently and now it's exploded into the more mainstream privacy communities.
It isn't perfect, and signal has a lot of perks but there's no need to literally ignore new developments
For the overwhelming majority of users phone number alone = no anonymity, then there's the fact you're relying on a corporation to store all your messages on their closed source centralized server...