[Jack Winter]

FWIW, I've started disregarding the system paths for plugins, and install mine in ~/.vst, ~/.wvst, ~/.lv2vst, etc. Sometimes I build the plugins myself and just copy them over to the right dir, other times I install a distro package and copy them from the system path.

In the case of using windows vsts, I do that with LinVst and install various plugins into different wineprefixes which I symlink into ~/.wvst.

Since reaper has no builtin support for LV2 or Windows VSTs, the lv2vst and linvst wrappers are interesting to investigate.

Also to note, that calf plugins seem quite crash prone to many linux hosts, and I've seen discussions putting the DSP quality into question. Possibly a bread and butter set worth investigating is http://lsp-plug.in/, the vst plugins appear to work well in reaper.

Edit:

Though since I bought the fabfilter plugins (which appear to work well in reaper/linvst/wine), I find it increasingly hard to use anything else for my bread and butter...