Making music Unix-style

I'm trying to use my computer to make some music. This would involve pretty lo-fi recording & processing and sequencing "virtual instruments" (midi? vst? etc)
There are a lot of options, and I haven't been able to "just get started". I'd like to benefit from your experience.
Is there any software to make music that feels Unix-ish? It seems everything I find so far involves knobs and buttons and sliders and lights and everything is integrated in one big scary app. Are there some right tools for the right jobs that present simple and clear interfaces?
In your experience, is it worthwhile to study decisions like ALSA vs OSS, whether or not to use JACK or PulseAudio, etc? I don't yet have a clear idea about the differences between these or how they relate. Can I just use my basic setup (default arch install + alsa I think) and get o.k. results?
Here's the kernel modules I load on boot, it looks like there are a lot that have to do with sound
MODULES=(!pcspkr r8169 slhc acpi-cpufreq cpufreq_ondemand snd-mixer-oss snd-pcm-oss snd-hwdep snd-page-alloc snd-pcm snd-timer snd snd-hda-intel soundcore kqemu nvidia)
I also have the "alsa" daemon running.

Your data rate for the video is 4.5 times of what it should be (9240 kbits/s). Try using 2000 kbits/s for the video data rate.
Here are some other factors that can make the video sluggest along with the above:
1) The dimensions of the video is 849x406. The height and width of the video should be divisible by, 16 for best... or 8 for better... or 4 for good. This can effect the encoding (always does) or playback of the video.
Here read this article: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/apps/flvbitrate_calculator/videosizes.html
Even tho the above article is for Flash it also applies to h.264.
2) The audio is mp3, this isn't h.264 complient. AAC audio is... I would change the audio encoding to AAC.
3) And lastly...what program did you use to encode this video with?
I'm glade you supplied a short video. Most people don't. See if next time you can supply at least ten seconds. Thirty second would be the bomb!
I took your video and copy/pasted it to lengthen it to 13 seconds. Encoded with Apple's Compressor...h.264....2000 kbits/s...audio ACC 128 kbits/s... dimensions 848x400
http://www.setfreedenver.org/DemoA/pause_demoA.html
There still is some jerkiness. This is inherent from the footage you supplied.

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