Ok, the consensus from about everyone is seemingly that pulseaudio is
the culprit causing all the problems with jack. So I will give that
route a try.
I uninstalled pulseaudio pavucontrol jackd2 jack completely.
I only reinstalled jack, the jackd2 need I dont get so I left it out.
After jack is installed, I try to start it through mixbus which is about
the only application I found that can actually start jack. I used mixbus
for about 6 months with jack on another distro. qjacktcl does nothing
but parse irrelevance and promisses so I dont use it anymore.
I start mixbus from command line.
It starts up but says it cannot find/start jack.
The tail of the terminal output contains the jack start string (which
fails completely to start jack).
resetting paste count
Mixbus: Screen height is 1080; Font scale is 1; User-scale is 1;
Suggested scale: 1.05469
caught signal - shutting down.
JACK command line will be: -t 200 -p 2048 -R -T -d alsa -n 2 -r 48000
-p 128 -d hw:VSL,0
Butler drops pool trash
resetting paste count
After which it reports the screenshot.
"http://grossmann-venter.com/issues/jack/jack-mixbus.png"
So, same problem without pulseaudio.