this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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I do gaming and music production on Linux without much issue at all these days.
Most games are pretty easy to work with these days thanks to Steam, Lutris, and Bottles.
As for audio, there are 4 key ingredients to my setup: Pipewire, Bitwig Studio, Wine and Yabridge.
Pipewire is pretty easy to use and works in a low latency setting just fine, so imo you no longer have to juggle PulseAudio + JACK.
Bitwig isn't open source, but it's fantastic and inspiring and supports Linux natively. They've also been great about stuff like the new open source CLAP plugin format.
I've found that Wine (staging) does a pretty reasonable job handling any Windows VST I've thrown at it, but it's a bit of work getting it setup, especially if you're new to the concept.
And finally yabridge is a great CLI tool for turning all of your Windows plugin .dlls into Linux .so, that you can easily use in your DAW of choice.
So if you want to do music production on Linux then definitely check out Bitwig and Reaper (along with Ardour, like you mentioned). And personally, I think that if you have a decent chunk of Windows VSTs it's worth investing a bit of time learning how to getting them working in Wine and then bridged with yabridge.
This is solid. I am so happy for this advice, never heard of Yabridge. I am willing to mess around if it actually means I can use my plugins with Linux!
Yeah! Don't sleep on it! I can say without reservation that yabridge is essential for me. :)
The basic yabrigde workflow is:
yabridgectl addwhere all of your various Windows VST dll files are (instead of whatever Wine prefix you installed them in).yabridgectl syncyabridge will create a .so bridge library for each of your Windows VSTs and spit them out into~/.vst3or whatever.~/.vst3or whatever, and your WIndows VSTs should hopefully show up and work just like they do on Windows (with the usual caveat of Wine being pretty great but not always perfect).Sadly there's no good GUI frontend for it (that I know of at least), but as far as CLI tools it's pretty easy to learn and use. Also, you may want to make sure that you've got realtime privilages setup on your system, and you can find guides to doing that in the yabridge wiki.
But yeah, I've got a bunch of Windows VSTs from Native Instruments and IK Multimedia and a bunch of others too, and they are work very well when bridged these days, so I'm able to use Linux for music without sacrificing anything.
Wow, thank you for the guide. I will try it out as soon as I can.