cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/34255100
Thought I’d create a distinct thread from the previous one asking about daily use, because I really do want to hear more on people’s pain points. Great to know people are generally sounding pretty positive in those posts who recently switched, but want to know your difficulties as well! This way old and new users can share their thoughts, hopefully to inspire a respectful discussion.


Honestly right now there’s no way to use 90% of the industry standard audio plugins and most popular DAWs on Linux. FL Studio and Ableton do work on Linux but very unstable and as long as they’re not stable you can kinda skip the latency talk, because stability is quintessential. You are bound to native plugins and as long as alternatives are way harder to use and take longer to learn configure, there’s a massive overhead, not even talking about the ones that genuinely do not work even with wine and or winetricks, bottle, etc…
The same goes for video and photo editing as well as post effects. Although I have to admit you genuinely have more options and some setups even though not much more stable to technically work already.
Games are also annoying but I just don’t play valorant or battlefield 6 or any other games that are kind of incompatible by design, so if that was the only thing I could manage.
And lastly (but everyone knows), office compatibility is still an issue because sometimes I need to do something in Microsoft office to ensure it still works when I send it over.
Honestly the real deal breaker for me is the first paragraph. I currently mix & master a band and produce music by myself, with friends and do small audio jobs for other people. Gimme an environment I don’t have to pour another decade into and I’ll switch. In it’s current state I will not place a bet that if I give it my all things will still work when I need them to and that’s the bare minimum.
It’s a shame because honestly I found setting up a modern Linux distro for audio work is actually easier and more flexible than windows now, by a long shot. Pipewire is awesome, routing signals is so easy and latency is great with no third party drivers.
Unfortunately I don’t think there’s a good solution for plugins, as long as developers don’t provide a Linux build we’re mostly stuck with alternatives. LSP is pretty neat, but I understand that not being able to use the suites you’re accustomed to sucks.
I find Reaper is great. And Bitwig works well as a replacement for Ableton.
I tried but there’s so many things that I need to be able to turn from bad to good in just a few clicks, and that’s basically irreplaceable for me rn.
I tried reaper and even if I learned it more thoroughly it would still result in 3x the time on every single process in song production, mix & master and that’s unacceptable for me.
Heard a lot about bitwig and that would probably be my preferred alternative but that unfortunately still leaves the issue of third party Plugins.
I’ve been trying to find a way to do this properly for quite a while now but I have yet to find a way to do this that’s sustainable long term.
Not trying to talk down your suggestions because I genuinely think they could work for others, just adding more information to why that’s unfortunately not enough for me to switch completely.
Btw for my servers and backup notebooks I already use lots of Linux. Anything not main driver kinda works perfectly with Linux and most of all it keeps on working when I need it. In fact I suspect my hardware will give in before the os and or software will pose any issues.
Have you tried using yabridge? https://github.com/robbert-vdh/yabridge#configuration
It’s not perfect, some plugins still have issues. But most of the time it works really well. I use this with reaper and find music production is totally doable in Linux