Gaming is all well and good, but I'd be interested to hear of experiences with moving and using Audio apps (Ableton Live, Cubase and other Steinberg apps, plus many VSTs) from Windows to Linux.

I see Wine, YABridge and LinVST mentioned in searches, but while I've got plenty of Linux experience, I'm time-poor and would prefer to make computers make noises rather than spend my time making things work. I have Reaper which is cross-platform but again, getting the VSTs working would be great (at a bare minimum).

A Mac is not an option here. Any pointers gratefully received!

> but I'd be interested to hear of experiences with moving and using Audio apps (Ableton Live

I've been using Linux for work and hobbies for more than a decade at this point, mostly Arch Linux, some CachyOS, but always had a partition of Windows available too. Why? Almost solely because Ableton does not run properly with Wine, Proton or any other tooling, and has never been able to do so, for as long as I've used Ableton (since version 8 or 9 I think).

If you spend most of your day with Ableton, then Linux is not ready for you, and then I'm not even considering plugins or what not, just the default and standard stuff is not running properly no matter what you'll try.

> I'm time-poor and would prefer to make computers make noises

Then Linux is not for you at this point. I don't mean to discourage you - for me, Reaper works, Scarlett works, ffmpeg works etc. But there are quirks. Reaper has horrible scaling on 4k screen, which I believe can be resolved by forcing UI scaling, but this requires change every time I switch from laptop to external monitor, so I just live with tiny buttons. Scarlett works, but requires JACK, and I never got it working properly with Pulse/Pipewire (outputs get duplicated sometimes), also control software doesn't exist, aside from one opensource reimplementation, which works but looks horrible.

If you don't have time, just don't.

I love how windows-linux discussion is populated by DAW/VST incompatibility. I'm still new to the industry, and therefore also open minded about daw/plugins.

I actually had good experience with setting up yabridge, it could have worked for me I think. But the elephant in the room is that many big commercial plugins use JUCE as a framework, and the recent release of JUCE (JUCE8) just broke compatibility with wine and seem to be sabotaging wine-based usage completely, and are not considering going back at the moment.

https://forum.juce.com/t/juce8-direct2d-wine-yabridge/64298/...

https://github.com/robbert-vdh/yabridge/issues/386

There are patches based on binary diffs to JUCE7, but it is just so much pain to simply run the commonest plugins in the field :/

So I'm now kind of stuck between using windows with commercial plugins or use linux with mainly smaller scale alternatives (although there are good ones: lsp, decent sampler, cardinal, surge)

I can't speak for DAWs but in 2019 when I tried switching to native Linux my Scarlett 2i2 3rd gen USB audio interface did not play nicely with Debian at the time. I'd get an endless amount of crackles and pops during recordings / playback and I spent days going over tons of audio configs / tools (Jack, Alsa, PulseAudio, etc.). They weren't xruns, at least Jack wasn't reporting them as that. Buffer sizes were normal too.

The good news is the same interface today works fine with PipeWire, without needing to tweak anything. I am using Arch this time around.

I use Reaper for Linux and love it. Getting Windows VSTs to work is okay with lin-vst and wine. Bascially install wine with your package manager, maybe run winecfg, then get lin-vst and make a copy of its single so-file, named the same as each vst binary in the same directory, then add that dir as a vst location in Reaper. As far as I remember.