Man, it took me a long time to finally break away from Windows. Coming from a graphic design background, I was deep in Adobe’s ecosystem, so it wasn’t easy to let go. I eventually gave up on Windows 10 when support was ending — I was just completely fed up with the whole experience.
I decided to try Ubuntu, which sent me down the rabbit hole of hopping from distro to distro until I finally landed on Debian 12. Since I’m on a budget, I’ve always used older, inexpensive hardware — stuff that often had no real support on Windows. But on Debian? Everything just worked! Sure, a few things needed extra drivers, but the community support for aging hardware was incredible.
It’s honestly a beautiful thing. Plus, not having to support a mega-corporation that’s pushing spyware into its latest version feels even better.
Finding a new DAW was the real struggle. I came from FL Studio and was slowly transitioning to Ableton, so switching to Linux was pretty jarring. At first, all I could find were Reaper, Ardour, and LMMS — none of which really clicked with me. I just wanted something that felt like Ableton, with an attractive, intuitive interface that was easy to navigate.
After a while, I stumbled upon Bitwig Studio. One of the main reasons I chose it is because it runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux, so I’m not locked into a single operating system.
I often see people say they can’t switch OSs because their DAWs, VSTs, and other tools are tied to one platform — and I totally get that. But for me, I want the freedom to go wherever I want. VSTs are still the one area I haven’t fully figured out yet, but for now I’m using CLAP plugins and plan to explore Winboat for running VSTs in the future.
Other than that, I’m really glad I finally made the switch to Linux. It took some time to learn, but with the help of ChatGPT and the online community, the transition was so much smoother.
Sidenote, this was the video that convinced me to make the switch.