Taking your DAW to Linux or Windows 11 etc. in the future?

[Master Mi]

I wanted to ask everyone how you plan to handle your DAW in the future.

Microsoft, with its “too big to fail” mentality, seems to be becoming increasingly bold with each new Windows version, and you sometimes get the feeling that Microsoft is more and more becoming the owner of your PC, while you yourself are increasingly being relegated to the role of a fool who, in a world of increasingly powerful and opaque corporate structures, is simply allowed to agree to become an increasingly transparent citizen.

Windows 11 in particular seems to be taking things to extremes, while powerful computers that may only be a few years too old are being dismissed as obsolete and, in true capitalist fashion, according to Microsoft's rules, should be scrapped today in order to buy a completely new computer with an uncertain expiration date.

This is what it looks like when unelected, filthy rich billionaires with their money-is-no-object aura decide to play world politics.

I'm getting increasingly fed up with how Microsoft handles our data, personal rights, and finances, and how it is developing an increasingly resource-hungry version of Windows that seems to be turning into a dysfunctional data octopus full of changes for the worse, and which is becoming less and less capable of fulfilling its function as a stable, powerful and long-lasting operating system for user applications.

I'm currently still living in the happy Windows 7 Pro era with an eye on Windows 10 Pro (which most of you probably have at the moment), just for being able to get some newer VSTis.
But I'm increasingly considering switching to a Linux version such as Linux Mint, as the increasing user-friendliness of Linux means that more and more musicians and DAW users are switching to this system, or at least, with Windows "The Eye of Sauron" 11 looming in the near future, more and more people are toying with the idea of cutting ties with Microsoft after Windows 10:
 

So I would like to ask the DAW users among you in particular how you plan to handle this in the future.

Are any of you already using Linux for music production - or has anyone even managed to get their DAW or DAWs (including additional VSTis and plug-ins), which were developed exclusively for Windows, to run completely on a modern version of Linux?

 

Edited Wednesday at 04:56 PM by Master Mi

[S A U C E F O N D A]

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.

 

Edited Wednesday at 10:02 PM by S A U C E F O N D A

[Zacktorial]

So I'm a little ahead of the game on this, as I've been using Linux as my primary OS for about 20 years now. The good news is that switching to Linux has never been easier. There's never been more options for user-friendly distros, and almost everything just works now.

For general Linux advice, almost any beginner distro will do. I would personally avoid Ubuntu (and its flavors, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc). Ubuntu derivatives are fine, but Ubuntu itself has a new package format (snap) that only it uses, and I've found it to be a bit janky. I would also avoid Arch and its derivatives because first of all Arch is not user friendly at all, and second, Arch updates tend to be pretty unstable. Updates are frequent and pretty bleeding edge and you can expect stuff to be janky or stop working over time. I think the current best beginner distros are PopOS, Mint, and MXLinux. Honorable mention for ElementaryOS.

As for DAWs, for obvious reasons I only ever considered DAWs that run on Linux. I found Ardour to have too much of a learning curve and not enough documentation to surmount it. Audacity is easy enough to use, but pretty clunky and not really intended as a full DAW so much as feature-heavy audio file editing. Someone (I think Argle) brought Reaper to my attention. I tried it out, fell deeply, madly in love with it, and have been using it ever since. That said, I'm only using it to do podcast editing. The closest I get to actual music production is Furnace Tracker, which does run flawlessly in Linux.

I'm sticking with Linux for the foreseeable future, but I do have a couple of caveats and quibbles with the modern state of Linux. I don't mean this as a discouragement, but just to temper expectations. Things are improving but not perfect in Linux right now. We are somewhere in the middle of a major infrastructure transition. Everything still works, but you might notice more little inconsistencies and bugs and jank than you would have even five years ago. Distros and desktop environments are moving towards making the newer Wayland windowing system the default instead of ye olde X11. Wayland is a much cleaner design than X11, but it is less mature and rougher around the edges. My experience using Wayland has been a desktop with annoying little bugs and bits of jank everywhere. Because of this, I still run X11, but I know someday I'll have to make the switch.

Linux audio infrastructure is also a bit complex these days. Something called PipeWire has largely replaced the older PulseAudio and is backwards compatible with it. There is a similar story with PulseAudio and JACK. But if you need to do anything off the beaten path with audio at the moment, which I suspect a lot of us might, you will probably find yourself having to wrestle configs that have to mess with pulse and pipewire and JACK all at the same time.

As for what made me switch? Windows Vista was waaaaaay too slow on the laptop I had 20 years ago.

[Master Mi]

Thanks for sharing your experiences. ))

Since the delivery of my SSD hard drive for the planned Windows 10 Pro installation has been postponed by almost a month, I think I'll at least install and test Linux on my old notebook to find out how it works in detail, how well, fast and safe it runs
compared to a Windows version, and what DAW-related possibilities it offers.

I've already flashed the latest version of Linux Mint onto a USB stick so that I can install it on my older notebook later.

Another interesting development in the Linux universe seems to be Winboat, which allows modern software developed for Windows to run smoothly on Linux:

https://www.winboat.app/

The version is currently still in the beta development phase, but is already said to be working not too bad:
 

Let's see what the near future will bring for developments like these.

...

And once software developers realize that more and more people - perhaps 10 to 20% of operating system users - are switching to Linux (which is already a significant number), it is very likely that more and more programs and well-known software will be developed as alternatives or even natively for Linux.

And then we can only hope that Linux, with its increasing market power, does not follow a similar path to Microsoft, for example by allowing large companies to overshadow, take over, displace, or even buy up the open-source software sector within Linux distributions.

[Zacktorial]

Huh, WinBoat looks pretty slick. It does seem to be a full (partial?) Windows install running in a VM, with all the pros and cons of that. I wonder how on earth they manage licensing...

For those of us for whom installing MS software is a complete no-go, there are some alternatives to Windows-in-a-VM, and here in the year of our lord 2025 things run surprisingly smoothly. Might be worth trying out these solutions first. Everything is based on WINE, of course, which is a Windows API emulation layer. You can use WINE by itself like a neanderthal, but it's much easier with a nice frontend. I haven't tried it myself, but I've heard good things about Bottles https://usebottles.com/

For games, the name of the game is proton, which is WINE + a DirectX translation layer. Again you can roll your own, but here you have a choice of a few frontends. If you're playing Steam games, just install Steam. Steam is Linux native and just works and so do 99% of games. By default Steam will only let you launch games that are "verified", but if you go to Settings -> Compatibility there is an option to enable Steam Play (what Valve has branded proton) for all titles. For some games you may or may not want to fiddle with running different the game with different versions of proton, but that is a game-specific setting.

For non-steam games, first of all you can just add them as a Steam shortcut and run them that way. Works pretty great with things that are just distributed as a .exe inside a folder (I use it for Sonic fangames). But also, GoG, Epic, and Amazon storefronts have a frontend call Heroic Launcher which works incredibly well. It's how I played Baldur's Gate 3 and Witcher 3, both of which I have on GoG. There's also a miscellaneous game launcher called Lutris, but I haven't had much luck getting it to run anything successfully.

1 hour ago, Master Mi said:

And then we can only hope that Linux, with its increasing market power, does not follow a similar path to Microsoft, for example by allowing large companies to overshadow, take over, displace, or even buy up the open-source software sector within Linux distributions.

In a certain sense that can never happen and in a certain sense it already has. We have to get our terminology straight a little. "Linux" the way we've been using it in this conversation is shorthand for a big glob of software, only one part is technically actually called "Linux". "Linux" is just the kernel of the OS, the very low-level part that talks to the hardware directly and provides APIs for applications to use computer resources (among other more technical duties like process scheduling and memory allocation). The rest of the OS is usually called "userland".

Android is Linux in that it uses the Linux kernel, but the userland on top of Android is increasingly under Google's draconian control. They just announced new shenanigans about sideloading set to take place next year that people are actively protesting https://keepandroidopen.org/ In that sense, large companies have already taken over and displaced open-source software.

Desktop Linux (what Stallman wants everyone to call GNU/Linux but that's also kind of not technically correct anymore) though has proven more resilient. Large corporations have tried shenanigans with desktop Linux, but every time they do, someone comes out of the woodwork and creates a new Linux distro without said shenanigans. A sort of "my own Linux, with blackjack and hookers" sort of strategy. The biggest threat to desktop Linux isn't so much corporate software meddling, but corporate hardware meddling. Microsoft continues to try to make Linux more and more difficult to install on your own hardware with "features" like Secure Boot. I worry that the almost-assuredly-impending mass migration to ARM-based PCs will be the opportunity that MS seizes to really lock down the hardware and make it impossible to install a non-Windows OS. (Even then there are companies like Raspberry Pi and Framework that will keep the torch going, but I worry that's not a self-sustaining ecosystem...)

[Argle]

In theory I would love to go to Linux because of the ethos and Microsoft sucks balls, but in practice I would need to see some extensive documented setup by someone who operates very similar to me and has installed all of my big heavy hitter stuff that I can't live without (Spectrasonics, Kontakt libraries + Native Access, iLok), and it works smoothly.  Bringing up these issues seems to result in 2 responses, neither of which acceptable for me... a) tear your hair trying to get specific software to work and maybe suffer with a buggy, crippled workflow, or b) abandon your expensive paid Windows exclusives and switch to native FOSS solutions.  For someone starting out who doesn't mind having access to the best of the best virtual instruments I think Linux is well worth a try, but someone with $10k of Windows-based software the cost-benefit just ain't there.

That said I don't have to worry until 2032 because I'm using W10 LTSC IoT.  I would LOVE for Linux to pop off before then.  But then again the year of the Linux desktop has been coming every year for, what, the last 30 years?  It's like cold fusion lol

I would very much prefer to not ever touch Windows 11, which for my music production rig it's safe until 2032 (at which point whatever horror after W11 will make W11 look like the halcyon days haha).  My gaming rig, I have until next October with that and then that's gonna be a reaaally interesting choice.

Edited 10 hours ago by Argle

[Unknown Pseudoartist]

I didn't touch any Windows system since 2008-2009, when my transition to GNU/Linux and free software programs began. The times when Ubuntu was still good, basically.

Of course my situation is kinda different, since I was not interested in music production back then (I barely started on this around 2020-2021, or arguably late 2022 - mid 2023 if you count only the serious attempts). So I hadn't any problem with any of the creative subjects or programs I was active in at the moment, as I had a proper replacement working for pretty much all programs I was used to before the transition, even if some of these weren't the most convenient. And regarding user interfaces and customizability and all that I couldn't be happier. Used to hard-closed and walled gardens all felt so fresh and so much like "my own system" in comparision...

With music making, however, I was already hearing/reading comments online about how the situation on GNU/Linux and free software was still pretty rough and many steps away from other systems. So when I got into this (by totally accidental ways) in 2020 I expected the worst, but to my surprise all was a lot easier than expected. Surely a lot of stuff improved and lots of new programs, plugins, etc making life easier in comparision to 1 decade earlier.

And nowadays I know of a few examples of musician doing great stuff using exclusively free software and on GNU/Linux systems. The guitarist Daniel Bautista is a good example, if anyone knows him or is curious to check. Although totally experimental and bizarre stuff I wouldn't recomend to everyone, the avant-garde band Sebkha-Chott is another curious example that also relies purely on free software for their live shows and other related stuff.

So definitively things can be done, and not even needing the privative DAWs everyone is used to. And still with Reaper having its own native version and Wine working pretty well to open Windows programs, Jack as low latency sound server, etc... probably easy to do stuff without even needing to migrate regarding your favorite DAW.

It's weird, as a person who was long fleeing away from the many problems of Microsoft and other "big tech" companies, to see so many people joining such campaigns precisely now, but kinda optimistic about that. Hopefully will see similar steps happening regarding the situation with Youtube and the move to free and federated alternatives instead (already started prioritizing on Peertube myself).