Hey,
atm i am considering switching over to linux on my main pc. I have some experience with different distros ( i have fedora on my laptop) but i am not sure if it is really worth it. I mainly use my PC for Music Production, some Gaming and graphics stuff (Affinity Suit).
For my music production i use a lot of stuff from Native Instruments. I have a Maschine mk3 as my hardware DAW (in combination with Maschine Software) and NI Komplete with lots of vsts. I also have some Arturia vsts and vsts from smaller companies (all paid). My Software DAW is Bitwig (wich has native Linux support). After some research i found out that there are ways to get at least some software from NI running with yarbrigde, but this does not account for my Maschine mk3 and seems very tedious and unstable. Also it is suggested that i have to use older versions of my software as the current version of Native Access does not run at all. I am willing to put in some effort but all of this seems a little bit too much. I also found out that you can run windows in a vm and give it direct access to hardware so i could Use my Maschine mk3 and all of the software of course. My main concern with this is, that i will end up using windows anyway so why bother switching to linux if it is basically just a host for Linux in this case.
Do any of you have experience with the soft and hardware i use under linux? Or maybe some suggestions how i could solve my problems? Is running windows in a vm a viable solution or should i just stick with windows? Any input is welcome and much appreciated!
I use REAPER, which also has native Linux support and run most of my vsts over yabridge. Works really well for me overall but i try to use as much native foss vsts as possible. See https://safereddit.com/r/linuxaudio/comments/wntpyd/linux_plugins_thread_2022/ for some examples
I use Bitwig on an Arch Based distro. It works really well. Thanks to the flatpak package of bitwig, your choice of distro should not matter that much (in regard to running bitwig). So far I’ve only used bitwig and vst/clap plugins with a native vst version (vcv rack for example) those also work great. So far, I have not tried to get windows plugins to work. But that’s a Todo item for the future. I plan to use yabridge for this, but as you have read yourself, current NI plugins are a hassle and hardware specific plugins especially. I face similar issues with overbridge for my elektron machines…
At least when it comes to native Linux audio software like bitwig and reaper, my experience is highly positive. But the landscape is a lot smaller then on windows and some things do require more reading and tinkering so I’m not recommending it to everyone but certainly encourage it if one can live with some downsides.
Have you tried Overwitch for elektron? I use it for the digitakt and it works really well. I have never used actual overbridge though so I don’t know how it compares.
Oh wow. I did not know about that project. Will try that one out soon. Thanks a lot.
Do share if you have experiences using yabridge with the flatpak distribution of Bitwig! My existing setup did not work with that, but the deb version worked ok on Debian, so I keep using that.
Thanks to your question I tried it out and found that there are some fundamental issues with getting yabridge to work with flatpak. Most of them described on these issues: https://github.com/robbert-vdh/yabridge/issues/135 https://github.com/bitwig/bitwig-studio-flatpak/issues/24 so yeah. I might also have to switch to a different bitwig distribution or wait for a new solution to use windows vsts in bitwig.
Thanks for the links! Once flatpak/yabridge works great I’ll be able to use it with SteamDeck :).
I wonder though if this might need some additional functionality in flatpak itself…
Sounds like you have some investment into hardware and software not really designed with linux in mind. Running windows in a VM could work. There might be issues with graphics though if your VSTs/DAW have a lot of eye candy, as you’ll usually use a virtual GPU with a VM. You could always try a windows VM inside windows whether it works OK, before committing to linux + VM. An alternative could be to have a dual boot setup. You could use linux for day to day things, and reboot into windows to do music production.
This is a great comment. If it’s dabbling then absolutely, have fun! But it’s a real self-administered kick in the nuts to squander serious investment in SW/HW just for bragging rights, cool as they are.
Dual boot is probably the (annoying) answer. Not sure on the efficacy of a windows VM for music production.
