I'm putting my tin foil hat on and want to join the world of Linux, however I make music in Ableton. Do I just need to dual boot or does anyone have a better solution?

There are several commercial options for Linux. The most-Ableton software out there is Bitwig Studio that has a Linux port. However, it’s expensive. The cheapest commercial solution, with a bit of learning curve but powerful nonetheless, is Reaper.

However, if you want to go 100% open source, there’s Ardour and LMMS (which is a lot like FL Studio). Ardour 9, which is expected by the end of the year, will be more MIDI-friendly than it used to be. LMMS latest git version (offered as binary on their site) has some good new features compared to their stable version, however, there’s still no vst3 support.

I’m an visual artist and I used Photoshop for years to edit my hand-painted scanned paintings. When I moved to Linux, and Gimp3 was out, I was finally ready to leave Photoshop behind. Some features of Photoshop aren’t there, but I was ready to leave them behind. Same with video, I used to have a rather popular blog about color grading with Resolve. I moved to kdenlive, which has none of these tools or plugins. It’s a decision that I simply had to make. I wanted to use foss tools, and that was the price to pay. I’m cool with my decision.

If you gotta go commercial, go with Reaper. The people (a small team of 3 or 4 I believe) behind it are really cool, and they’re doing it for the love of it, their profit is very small.

I can greatly recommend Reaper to you, in case Ableton + Wine doesn’t work out.

I only recently got into music making as a hobby so my overall perspective might be limited, but other DAWs I tried included:

• Ardour
• Bitwig
• LMMS
• Zrythm

I settled with Reaper bc of it’s customizability, freedom in workflow and cheap price without compromising in pro features. It’s actually completely free as long as you are evaluating buying it, which is up to you for how long. And the customizability is off the charts compared to any other DAW.

But what really sold Reaper to me was the lack of hurdles that got into my way of learning to make music.

Have fun

I use Ableton with Bottles (wine) with VSTs too, like Serum.

If you’re an Abelton user, I cannot recommend Bitwig enough.

If you switch DAWs, bitwig is really very good and runs natively on Linux.

I’m quite surprised Ableton haven’t released a Linux version yet. They would have had to do some of the legwork to stand up Ableton Push.

The .wav format is actually very simple. You should be able to write a bash script to produce wavs without too much trouble. If you’d rather not work that low-level you can always use the DAW features in emacs.

/s

I’m a happy Ardour user

The only comparable I was able to find is Bitwig Studio, but it’s quite expensive and I wasn’t doing so much music so I stopped making electronic music instead.

Someone in here mentioned bitwig.

I started on abelton and moved to bitwig around 3.X and have been with it ever since.

I love all the different modules and the grid which has give me a lot more expressive control over my sounds.

they are similar yet different; I believe the core bitwig team were ex ableton devs who wanted to take things in a different direction.

I know it’s silly but one of the biggest things that I like about bitwig is customizable shortcuts; this is especially good if you’re coming from ableton because if your a shortcut key wizard you can easily remap similar functions.

if you’ve got an extensive VST collection you can run them with wine + yabridge.

Bitwig is not the only option, but coming from ableton if you want to run single boot it is the most similar (IMO) to Ableton.

Happy to answer any questions you may have about it as well.

just use Deepin OS, it’s much better!