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 post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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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.
You certainly want to test out what you expect to use before moving. The advantage would also be finding apps that run natively on Linux. There certainly are some such DAW apps.
I'm using Manjaro KDE and my games are running fine under Proton on Steam Games. But I play Snowrunner, Red Dead Redemption 2, etc.
A tip on Windows VMs as I do keep one. I discovered that running one with it's Windows files rather on a separate partition formatted at NTFS, really works quite well for me (versus the VM sitting on one massive VM file on the Linux partition. Can see Chris' video about this at https://youtu.be/6KqqNsnkDlQ.
Nice thing for just testing Linux, is install it on an external drive, and boot with that. Then your existing machine is completely left as it is, and you can test Linux as it would really run on your computer.
Thanks a lot for the Hint about the vm solution, i will defenitely Look further into it. The only problem with actually running Linux on my Hardware i can think of would be secure Boot. But this can be turned off (i needed it for Windows 11 and some docker stuff i played around with). Years ago i had a dual Boot solution with win 7 and Ubuntu. But in the end i was more on Windows (gaming on Linux was way worse bock then) and eventually kicked Ubuntu off my harddrive.
It isnt even that i have actual Problems with win11, in fact i have to say it runs well and very stable, at least on my System. Its more like an "ideological" Thing. I just want to have As little big corpo stuff as possible.
Linux can also boot with EUFI (hope that is the right letters) as I converted mine to that. So it is recognised alongside my dual-boot Windows 10.
Last time I tried to use low latency audio on a Windows VM the latency was still horrendous. You could get closer to the desired result via some non-trivial virtualization where you passthrough a whole USB controller to Windows and you plug your hardware in it. Unfortunately that still isn't as low latency as native Windows. It might be possible to get there via further optimization like CPU core pinning but I didn't get there. I keep a laptop with Windows for the purpose.
TL;DR: Windows VM for low latency audio isn't an option.
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.
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..
The big issue is not the DAW. Reaper will work fine (as well others, I'm sure). The issue is plugins, particularly wrt extended functionality with NI stuff (Maschine, etc.), and a variety of other ones, from Plugin Alliance, etc.
Yes, you could probably get a lot of this stuff to work (though to what extent, I don't know), but it will not be supported. If things start having issues, or if a new version comes out, there are no guarantees. I had a wierd glitch with a certain PA plugin but since I was using Reaper, they wouldn't support it - this was on windows.
Also, although you could likely get your interface to run, it'll not be supported.
In the end, if the fun for you is the challenge of making it work (even with duct tape and bailing wire) then go for it. It would honestly be fun.
However, if the goal is to make music, you run the risk of spending valuable time grinding away on compatibility issues - time that could be spent doing the music thing.
There's a reason why people gravitate towards MacOS for music - it just works, even more so than with Windows. That said, I just can't stand Apple computers (it's the walled garden that gets to me - YMMV - it's a personal choice) and settle for Windows on a home built PC with a healthy dose of WSL.
The other big thing holding me back is Adobe - lightroom, mobile, cloud, are all very much part of what I need. No joy there in *ix-land.
FWIW, I exclusively ran linux (and FreeBSD) for several years. Switched back to windows for the sake of compatibility with my workplace.
Let us know what if you end up trying it out - I am tempted to test it out too, but I am unlikely to switch.