Not extensively, but something tells me that it probably works just fine across the board, sort of like Audacity, GIMP, or something like that. I’ve noticed that the FOSS / nearly-FOSS stuff tends to be the most solid, and anything geared toward Windows / Mac users that’s later ported to Linux sort of remains an afterthought in terms of bug fixes and updates, or in some cases, maybe it’s a little more difficult to find the one package manager that supplies the current version and everyone else is lagging, etc.
I might’ve spoke too soon about FL Studio, though; I had seen Bottles being mentioned in place of Wine a few times but disregarded it (because I thought Bottles was just a Wine frontend anyway?) but as it turns out, the surface functionality under Bottles is definitely there. I haven’t extensively used it yet, but being able to open patcher and nest a VFX Script in there looks pretty promising so far. Apparently if you spend time tweaking bottles frameworks and dependencies you can even have the shitty inbuilt AI back, but I’d gladly pass on that feature anyway .
Might just be my resistance to change / growing pains, really. Sometimes the solution is to just try another app or cut your losses, but not really having access to VSTs just feels so bland. I really wish I could somehow get Voltage Modular to run, if nothing else, but due to its strict DRM, that’s unlikely to ever happen unless they actually come up with a Linux build. Maybe one day.
I’m still committed to this, though. I came really close to reinstalling Windows, but I took a few deep breaths. Having a decluttered workspace with mostly free tools and millions of ways of stringing them together is still a win. I just need to toughen up a little .
I also ended up dual-booting with Zorin just for a laugh, but they weirdly have all sorts of audio tools like Pipewire managers and shit just right on tap in the software manager. I know nothing about the Carla plugin system, and this might actually integrate with Bitwig in some way, so I think there are probably more alternatives / solutions than problems. It’s just a matter of finding the better option and loading things up that way, but there’s no roadmap in sight. lol
I can vouch that Audacity, Pd and Supercollider work great on whatever hellscape of Linux crap I have installed, but that’s the end of any real experience. I have Reaper on there as a trial and have used it a few times, but honestly I haven’t put in a lot of time doing serious audio workflow with any of it, it’s mostly just a playground for learning stuff.
I’m still on Win10 and unless there’s some ridiculously compelling reason I doubt I’ll upgrade. 10 is bought and paid for, pretty locked down on my network, and only used for audio and the occasional coding project. I’d love for it to be my last round of Windows. At the same time, it’s functional enough, has the tools I use, and I’m not interacting with or supporting Microsoft in any way by using it at this point. At least that’s my mealymouthed justification to myself.
100%. It’s death by 1000 cuts every time I’m at a Windows desktop. The workflow is so clunky, the views are not what I want, nothing runs as quickly as it should and there’s zero customization compared to Linux. Everything works, nothing crashes, but it all takes twice as long as it should and I hate it.
Well, I’m tapping out. The best way I can sum up why I’m tapping out (some of this is overkill / redundant tinkering BS, but most isn’t):
*
(also, a lot of the shit I use is just broken / needs to be debugged in order to run under LInux, as mentioned above a few times)
I consider this experiment to be a win, and I’m going to absolutely keep using CLI tools and doing cool batch processing under WSL and on some of my hardware that can’t handle W11. I think, until Linux gets more popular / supported by more devs and bugs get ironed out (mostly on the UI-end, of course), Windows is just crushing the competition like always. I talk a lot of shit, but in the end, I can have Ubuntu under the hood, package managers, and all sorts of cool shit under Windoze. Everything ‘just works’, and I don’t have to fight every step of the way to get something up and running. I’ve learned a lot of valuable lessons through this experiment.
This is the real dream. If VM and other software didn’t have to phone home all the time, I’d probably try this, too. Unfortunately I’m probably going to have to roll with whatever the new thing is until I can’t afford to anymore, then fall back on Ubuntu or something out of necessity rather than out of morbid curiosity. For that, I’m actually really glad it’s there at all.
Maybe someday soon we’ll see the integration. Since our last chat, I went ahead and tried plugdata and retried supercollider (love it this time around)…. but I’m just goofin around or trying to record some output.
PS my “laugh” emoji on your frustrated post was just that I know your pain when it comes to getting things done with Linux and how it can drive somebody mad lol
That’s awesome! I still haven’t touched SC in any meaningful way yet, but if you’ve got anything cool brewing I would love to check it out! Might be just enough to get me into it for once!
I think the only real prototyping environment I’ve really tried and got comfortable with is ChucK so far - it’s weird as hell, but has some really cool stuff going on under the hood.
@Artificer had some cool SC experiments going on in the Prototype thread, too, and judging by that and the videos we were sharing, it looks really cool so far. I also hope to drop more scripts into that thread since everything seems to have a sort of web-based IDE now!
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