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 did some music production on windows, had a lot of vsts and everything worked pretty well. I then lost interrest for a while and switched to linux in the meantime. After starting again, I realize, how much easier it was on windows. While the bitwig plugins are great, there are so many things, like some effects plugins missing, that I really want to have. Of course carla and wine works quite ok, but it still isn’t the same as native running plugins. My suggestion is to stick to windows if you do music production somewhat professionally, but if you have the time and motivation to work with a limited set of instruments, go for it. It can only change for the better in the future.
yabridge works really great for working with Windows plugins. I have quite a few of them working out just fine—at least with Bitwig, which is a native application.
That said, I’ve also seen some plugins that did not work. In particular the problems can be related to license management; they probably get confused of what kind of system it is running on…
In my view yabridge is easy to use, but on the other hand I have a decent amount of Linux experience, so perhaps the experience can vary.