For like a month or two I decided, screw it, I am going to use all the programs I cannot use on Linux. This was mostly games and music making software.

I guess it was fun for a bit, tries different DAWs, did not play a single game because no time.

Basically, it was not worth it. The only thing I enjoyed was OneDrive, because having your files available anywhere is dope, but I also hate it because it wants to delete your local files. I think that was on me.

Anyways, I am back. Looking at Nextcloud. Looking at Ardour. I am fine paying for software, but morally I got to support and learn the tools that are available to me and respect FOSS. (Also less expensive… spent a lot on my experiment).

Anyone done this? Abondoned their principles thinking the grass would be greener, but only to look at their feet coverered in crap (ads, intrusive news, just bad UI).

I don’t know. I don’t necesarily regret it, but I won’t be doing it again. What I spent is a sunk cost, but some has linux support, and VSTs for download. So, I shall see.

  • DidacticDumbassOPEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    This is solid. I am so happy for this advice, never heard of Yabridge. I am willing to mess around if it actually means I can use my plugins with Linux!

    • itsralC@lemm.ee
      1·
      1 year ago

      Be sure to check out the README if you’re having problems with certain plugins (Kontakt for instance).

      • DidacticDumbassOPEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Yes, I know loading VSTs are possible, I just need to figure out how.

    • donuts@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      Yeah! Don’t sleep on it! I can say without reservation that yabridge is essential for me. :)

      The basic yabrigde workflow is:

      1. Install wine-staging and yabridge on your distro of choice.
      2. Use wine to install all of your Windows VSTs somewhere. (I prefer to use a separate WINEPREFIX for each plugin maker, but that’s probably not fully necessary). If you don’t know much about Wine this can be a bit hard to wrap your mind around, but that’s another story.
      3. Then you run yabridgectl add where all of your various Windows VST dll files are (instead of whatever Wine prefix you installed them in).
      4. And then when you run yabridgectl sync yabridge will create a .so bridge library for each of your Windows VSTs and spit them out into ~/.vst3 or whatever.
      5. Finally you point your DAW of choice to ~/.vst3 or whatever, and your WIndows VSTs should hopefully show up and work just like they do on Windows (with the usual caveat of Wine being pretty great but not always perfect).

      Sadly there’s no good GUI frontend for it (that I know of at least), but as far as CLI tools it’s pretty easy to learn and use. Also, you may want to make sure that you’ve got realtime privilages setup on your system, and you can find guides to doing that in the yabridge wiki.

      But yeah, I’ve got a bunch of Windows VSTs from Native Instruments and IK Multimedia and a bunch of others too, and they are work very well when bridged these days, so I’m able to use Linux for music without sacrificing anything.

      • DidacticDumbassOPEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Wow, thank you for the guide. I will try it out as soon as I can.

        • DidacticDumbassOPEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          I am finally getting around to doing this! I will admit, I had Windows on all of my machines… I first rehabilitated my laptop, and I finally brought back my main desktop from hell.

          Running the script. Let’s see what my computer becomes!