It’s kinda hard not getting jaded when entitled people (or companies) expect commercial grade support for something you work on your free time for pennies or for free, and to top that usually are pretty abusive from the get go.

I’ve tried all of them except Zrythm. In fact, REAPER is my DAW of choice. But while that works on Linux, a lot of the plugins I require do not (or well, I guess it depends on how people define “work”), and REAPER in itself is not FOSS.

I guess that list could be helpful for some, but for me (and IMO, music production in general), it’s woefully inadequate to the point of hilarity.

Pro audio has been a complete mess in Linux for ages, and it’s not even close to where it should be in order to be generally usable. Every 7-8 years or so when my old music computer starts to die I try and check if it has made substantial improvement, but apart from Musescore actually being good, it is hard to find any tangible progress from 15 years ago. Pipewire gives me some hope, but it’s far from production-ready in Pro audio world. And I’m not really going to get rid of all the VST stuff I’ve bought in the last 20 years (all of which still works out of the box on a new computer!)

In addition, making music is the one hobby I have to get me away from tinkering with computers. I am not interested if I could make my Linux setup equally good if I spent weeks tinkering on it, when it’s literally easier for me to work for a week and buy a Macbook Air (or whatever crappy windows PC), where I get all of my old work ready for action in under a day, and I can trust that everything I do will just work, and work well at that. And it does it while allowing me to work remotely with other musicians since we can all use the same stuff.

I’m pretty sure I’ll be in my grave before FOSS Pro Audio ever gets there, unfortunately.

Edit: Ironically, the one FOSS thing I would love to use in my audio stuff is Guitarix, which is then the thing that doesn’t interop well with anything else. And I would love to have easy way to do all that I do on (Win/Mac Os) on Linux, but 20 years of disappointment is pretty hard to overcome at this point.

Well I have separate computer for music production which I don’t think has any FOSS software on it, so everything that has to do with that.

You don’t even need to go to the 90’s. E.g. RSS feeds were pretty much killed by EEE in mid-2000s. XMPP is another more recent victim.

Sweeney has had a chip on his shoulder with Linux for at least 15 years. It’s honestly a bit weird since if you look at stuff before around 2005, he had quite a different tone.

I applaud the stubbornness. If enough people are stubborn enough, maybe linux pro audio some day becomes less of a mess.

I’ve tried every couple of years since 2006 to see if I could finally ditch my windows/mac box, since making music is my last hurdle, but it’s still been too much of a chore for me. I make music to get rid of computer-induced stress, so it’s the one place where I’m not interested in configuring for days.

Check out KX Studio. Ubuntu Studio is also a thing where most stuff comes preinstalled and it might be good enough for some.

Though I would still say that it’s still faster and easier to get a job, earn a months pay and buy a Windows/Mac laptop for music production than try to get shit done in Linux. Pipewire kinda-sorta-works if you aren’t doing anything weird, but it’s not going to be optimal either, and it’s at best beta-quality software still.