

I recently went down that same rabbit hole.
I ended up buying Bitwig Producer and I’m running it in an Arch install.
I tried a number of different distros which all caused different headaches. Arch ended up being the best fit for my Linux audio needs and was way easier to set up than Lubuntu, Debian, PopOS.
With the right setup, latency is better than I was getting in Ableton on Windows and Mac. I can even record live audio without any perceivable latency.
Bitwig made me realize how convoluted and stupid Ableton’s UI is. The team behind Bitwig holds good values, so I felt they deserved my money. However I have seen torrents available for it. I suggest you try a 30 day trial first that way you can check if you even like Bitwig before going through the hassle of getting a pirated version working.
My current pain point is Serum in Wine has GUI rendering issues making it unusable. Luckily Vital for Linux works perfectly.
Fabfilter plugins work with some minor tweaks.
My Waves license is on an ilok, which I know doesn’t work in Wine. So eventually I’ll pirate the cracked version and try that.
So far I’m really happy with the setup. Another benefit of Linux audio over Windows or Mac is the routing abilities. I can route any program as an input, allowing me to stream YouTube or Spotify into Bitwig so I can play live music over the songs without having to download them first or rig up some weird aux cable nonsense.





Last time I checked, you need to make a github pull request with the relevant info about your instance and after a certain buffer period they will add your instance to the list. Check the github page. There should be instructions.