DAWs on Linux

I’ve been doing audio stuff, on and off, close to half a decade, now; DAWs are kind of the foundation, the kitchen you do your metaphorical cooking in.

Like kitchens, there’s no best kitchen — any sufficiently good kitchen will do — but there are bad kitchens: lots of DAWs have things you’ll sorely miss. The Linux DAW scene is still, to use a technical term, “doodoo ass.”

Here’s what I’ve tried, and what I’ve jived best with.

TL;DR: Furnace for chiptunes, Bitwig if you’re willing to pay, Ardour if it’s before ~2027, Zrythm otherwise.

Furnace

It’s a tracker, and a good piece of software! It seems to be a FOSS successor to DefleMask. It does take a bit of ricing to make it not ugly (protip: turn off rounded corners,)

It supports pretty much every kind of old-school synth chip you can think of, lets you mix and match them, supports samples, very nice UX. A few wishlist items would be the ability to manipulate patterns with drag-and-drop, but that’s really just cake on top. Fantastic software for making chiptunes/tracker music.

No complaints from me. I did try to rice it into using HJKL for movement, with limited success, but that was in hindsight kind of foolhardy in the first place.

Free download on GitHub. Not in the Debian repos.

Ardour

I started out here, rather than in LMMS as many do, and it’s still probably the DAW I’ve spent the most time with. In my experience, it’s been moderately unstable— persistent random crashes, failures to load plugins, etc. However, it’s got a really robust recovery mechanism, so I’ve never actually lost more than like 2 minutes of progress. (As a cost, you do get some pretty fat (high 100MBs, low GBs) project files on disk— it’s not that big of a deal on modern systems, but be warned!)

It’s really good at recorded audio! Comes with a lot of features for punchin/punchout, time sync, and so on. Also comes with an okay pile of stock plugins, though notably no synths. It also has access to LV2, uniquely on this list; not super relevant in today’s age, but it does mean you can use the Calf plugin line, which is pretty good.

It’s not very good at synth music; it has a MIDI editor that’s… serviceable, but kind of mid, and you’ve gotta BYO effects. Notably, it also has pretty much zero support for automation that’s not recorded from hardware: all automation curves are linear, can’t be biased, have no QoL features like ability to snap to horizontal points, and are kind of bugged in implementation to boot.

Screenshot of an Ardour automation lane. There's a wide spread of points on the lane that I had to place by hand.

I had to write this all out by hand. Don’t do this.

It’s on Flatpak, but it wants a lot of /usr/lib access for plugins, so you’ll kneecap yourself that way. It’s also on most package managers, at varying levels of updated-ness; I think AUR has it bleeding edge, but Debiuntu is like two major versions behind. You can also build it yourself, if you’re FOSSpilled enough.

TLDR: Good at recording, mid at synthwork. Good DAW for more acoustic people than I am.

Bitwig Studio

Pretty much the only closed-source DAW I’ll endorse here! It’s got its quirks, of course, but it’s probably got the best UI of any DAW I’ve used.

Roses:

Thorns:

Not much to say other than this: it’s a pretty good pick if you have the cache to spend!

Zrythm

An up-and-comer to the open-source buy-a-build scene. I’ve used it a bit, and it’s not for me yet, but I’ll be keeping an eye on it in the coming years.

It’s got a lovely UI, except that it’s packed as all goddamn hell— GTK4 still has some kinks to work out in terms of spacing. It’s got really nice piano roll and loops support.

Notably, it supports autosave, but both save and autosave freeze the GUI thread for some fucked reason, until the write completes; apparently it does some fancy rollback journaling to ensure recovery, which also means the write takes hundreds of milliseconds to seconds on my machine. This is a dealbreaker for me— it’s nice software other than that, but I cannot deal with my entire setup freezing and refusing to accept input (1) when I hit Ctrl+S (2) periodically every couple minutes. At least it doesn’t freeze the DSP threads.

On Flatpak, though same concerns apply about sandboxing and plugins. Also can be compiled from source.

True modulars

These aren’t DAWs as such, but they should be shouted out because they’re really fucking cool:

Wine it up

Okay, this doesn’t really count as “on Linux”, but it does work.

Several people I know do this! You can pick a mainline (Live, FL Studio, Cubase, Pro Tools) and run it through WINE. I don’t like doing this, for a couple reasons:

Expect instability if you do this! That being said, I do have friends who happily swear by FL/Live over WINE. Not a bad pick if you’re coming to the Linux scene from afar!

Honorable mentions