Longtime Bitwig user here that switched there after Ableton 9 which I used since the very start.

Bitwig is quite similar to Ableton in terms of capabilities, I never tried this myself, but there seems to be a way (assuming you want Windows VSTs on Linux) https://answers.bitwig.com/questions/624/vst-windows-on-linu...

I am perfectly happy with the built-in stuff however. Because of bitwigs extremely strong modulation engine the standard effects are probably the most powerful and expressive ones out there.

I got bitwig because I am a heavy linux user and wanted to start making music.

The software itself works well, it's really great, but with VSTs it's quite tricky. I got a couple to work that explicitly support linux, but for example Serum I couldn't get to work properly.

Recently I decided that it's not work all the hassle, and setup a windows computer again. I want as little friction as possible, because the process of making electronic music is already hard enough by itself.

As others have mentioned, linux does support VST plugins, as do a number of linux DAWs. But it's worth mentioning that the ecosystem is rather thin at the moment in terms of native VSTs. One solution is to install Windows-based VSTs in a Wine installation and then use linvst, a wrapper which presents those Windows-based VST dlls to a linux host and runs them with Wine.

I found it a pain to set up in the first place, and it's hit-and-miss which plugins work in it, but once up and running it actually works smoothly enough, in my experience. (Larger, more complicated VSTs seem correspondingly less likely to work. Of ones that don't immediately work, some can be massaged into working with some tweaking of your wine setup. There's a webpage somewhere with a list of what plugins are known to work and what you need to do to get them to work.)

There are other ways of running windows-based VSTs, but that's the one I'm familiar with.

As a person developing VSTs, BitWig is supports them THE BEST. BitWig handles VSTs better than almost any other host, including (optional, but you should do it!) sandboxing and proper HiDPI support.

You can absolutely make VSTs for Linux, but I imagine that very few people do.

I don't remember how well it integrated with Bitwig - but a few years ago VST support on Linux using Wine, Jack and Carla (https://github.com/falkTX/Carla) was pretty solid.

yes, both vst 2 and vst 3 ; and unlike ableton, bitwig integrates a 32 bit vst bridge and allows to run VSTs in external processes if some are crashy