Bitwig is the closest (and in many ways superior)

Reaper

Ardour

I like Ardour, but when choosing btw Ardour and Reaper - if you work with many VSTs or just exploring, this may be an interesting read: https://ardour.org/plugins-in-process.html

all plugins in Ardour run in the app's process, so if one crashed - you might lose the project.

But UX for MIDI editing in Ardour is so much nicer than Reaper's to my taste.

Bitwig.

It is cheaper and better and supports Linux.

It's on flathub so you can try it out on any distro.

+1 bitwig. It's so fun

+2 as a beginner in Ableton and Bitwig, I'm a bigger fan of Bitwig.

Best for hobbyist goofing around. Which is me ( and pbly most ppl here)

I really liked the DAW itself, but how does it handle VST's? I tried setting my studio up on Linux with Bitwig a while ago and it was causing me a lot of pain and I gave up. Ableton is the only reason I still keep a dual-boot.

I didn't face any VST related issues on linux.

VSTs work perfectly fine in Bitwig. Whether a plugin supports linux is a different question though.

Yes, I remember trying to set up Omnisphere and it just wouldn't work for me. So my issues were related to windows VST's. I used Wine and yabridge, which did install them but they weren't usable.

Was that some time ago? I find Yabridge to work reliably on numerous plugins.

It was last year and then I tried again some weeks ago. The issues I had were sometimes crackling audio and not being able to close a plugin's GUI window.

VSTs work better than Live, because each VST is sandboxed. If one plugin crashes, it doesn't bring down the whole DAW along with it.

Bitwig has so many tiny conveniences like this that I never bothered to renew my Live license. Native Linux support is the cherry on top.

Sandboxed plugins are a tradeoff, as then you can't have ARA support (coming to Live 13.)

Ironically they added linux support... for Live Push 3. It runs an headless x86 version of the desktop suite ported to linux.

There are even projects like this that let you restore the missing parts and use it elsewhere, but it's kinda buggy: https://github.com/velkajelka/linux-native-ableton

Very interesting but damn, it needs AVX-512 instructions, so it won't work on Intel 12th Gen or later.

[delayed]

Depends what you mean by audio drivers, if you mean the audio subsystem, Jack has always been good for pro audio, and pipewire (the modern default) can be configured to be good too with the right packages. In terms of timing (latency you mean?) I have zero complaints using Jack via pipewire on a proper audio interface.

If you mean device drivers, it can be a bit hit or miss, generally stuff works but for example I have an SSL audio interface and while the audio works, it's missing a lot of the configuration options that the Windows drivers give you around customisable audio routing.

[delayed]

Linux can run specific apps with realtime priority since 6.12. Just gotta configure your audio stack to run that way.

At the grub config, append to the end of the "kernel" line:

      preempt=full

I would think that's the kind of thing the installer would take care of for you or that the app would modify on first launch. It's not reasonable to expect DAW end users to make those kinds of changes.

I don't know if any DAWs do any modifications for you, but I know Bitwig at least pops up a warning if realtime privileges aren't detected with a documentation link.

Ah yes, I understand - yes as the other comment says, kernel supports it but most distros aren't configured that way out of the box, but it's pretty simple in most of them - on Arch you install the `realtime-privileges` package and add your user to the `realtime` group, the audio server and DAW software takes it from there.

pipewire-jack adapter is good enough for me to use PC as a guitar pedal with guitarix and maudio sound interface.

You might need to tweak kernel settings for better latency https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Professional_audio#Optimizi...

I'm using SSL 2 + SOLID STATE and it work very well. Inputs and outputs.

There's also this project:

https://github.com/shibco/ableton-linux

They have a custom wine version that is built specifically to fix ableton issues on linux. I haven't tried this myself but I have heard good things about it on their discord.

Studio One has Linux support for non-open source and it's been around for longer than Bitwig.

For open source, Ardour but yeah...

Tracktion has always appealed to me.

Don't forget Renoise! It's proprietary, but Linux is a first-class build, it's inexpensive, and it's extraordinarily powerful for the right kind of mind/workflow.

+ 1 bitwig , Ableton feels stale compared. You can modulate anything easily

ME TOO! lol. People will say Bitwig but boy I've tried it and it's really not the same. Getting it running with my UR22 is like a 5 step procedure, starting with getting the correct audio driver app running in the correct mode BEFORE starting bitwig, then praying bitwig recognizes everything and can achieve the right latencies... 50:50. I would never trust it for a live performance. The fact that so many people like it suggests to me the experience might be somewhat hardware dependent. i dual boot the machine though so it's pretty noticeable that the same hardware works flawlessly in ableton.

Reaper if you're more working with recordings or samples, Bitwig if you're working with MIDI directly, ReNoise if you're interested in the "tracker" workflow and sampling genres like breakbeat.

Also if you're keen on Open Source, check out Ardour and OpenMPT. I use the latter, but still limited compared to the commercial options.

Csound 7!