+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.)