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Steinberg plugins are not working at all for me. I have Absolute 4 and Cubase Artist 12.
The licensing app installs fine. However, the download center cannot be installed. If you download the installers directly from Steinberg, those don't install.
I did have some luck with downloading Steinberg installers on a windows pc with download assistant, and then opening THOSE installers on Linux. They installed correctly this way and Yabridge (vst bridge for Linux) even identified them correctly. But the vsts would crash on start.
Yabridge is essential to using VSTs on Linux. Works great from my experience, IF the vst actually can start at all. But that is never a Yabridge problem, always a VST specific Wine problem.
Arturia stuff can be installed without any problems (through wine)
Spitfire's recent update broke things.
From what I've seen, Ableton is pretty nicely supported by the Wine community. But any Ableton or Wine update can break things, so you'll need to have Wine and Ableton updates freezed if you want a hasslefree life.
Hardware stuff I had no problems with for now, but I have mostly simple midi controllers. I have an external soundcard (UR22 mk2), so my latency is as low on Windows. I use Pipewire, because PulseAudio seems to sometimes give problems being detected by VSTs.
For now I cannot recommend anyone that has extensive VST libraries to fully commit to Linux. The support is simply not there yet. Wine is not reliable enough, and I would hate to be stopped by a Wine error when inspiration hits. You'll be troubleshooting for days to hopefully get your favourite VSTs working, and pray they don't break when they update.
I dual boot for now. Music and VR on Windows, all other tasks on Linux. I'm considering making stems for all my projects so I could switch to a different DAW with only Arturia plugins in the future. But I'm not ready yet.
I'm not a super expert, but I did try very hard to get my steinberg stuff and Spitfire Labs working. Feel free to ask any followup questions.
Firstly, thanks for the detailed response!
It's promising to hear that Ableton has a lot of support from the community. I suppose given the versioning issues something like nix could be used to manage the wine versioning more deliberately.
I've got a focusrite interface, so if your latency is low, I imagine I'd probably get the same experience. I know I'll probably lose the iPad remote control features too as I think that's baked into the windows driver.
Given I do have a pretty extensive VST collection, it's a shame, but you're probably right. Do you know how heavily developed Yabridge is? Do you think the industry moving slowly to CLAP plugins might improve this situation?
Maybe dual-boot is a better option to start with, I guess that way if I feel like trying to get it working I can give it a go.
Do you have any plugins that use iLok? Either software or a hardware key
No problem!
-Yabridge is still actively being developped. The developer responds to issues on it's Github frequently.
-Ableton 11.x currently has gold status on WineDB. other versions have varying ratings bronze to platinum.
-I don't use iLok plugins a lot, but I just tried installing one. iLok gave an error for me. Some searching gave me a thread about a user that got a specific iLok version to work though, so you may need to experiment with this yourself: This thread
I don't know much about CLAP since I always used VSTs (Cubase user after all :P ). I hope more developers will implement it as an alternative, but I don't have high hopes. .Au could only become a standard because of Apple's willingness to not support VSTs in Logic. I'm not sure if a third-party format can shift that much weight. All DAWS either support VST, AU or AAX and I don't think developers want ANOTHER format to maintain.