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Comment by wormius | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I've got friends who are open to the idea (even though they still think the driver situation is the same as 20 years ago - I won't promise there aren't problems, but I think overall it's much better than it used to be).

The main complaint is: I need my Adobe. I need my Ableton. I need my Office.

Some people actually need the official Office products, but I think for most users it's not necessary, though they get really uptight if you suggest it's not.

Adobe is honestly one of the biggest problems I think, and the most likely to continue to cause an issue with adoption.

Ableton can sorta work, but it's not perfect, but I can see them starting to pour resources into it to get it working better or even a proper port, but I could be wrong.

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As far as Ableton goes, have you tried Reaper? Reaper has a native Linux version and generally works quite well IMO. One of the better DAWs and certainly one of the cheapest to purchase a license for.

Reaper's great, but it and Ableton are focused on very different things. It's hard to come up with a workable analogy but they are probably at least as different as Photoshop and Illustrator are from one another.

I use ableton in linux, it works fine. What works amazing is Bitwig, which you'll find is like Ableton evolved, by some of the original developers of Ableton.

Unless Reaper has drastically changed since the last time I used it, it's not even in the same ballpark as Ableton. Ableton strength is using it as a pattern based nonlinear editor and live production. I can't even imagine doing something like that in reaper.

To me reaper is more like a superior version of audacity than a competitor to things like Logic Pro, FL Studio, etc.

> To me reaper is more like a superior version of audacity

I can't tell about Ableton as i never used it, but Reaper is on a totally different planet compared to Audacity. I used Cakewalk Sonar (on Windows) for years until I discovered Reaper, and didn't look back. Then they made the Linux version which works like charm, although the Windows version runs extremely well with very low latency too using WINE. I'm all for using FOSS software, and it hurts me because Audacity is the "good guy" here, but it's really way way inferior compared to just everything else.

What's funny is that I personally am not an Ableton fan, so this applies more for my friends than me. I know Bitwig exists, and just looking now it seems to support Linux. It's not the same exactly but uses the same "pattern"/loop based mode that Ableton is built around.

I actually paid for a license, because I think Justin Frankel/Cockos is great for Reaper and supporting Linux. Even though I barely use it (I ended up not doing much music production) - maybe someday I'll get back into it.

I did check (based on the comment above about Ableton not being the same as Reaper in terms of how it's used) - and see that Bitwig (which is more like Ableton) does support Linux (not sure how well, but it looks like it's officially supported). But people who have Ableton specific plugins may not be able to use it, IDK.

I do feel like Reaper was more for "live recording" sessions as opposed to Midi sequencing and electronic production, but that was just based on my small experience. I'm sure it's good for both, just a different work flow.

Bitwig

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