Why?

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I had been really happy with Linux overall, and really enjoyed the custom setup I had made on EndevourOS, but like on my previous attempts, I found out that I couldn’t live without Kontakt.

Since running/authenticating Kontakt through WINE is a everchanging pain in the butt + I had just snagged a great sample library from a sale that I was really looking to get to use, I decided to just bend the knee to the big corpo microsoft and return back to windows for now.

I’m not abandoning using linux, but I will probably keep my workstation on windows for now, at least until my audio software/plugins get linux support, or using them via WINE/Yabridge gets less annoying/stable.

I’ve been using linux on my laptop for a long time now, but I have a crippling FOMO with playing around using sounds in Kontakt, so the Linux Adventures are on hold for me for now.

Experience

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Even if using windows plugins and software is a pain in linux, its understandable because you are using un-supported software through compability layers after all.

And most of the issues is not regarding performance, since that only takes a minor hit even with wine in between, but the issue is DRM for every software, and that is the real pain, especially with NI stuff, since the Native Access needs a lot of tweaking to get working and then breaks on the next update.

That was the primary reason for my return to windows.

But if one uses only native software and plugins, the whole experience is great! And linux has a lot of great plugins made and shared by some really talented people for others to use for free.

The only area where they are lacking is Orchestral sounds, which is understandable because of how much sampling them costs, though there is a great collection of free orchestra samples called Virtual Playing Orchestra in the sfz format, which are OK for being free.

But since I want to use the sounds I’ve bought, and don’t want to resort to using cracked versions of them just to get them working in linux without problems with the DRM for them, back to windows it is…. for now