Microsoft did a tremendous amount of hard work to convince me to make the effort to migrate away from Windows at home and at work. They want to lease me a word processor. They want to put ads in my digital filing cabinet. They want to take 30% of my software revenue, and when they realized they couldn't have it, they said they'd settle for 12%. No dice.
There are zero Windows machines in my home or in my business right now. In fact, there are no Microsoft products. I migrate clients away from Windows when possible, and refuse to work with those who are tightly integrated with MS products. I do occasionally work a job where something has to work on Windows or with MS SQL, but I only accept if that can be done in a platform agnostic way.
I previously held onto Windows at home because despite my age I still love games. At least, I love the idea of them, if I ever get time to play.
Now, recently I had a startling realization: it's actually easier now to get many of the games I love running on Wine (with or without steam) than it is on Windows. The performance is great. (edit: I love you, Lutris, you make gaming easy.)
Even for tools where Windows is essentially mandatory (music production), the situation is such that I now would rather run old software on an old version of Windows as a dedicated DAW machine than to subject myself to new Windows.
Anyway, great job Microsoft, you converted a customer into someone who will take time out of their day to bad-mouth you on the internet.
All that could have been avoided by just not behaving like an asshole.
What DAW are you using that is Windows-only?
Ah yes, you can also use Mac for most.
I meant, rather, that I don't think any of the Linux audio production stuff is great. Reaper and Waveform are good, Ardour is not yet (in my opinion, it's buggy and requires too much configuration that is not required in other software, but they'll get there).
The big-name software is genuinely better than what is available on Linux and is worth using, and the latency introduced by VMs makes that idea useless, and using Wine for that task is non-trivial.
I'm just a hobbyist though, my job is not music-related. I have used a midi controller as an industrial process controller though :)
Like everything else on Linux though, it'll get better over time. I do screw around with LMMS on linux because it's completely intuitive to me. It works, it's just not as complex and feature-complete as Ableton / etc.
Bitwig is available on Linux now and works great in my experience. I actually prefer it to Ableton anyway.
What about VSTs? They won't all work on Linux.
But you could also use something like yabridge [0] in order to run Windows-only VSTs.