Share your experience running VCV on Linux

I mainly use Ardour and VCV Rack but I also have LMMS, Reaper Trial, Waveform 11 Free and Bitwig Studio Demo. I do also have a virtual machine of win 10 trial with Cakewalk, FL 20 Demo and Abelton Live 10 Trial, however I never use this, as, it is super laggy and almost unusable.

:slight_smile:

Actually FL studio runs amazingly good on WINE. NGL, besides coding my university assignments in C language and basic Terminal stuff, i’m “bad at linux” and i literally can’t make anything work in Wine, but FL studio , no problems ! it runs like a charm out of the box ! The only tiny issue is that a font needs to be downloaded or some texts in the UI don’t appear, but it was super easy to do, and even I could do it :slight_smile:

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Linux here too. not that i actually make music. i try to keep everything inside vcv with midi controllers. minimal use of vsts.

I use Windows for work due to necessity, but Linux for all home use, including development, gaming and music.

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Must add that another plus for being strictly linux, no temptation to waste time checking out all the doze freebies. Between VCV, Harrison & u-he I’ve more than I’ll ever be able to fully explore already.

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A really rough scan of plugin download counts in the last few months suggests that 7.5% active VCV Rack users use Linux, 29.5% use Mac, and 63% use Windows.

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Thank you, it is really interesting to see these stats. :grinning:

A lot of those freebies run just fine under WINE. Ask me how I know! There is a lot garbage in VSTville, but there are things (Szabo’s Phazor, or U-He’s TyrellN6 for instance) I’d be loathe to do without.

Indeed and indeed, hence not even bothering with wine. I have a native linux TyrellN6.

The trouble is that for some native things, they don’t run as free standing very well. I.e. I don’t necessarily want to run an instrument as a plugin under a complex DAWish host, and so I use a locally customized WINE/fsthost for some things even available as native Linux apps. Carla (looked into) and QTractor (actually use) are rather hairier conceptually to me. I really want a small and completely scriptable control system, not a GUI. If everything existed as LV2, I could use my hacked up jalv to control them as freestanding instruments and effects, but that is not the case.

This lets aside that Adam Szabo’s Phazor and OrilRiver have no Linux equivalent. I run this stuff for pragmatic not ideological reasons.

are these module downloads or vcv installer downloads?

That’s based on plugin download counts (not subscriptions). Downloading a plugin twice or downloading an update will count as a “hit”.

This is more accurate than hits to https://vcvrack.com/downloads/Rack-… since that only represents new Rack users or new computers.

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And that might still miss git clones and forks. I’d think Linux folk might be more likely than others to “use the source, Luke.”

That’s super negligible. Don’t count on it increase Linux usage by more than 0.1% absolute percentage points.

Linux is one of those things I wish I could use more. Have had various forms of it on secondary computers since my childhood. I love the way it works. But it still lacks hugely in audio and gaming. Both of which have been hugely improved since back then. But still a hassle of drivers, programmes, external support. So every few years, I try it as fully as I can again, enjoy a lot, but still left feeling like it’s easier to stay where I am on Windows. Keep my Linuxes around for small scale stuff. Reviving old computers, fun little tools and hacks. A backup in case my main machine goes down. That’s about it.

That’s a somewhat disappointing note. UTSL means you can (and perhaps should) put in any number of privately useful hacks. I have a number of very Linux specific mods (not ready for prime time) that I’d be very unhappy to do without. Whether they survive the transition to 2.0 remains to be seen.

You really think so? I’m a Linux user (couple of decades, like some other folks on the thread), and I run exclusively from git clones.It actually works a lot better than packages (I’m an Arch user and the AUR packages have been broken, or at least was when I looked). I’ll only download a module if its not open-source. My current plugins directory has 28 sub-clones.

My current stack is pretty minimal: VCV 1.1.6, Ardour 6.1, and Calf Studio tools 0.90.3.

Linux is a pretty nice platform for audio, especially now that the mainline kernel supports real-time and you don’t have to patch it anymore. I actually installed VCV/Ardour on an old Macbook to check it out, and I prefer the Linux environment.

The only real limitation in Linux that I find is session management and jack. I use Cadence/Catia these days, which seems to be the best option, but even it’s wonky. You have to bring up and take down the stack in a very specific order or your connection graph will get all messed up, necessitating a re-routing of audio the next session.

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You should look into qjackctl and the patchbay function, doesn’t have any of that weirdness and once set up connections are always persistent. It now has a graph view like catia too (might need the git version).

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We can all see stats on how many people are cloning our repos. Of course my stuff isn’t nearly as popular as others, but I typically get maybe 4 clones a day. I probably see that many videos posted with my stuff in a day, well, maybe not that many, but I’m pretty sure most of my users are using windows, with some on mac. That’s what they tell me.

But we are all happy that it’s so easy to support Linux with our modules. It means we don’t have to make that call “is it worth supporting platform x”, it’s practically free.

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You should look into qjackctl

I used it a while ago, but stopped because it didn’t seem to play well with dbus and dbus-enabled jack daemons. If that’s working now, I’ll have to check it out. Thanks!