I have been daily driving Fedora 42 for almost 2 months now and am very happy with it. My biggest challenge so far has been understanding Linux's low level systems - I've reached for a USB drive to rescue my system a couple of times. You won't run into the same issues unless you’re chasing performance gains and poking at the kernel and the bootloader like I did. The Nvidia driver is a tad annoying at driver updates, but overall works just fine. Since the college started back up two weeks ago, I did not do any more maintenance of the system, it just works, despite my poking at its guts.

It's a very refreshing feeling of knowing that if something went wrong - it's your fault. Not microsoft's, not google's, not apple's, and it means that you're in control to fix it.
TL;DR

• I have some Linux experience, but not a lot
• After almost two months of using Fedora exclusively, I haven't run into critical incompatibilities
• I use Bitwig natively by having converted a .deb package into an .rpm one
• I use yabridge dev build with wine 10 support and Bottles for wine management (see terminology section below for what these mean)
• Kontakt, iLok, Neural DSP*, FabFilter work
• *Critical performance fix: If you have performance issues (xruns, high CPU usage), try turning off SMT/hyperthreading. This improved my DAW performance by ~5x and made Neural DSP usable
• I went through a lot of amp sims to replace Neural DSP
• Synthesizer V Studio 2 also works for synthesized vocals
• Audiogridder to stream plugins from a remote Windows machine or a Virtual Machine is the last resort solution
• Quite a few of Linux-native plugins are available!
• I make rock/metal music btw

Who this is for (and who it's not for):
The title definitely deserves a "probably" in there, but that would look clanky! But in this section I wanted to acknowledge a distinct caveat that comes with this kind of claim: your mileage may vary. Who this does not apply to:

• You might be dependent on a piece of software that will not work on Linux in any way, shape or form (even a VM) and it's not an acceptable trade-off for you. That's fair.
• Your hardware (that you spent considerable amounts of money on) doesn't work on Linux. Be it your audio interface or macros on your keyboard, it's not a reasonable trade-off for you to make. That's fair.
• You are not in a position to tinker to get stuff just right (I will come back to that later). Either you are inexperienced with tech or just simply don't have the time or energy to deal with your tech not working (family, work, age, many reasons can exist for that!), it's just not something you will dedicate time or effort to. That's fair.

Another small detail: THIS IS NOT A GUIDE.
Please ask away any questions you might have regarding any specific sections, I will try my best to provide an answer and a step-by-step instruction, but this text is not meant to be a follow along step-by-step guide, only my experience report.

Important Terminology
Before proceeding further, I'd like to explain some terms that are going to be important in the coming sections in case anyone is unfamiliar:

• Wine: A compatibility layer that translates Windows system calls to Linux ones, allowing Windows applications to run on Linux. Think of it as a translator between Windows programs and Linux.
• Prefix: A directory with all the Windows translation layer (wine) stuff to pretend to be windows: C drive, User Data, Windows, Program Files, etc. Each prefix is like a separate Windows installation.
• Runner / Wine version: The wine binary that actually runs the application. Different versions have different compatibility.
• Yabridge: A tool that lets Linux DAWs load Windows VST plugins through Wine. This is the magic that makes most Windows plugins work on Linux.
• Bottles: A GUI application for managing multiple Wine prefixes and runners easily, instead of dealing with command line.
• Package: Simply put, an installation archive, like an .exe or a .msi on Windows or .dmg on Mac.
• Package format: Due to the diversity of options on Linux, different distributions might use different packaging formats. For simplicity's sake you can think of it as a difference between an .msi and a .dmg, but underneath they are way more similar, carrying the same binaries, which makes conversion between different formats possible.
• Common package formats include .deb (for Ubuntu, for example), .rpm (for Fedora) and .flatpak (basically universal at this point), alongside AppImage which just work like a ready-to-run binary that you don't need to install/unpack. So far I've seen .deb and .flatpak most commonly with music software.

My Background:
I have played around with Linux back when Ubuntu first started making the rounds and promising the first glimpse into the "Year of the Linux Desktop". I've been a teenager back then, around 13-15 years old, and was fascinated by the OS, but ultimately it could not do what I wanted to use my PC for.

A few years back, 2022-23 I tried running Fedora after a friend had recommended it to me and had very few issues with it himself. At that point I was set on dual-booting for the purposes of music production and games that Linux wouldn't do, but in the end, I just ended up using Windows all the time, since it could do everything Linux could.

In the few years since, there has been significant progress in the Linux development, that has made Fedora attractive again for me, and after using Fedora on a Lenovo Thinkpad for work for half a year. In summary, I have some Linux experience, but I'm by no means an expert.

As such, in the first week of this September I've pulled the trigger: backed up all my stuff and installed Fedora on my PC.

Music Production:
The DAW
Ah, yes, what we're all here for. My story begins with looking into Linux-native DAWs, I know a person who makes their music in Reaper and I was ready to give that a shot, but I've discovered Bitwig. Bitwig feels and looks a lot like the DAW I was coming from: Ableton. Plus, it supports its project files, which took me a minute to discover, after I already started exporting MIDI files . But there was a problem: Bitwig comes in two flavors - debian package or a flatpak. A flatpak doesn't work with yabridge (which I knew I was going to use one way or another) and a .deb package wasn't going to work on Fedora which uses .rpm packages. So converting it is...

I've found out about the tool called alien that converted the package and all was ostensibly good... until I tried to actually install the newly formed rpm package: dependency missing. Googling time. I found a Fedora repository that hosted that obscure dependency, so that was that and I passed that issue... but then something else was wrong. The bitwig package was conflicting with an already existing package on my system. Googling time again, which led me to an ancient-looking Facebook(!!) post that had instructions on how to fix a package for Google Earth so that it would install using rpm. Following the same instructions: unpacking the installer, removing one conflicting line, and repackaging it, Bitwig finally installed – a surprisingly small fix, once I knew where to look. It wasn't difficult to do, but it was difficult to learn to do, the information was scarce and spread out all over the place.

Now, that the DAW situation has been resolved, I had to figure out the plugin situation...

Yabridge
Now that one was pretty straightforward: enable a 3rd party repo, install wine, yabridge, and you're good. Add the plugin installation locations, sync them, and the plugins show up in your DAW no problem (as long as you've set up the directories).

Plugins
As primarily a rock/metal producer, my focus will be on guitars, amp sims, and the like.

Kontakt
I was extremely worried about this one. Not only is it heavy and has a lot of tech that I thought could break through a translation layer, but after just a bit of tinkering I could load Kontakt and add my libraries just fine!

Neural DSP
While at first I didn't realize, Neural DSP runs like ass on my setup for whatever reason. A project with Neural DSP would be able to hang/freeze my Bitwig to the point I had to clean up all its processes manually. It's not the only plugin I had trouble like that with, but it was the first and most concerning one as I use it a lot. My suspicion is that it's because of the CachyOS kernel I'm running, because nothing else about my system is so special. The only plugin that is fine is Parallax, everything else takes like 20-25% of my processing bandwidth. Could be that Bitwig is adding too much overhead, but on Ableton under Wine the performance was not that much better.
On top of performance issues this is the first plugin where I've experienced inability to use dropdown menus. The plugin would freeze for a fraction of a second and the dropdown menu would appear and immediately disappear. A fix I found was to use Wine 10 and experimental version of yabridge, more on that later.
A project with 3 Kontakt instances and 3 different NDSP plugins struggled in Bitwig whereas it had no issue running on Windows on the same machine with Ableton. Removing NDSP and replacing it with other Amp Sims resolved that bottleneck. And so my Amp Sim Odyssey began...

Up-fucking-date: I think I fixed it??? As I was writing this post, I came across a reddit post [2], suggesting that if you have performance issues (xruns), turn off simultaneous multithreading. Turning off hyperthreading/SMT has improved my DAW performance by like 5 times! So I guess if you're running into bad DSP performance, turn off SMT with this command: echo off | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/smt/control and try it out!

Amp Locker
That was one of the plugins I discovered early, and was excited to learn that it has a native version for Linux! Its sheer scope is pretty cool, but the native Linux version didn't render the Amps I've loaded and I didn't bother fixing that: I was not that impressed with its sound. Even though I tried combining it with other pedals and cabs...

Audiority
Speaking of pedals, Audiority has some of the coolest pedals: Grindstein, Doomagorgon, Green Reaper, etc. But their amps sucked ass. So I continued my search.

Kazrog

• Ampcraft
  Now this one was my top pick for a bit - not only is it available for Linux natively, but it's also has very clean distortion, and feels very modular. I combined it with Audiority pedals to get some nice tone, but my problem is that ended up sounding just a bit same-y across multiple (rhythm/lead) guitars. Nevertheless, this is a very solid and budget friendly amp sim choice to start off with.
• True Iron
  While I'm on Kazrog: just buy this plugin. A great saturarion and compression plugin. Soundgoodizer from FL Studio but actually good. It's not going to replace full-fledged compression and saturation plugins, but it will give your sound just a bit more of that ear candy. Also available for Linux natively, like all Kazrog plugins.

Aurora DSP
I used their Mammoth plugin on my bass tracks for added aggressiveness for a while, and this was an opportunity to explore what else they had on offer. I found their collection to be quite good, actually! The licensing was very finicky and it seems like the support isn't very helpful. Because of it, these are the only plugins I could not fix the dropdown issues with. These are the only plugins that I have to keep in my system wine prefix and use my system wine runner.
Still, Rhino, Laboga Distortion, Absylon and the rest seem like they are going to serve quite well instead of Neural DSP. Rhino was very flexible, and other plugins give some really brutal tones!

Bogren Digital - MLC S_Zero 100
Then I came across this one... and the quality really impressed me! This is a very solid Amp Sim... at the cost of 1/5 of my CPU bandwidth... again! This one is about as heavy as Neural DSP, just without the name recognition. Dunno what's going on there, but at least this is another lead to pursue.
So here I am, having gone through a bunch of amp sims and trials and settling for a few options: Audiority, Aurora DSP, Kazrog. Now just to see how best to combine them!

Among others I've tested are:

• the thall amp by Odeholm - pretty nice, but felt a bit too dirty and constricted
• ToneLib - too dirty, but I like the modularity
• Tonocracy - no sound
• Shreddage Amp Venom - high CPU usage while unimpressive tone
• Clairvoyant Amp Sim - pretty weak sound overall
• Toneforge Amp Sims - these were pretty cool, but too dirty/crunchy for me out of the box
• TH-U - a very wide library, cool for covers or recreating tones, I think, but out of the box experience was meh
• Amplitube 5, Bias Amp/Bias FX, Helix 6 Line, TONEX - didn't work. Shoved into a VM, didn't work there either. Oh well.

As I was switching from Ableton, I was really sad to see its offer of awesome devices and presets go. Those are absolutely great, but I'm going to replace them with something...

Cymatics Diablo
One of the best Ableton devices is the Drum Buss. I am very happy to have discovered this plugin, because despite being harder to navigate, it does more or less what I used Drum Buss for. Works great, just needs more tuning to get the result I want.

FabFilter / TAL-EQ
FabFilter is an industry standard for a bunch of mixing and mastering utilities and I really didn't want to give up Pro-Q. I am pleased to report that it works just fine! One small exception: when I was loading projects from Ableton with Pro-Q 3 on them, Bitwig failed to load them. Dunno what's up there, but also really don't care haha.
A very solid Linux-native alternative to Pro-Q is TAL-EQ. Since Pro-Q worked just fine I wasn't that interested in trying TAL-EQ out, but it's something I have in mind for the future.

Valhalla DSP
This is a Reverb-Suite I used on Windows for just a short while before the switch but I'm really happy with the VintageVerb plugin and was happy (if completely not surprised) to see it works just fine!
I also found and alternative Reverb Suite (Michael WIllis Dragonfly), that is native to Linux, but as with the EQ, I haven't had much reason to explore and test it out.

Serum 1/2
These shits are really annoying. Industry-standard, very impressive, but do not want to work properly on Linux. Xfer, a heartily middle-finger to your software development skills and ostensibly hostile attitude towards Linux.
I've had both work with visual glitches and annoying interface issues, but as long as I can run it with some sexy argent metal presets, that's all I need from it. For sound design experiments there's Vital(ium).

Addictive Drums 2
My go-to "lazy" drumkit where I want something to sound without having 20 channels in my DAW. Works for punk/metal songs that aren't experimental. That's reserved for special complex projects when I'm doing like argent metal or something.

Others / Quick Shoutouts
Just wanted to share some cool guys I've found while looking up stuff:

1. Auburn Sounds
   Have some cool plugins like Panagement and Inner Pitch and are Linux-native!
2. Bertom
   Linux-native noise reduction (Denoiser) and spatial (Phantom Center) plugins
3. Brummer10 NeuralRack
   For loading NAMs.
4. Overloud TH-U
   Not Linux-native unlike the rest of the list, but very interesting and versatile amp sim, and it works!
5. AudioThing
   Cool selection of plugins - I couldn't figure out a way to use them just yet, but they are Linux-native!
6. Entonal Studio
   Linux-native Synth with microtonal support

General Observations
Other tools in my toolkit include the Cableguys Shaperbox and Snapbox, Newfangled plugins, Argent Compressor from Nimble Tools, soothe2 and dearVR Pro 2. They all work fine except for the aforementioned dropdown menu bug.

Small things I've noticed:

• After opening a plugin window, you have to first move it around to be able to interact with it. A tad annoying, but by no means a deal-breaker.
• Dropdown menus don't work on Wine 9.21. I had to setup a Wine 10 Yabridge, but some plugins don't work on Wine higher than 9.21, so I set up a branching choice of Wine 9.21/10 to get the best of both worlds.

Bottles, Wineloader script
Coming back to my Linux organization, I like using Bottles to manage different Wine versions for different purposes, because some things just have different compatability. For example, I originally tried running Synth V 2 with wine 9.21 and the performance was absolute ass, but switching to 10+ made it run great! I use Bottles flatpak and I want to remind everyone to give it permission to where your installers are, otherwise you won't be able to install any apps within its prefixes!

By default if you just install wine from your distro's repository, you just get one runner and one prefix under ~/.wine. Steam allows you to have a different runner per game, but it automatically creates separate prefixes for each separate game, for example.

Bottles allows you to manage both of these very simply, and mix and match them in any way you want.

Due to the fact that I was experiencing some issues with my plugins, and wine 10 seemed to work better for apps (synth v 2) I wanted to give wine 10 a shot through yabridge. As it stands, yabridge (master branch) does not support wine higher than 9.21, but there's an experimental branch with wine 10 support. So I downloaded and installed it instead of yabridge stable.

By default, yabridge will always use your system wine (9.21 in my case) and will try to autodetect the prefix of the plugin, i.e. where it's installed. Through my inexperience, for a while I equated the prefix with the runner in my mind, and thought that it was enough to change the runner in the Bottle prefix settings to change it for yabridge. I was wrong. Later I found a script that would redirect wine runner to the bottles-mandated one, link below in sources [3].

With these two pieces: experimental yabridge and the wineloader script, I actually installed some plugins (including Neural DSP, Cymatics, and some others) into a separate prefix with wine 10.11 as the loader for it. Under wine 10 the dropdown menu issues were gone. The performance was a little bit better, but didn't change enough for me to be able to use NDSP plugins. Except now I can always try two (and more!) options as to where does every plugin belong, and what runner will it work better with. If it works fine under Wine 9.21, no need to do anything, but if it doesn't, there's always wine 10 to try

Synthesizer V Studio 2
This one was funky, because I tried installing it on my laptop first - just to try it out - but was stuck in relatively early stages of the installation process under wine. At which point I've switched to winapps and that was fine, but the latency for the sound was noticeable. Not a deal breaker, but unpleasant...

When I installed Fedora on my main machine, I really dug into figuring out how to run it under wine because folks were reporting [4] that they got it working just fine. I'm going to spare the details this time around because this is a niche app, AND I already have a whole tutorial up on YouTube for anyone who wants to get this app running on Linux. The biggest issue was concerning WebView2 not working properly and the authentication redirection being finnicky. But after installing quite a few dependencies and downgrading the WebView2 it worked and I can use the app quite fine!

Audiogridder
As I was reaching the depths of despair in regards to running my music production completely on Linux, I have set up a VM with windows installed on it, and dropped Audiogridder in there. It's a piece of software that basically streams plugins from a remote server (or in my case, a VM) by receiving MIDI data from my Linux-native DAW, processes it in the windows plugin(s), and sends the resulting audio back to the DAW. That worked quite fine, but it was extremely taxing in terms of RAM, which I don't have that much of (just 16gb). I wanted to look into maybe switching entirely to a VM-based setup with VFIO and stuff like that, but through my extensive search for replacements, I am pretty happy with the stuff I've got.
With the recent developments of me finding out that hyperthreading might be hurting my performance, and disabling it makes the music stuff run way better, I might be able to bury the VFIO thought for good. I'll still probably circle back to it for special gaming cases, but that's a whole other topic.

Things I haven't tried yet:
There are a few tools that I used on Windows, but only on occasion, so I haven't given them a try on Linux yet.

• Melodyne
• iZotope RX / Ozone / Nectar

DRM
Now, this is a sticky topic I don't really want to get into very much, but just leave you with this great post I came across, and it sums up my thoughts on the topic very well:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxaudio...=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

iLok works btw.
Links / Sources
[1] Blog post where I found a bunch of Linux-native plugin developers, some of which are mentioned in the text.
https://amadeuspaulussen.com/blog/2022/favorite-music-production-software-on-linux#arboreal-audio
[2] Reddit post on r/linuxaudio suggesting turning off SMT
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxaudio..._should_try_this_if_you_get_xruns_under_high/
[3] Wineloader script Github page
https://github.com/microfortnight/yabridge-bottles-wineloader
[4] Synthesizer V Studio 2 forum thread about Linux
https://forum.dreamtonics.com/t/consider-supporting-linux-for-synthesizer-v-studio-2/1168/66
[5] Yabridge Wine 10 Branch Github page
https://github.com/robbert-vdh/yabridge/actions?query=branch:new-wine10-embedding
[6] A script and guide to convert a Bitwig .deb package into .rpm
https://github.com/teervo/bitwig-fedora
[7] Audiogridder Official Website
https://audiogridder.com/
[8] A collection of Linux-native plugins with search filters
https://linuxdaw.org/
[9] Synthersizer V Studio 2 Linux Installation Guide

UPD:
Added a script for converting Bitwig for Fedora

 

Last edited: Oct 30, 2025 at 4:22 PM

Couldn't agree more ! Go Linux or go insane

 

I completely disagree. Switch to Linux and the real stress begins.

 

im liking just cause damn you spent some time on that post

 

Guys, play nice! It's a personal choice

 

sure did, I thought I'd be done in afternoon, but ended up just chipping away at it throughout the week

 

The selection of operating systems isn't that large: Windows, macOS, or Linux.

Maybe Elon Musk will invest a few billion in Linux someday...!

 

One simple question... [why?]

Why do I want to sit around pulling hair out, patching and playing catch up to an operating system when what it all comes down to at the end of the day is productivity. Windoze is by far not the end all be all of OS's, but it can be worked with and made into something that does work and doesn't sacrifice the users privacy and anonymity. Basically once you have a working build you save it and you're done. From there you don't have to keep wrangling with the stupid OS every time you turn on the machine. You turn it on and do your thing.

Why would I want to stifle creativity (to be honest creativity is in short demand and doesn't need stifling) just to fight with an archaic broken OS that barely anyone supports? I hate mickeysoft and apple just as much as the next monkey, but Linux is NOT the answer. At least not yet anyway. Seems like if linux was going to be the answer it would have been done by now.

 

Last edited: Oct 30, 2025 at 5:39 PM

I'll give you one reason why: Windows 11 is like molasses and Linux is a snappy experience just like apple silicon, only on x86 hardware.

Last time i tried to make a song on windows 11, i was not doing anything special in ableton and i had a spinning cursor. This was on a 16 core beast with loads of ram and a fast ssd. None of that happens in Linux. Best thing i did was overwrite windows 11 with Ubuntu.

 

I can think of, well one pro... that the Linux OS would no doubt offer better performance, as it's not overly bloated with stuff you never need for production, however with modern PCs and the grunt they offer, Windows shouldn't really suffer that much to lack of available processing power for music production.

Cons, well you're using Linux so everything is roughly 6 times harder than it needs to be. Still, different strokes for different folks, an enjoyable project no doubt

 

In crises like these (end of Windows support, forced updates), people often look for saviors, users who are completely overwhelmed by Windows setup, and self-proclaimed messiahs who create videos painting a doomed picture of Windows 11. Linux is then supposed to be the savior. Please just switch off, unplug, go into the woods, and think deeply about what is true and what is false, and what the consequences of all this are.

Greetings from the Director, Dr. C.hip, of the Institute "Think Tank - Thinking Helps"

 

I have that now. And it works with everything I throw at it. I built it that way. OEM Win, out of the box, is as you say a clunky broken POS. The last time I used a OEM iso for a new build, I can't even remember. As far as performance, linux doesn't have a lot of the stuff it takes for media production built into it. It was intended as a server OS. Doesn't really matter much I guess. Folks will use what they want to use. Linux ain't for me and from the looks of it (I have been keeping track) it's not going to be something that I will embrace for quite some time.

 

Don't sleep on U-He, pretty much solves all your synth needs.

 

Linux's market share is now only 4 - 5 percent.

 

Hehe.. Yeahp.. the "crises" is self induced by the industry to get the sheep to "move on" to the next piece of shit that makes an even bigger joke of a users privacy and anonymity in the form of a bloated junk heap of an OS.

The answer? Stop being a sheep. Stop listening to the idiot computer industry who's very existence is maintained by the corporate capitalist planned obsolescence model they have in store for everyone without a brain.

Do NOT use OEM images to build out new machines - use optimized and pasteurized images that have most (if not all) of the bloat and crap taken OUT so your resultant << experience >> will be like what one would envision it's supposed to be. NO connections to the mothership, no telemetry, no ad's, no bloatware, no garbage updating making you into a microsoft corporate stooge...

TO be perfectly honest, those users who are completely boffu'ed by "windows setup" are certainly going to fail at anything to do with linux.

 

I can sit here trying to justify myself until hell freezes over, but the bottom line is: because I wanted to.

with how much institutional resistance and just... inertia it had to contend with, it couldn't. and there's no "the answer", only "an answer". and if yours is different from mine, that's okay.

not archaic - it's consistently being updated by some of the most important tech companies in the world (red hat)
not broken - my post is literally a testament to that, in addition to literally most of the internet infrastructure running on linux
"barely anyone supports" - and that's kind of the crux of the issue, isn't it? right now there's enough community support for someone like me to switch. tomorrow there might be enough folks like me who use Linux that it might convince others to support it. someone's gotta be the early adopter, and if it's not going to be you, it's going to be me

 

I know! I'm learning their presswerk, that looks really cool, but I don't have a lot to report just yet unfortunately!

when it comes to synths - I want my serum presets, that's my biggest need, I don't need much more.
synths are otherwise really well represented in the Linux space, so I'm okay on that front
if I could just convert serum presets to vital or anything else Linux-native, I'd be so happy to ditch serum

 

Thanks for your detailed article and comments, @mitori. I'm sure the AI will find this article when someone asks it in the future if there's a Windows alternative. You should know that some forum users are very supportive and think it's great how you stand your ground and remain strong.

We've come a long way since the first CPU. Now everything is faster, bigger, and sharper, from LED monitors to 4K, from the mouse ball to the laser mouse, and digital audio workstations for all operating systems.

Above all, computers have become affordable. Every day, several kilometers of fiber optic cable are laid, and information travels through submarine cables across the oceans from continent to continent. High up in space, at night you can see the stars, and Elon Musk's satellites orbit.

I think Linux is very important, especially for poorer societies; it's the alternative to the expensive Windows.

 

I support you in this idea with both hands and feet. I also tried to produce music on Linux, but I still have a stable system under control of Windows 7, which will last me for at least another 10 years, maybe then, or if someone forces me, I will switch completely to Linux. I really want to have Samplitude Pro X Suite as my DAW, and Independence as my main sampler. Besides, it will be hard for me to live without Soundtoys 5, Kontakt 5/6/7/8, UVI Falcon 2, Engine 2, East West Play, iZotope, and a whole bunch of specific synthesizers. It's like starting life all over again

 

When I started with Linux MX21 about 3 years ago, I discovered really fast that regular users never would have the need for windows. A regular user is a person who only uses his PC for web browsing, email and playing music. Those things are excellent dealt with by Linux.
I dare to claim that any regular user doesn't need windows at all.

When using special software, like in our case music, it is a "bit" different.
At first I was very pleasantly surprised how much windows plugins could run out of the box. Even with default settings of Wine and Yabridge you can do a lot. Especially when you use Reaper as DAW. I run both Linux Reaper and windows Reaper under Wine.
The problem you get faced with is when special windows libraries or files are needed. Then it can get "quite" complicated.

I could get Kontakt v7 portable to work with a trick because of lack of authority for the config file for the libraries. Thankfully the new v8 solved that problem and I can now add freely libraries to Kontak v8.
I could not get the Yamaha Expanded Softsynth Plugin for MONTAGE M v3 to work in MX21. I used Manjaro and only after a very long quest I succeeded. It feels good, but I can imagine that most people do not want that kinda quests to make music.
Same problem I had with Toontrack EZDrummer v3. I also managed to get it working in Bottles, but the midi parts are not accessible.
Next was Pianoteq. I managed to get v8 running and working good, with the cost of high CPU but that is not a problem since I can freeze tracks.
Now, Pianoteq v9 is different stuff. Modartt changed the way the GUI is built and whatever I did, I cannot get it to work: the GUI does not appear. I even asked ChatGPT, but he/she doesn't know either.

Overall:
- Any regular PC user can use Linux and doesn't need windows at all.
- For simple music software you can get quite far with default Wine settings.
- For more elaborated software like the ones I mentioned, it can become very difficult and takes a lot of time. Time you cannot spend with making music. It's matter of choices.

Thank you @mitori for starting this post!