My main music machine is a Mac and my main everything else system is a Lenovo laptop with Pop!_OS. I would like to have the option to play with ideas on my Linux machine instead of having to switch systems when I feel inspired.
I already own the full version of Bitwig Studio butvI would love to throw some must have, Linux compatible, VST plugins into the mix.
Free sample sources would also be much appreciated.
In my experience yabridge is fantastic. With a bit of initial setup, it's the closest thing to a native experience that I've come across.
You do control it with a CLI interface, so you need to be comfortable with that.
You also need to have already installed the Windows VSTs manually using WINE or whatever, and so there's a bit of a typical "how well does this work under wine" crapshoot and a bit of a learning curve there.
Getting plugins to install is often a big hurdle, if they are working, they work. However I think performance suffers alot. Didn't try it on any bigger synths yet tho.
I use it for spitfire labs, ott, and delay lama (very important) and all work great. There are occasional crashes when messing with parameters, but usually those don't happen more then once. I haven't noticed any performance issues.
Might depend on what DAW you use but I found it abit tedious to setup with Ardour, but after that it worked perfectly with the VSTs I was running on Windows, mainly Amplitube 5.