Noo

Welcome and congrats on your migration under GNU/Linux.

VST is a proprietary format therefore it is made to not work on linux. On linux synth or virtual instruments are LV2 plugins (like Helm, Surge or Vitalium) or SF2/SFZ soundbank (played with Sfizz or Fluid Synth).

Now Ardour, Bitwig and Reaper can load VST plugins, but :

• Some won’t just work,
• Some will work pretty much the same (Kontakt seems to be working for some person, but it depends on the version I think), BUT if the VSTs needs to be installed before hand (like Kontakt, Spitfire, SINE and I think Arturia V falls into that), you will have to install them first using Wine (or with a wine front-end, like Bottles, Heroic, Lutris). Then load them in your DAW, if they don’t work there after being properly download and installed, I don’t think there is anything much to do… … Apart from try using a bridge (like Lin-VST or Yabridge), but here against results are still very unpredictable. I got some pretty god results with both on the past, but on my new setup none would work for my plugins (Spitfires mostly).

These companies won’t make their plugins available under Linux cause ‘there isn’t enough people using it on linux’ (words of someone at Spitfire who I was asking the question).

My workflow for production in a few words :

• One PC (recording, mixing, mastering) with a midi keyboard,
• One PC virtual instruments only, I use it when project requires lot of instrument tracks.

Edit : Yeah Carla can be used as well, it can load VST plugins and act like a plugin library (pretty much like Kontakt).

Try using audacity/tenacity with each mic on one stereo channel, press recording and like the output to OBS.

On the DAW, the three are good, I use Ardour cause it’s a free software, but I’ve been told the other two are good, specially for people coming from ableton who want something close. Ardour is really a old-fashioned daw like pro-tools.

Check Librazik it’s a distro based on debian made for musicale production.

I’d say you don’t need a specific distro for what you want to do : a Debian or Arch with KDE could do the trick, but I would recommend to use a lighter desktop environment like Xfce. You may not like it coming from mac but it will preserve machine resources for your audio work.

Ardour runs pretty much on it’s own on any distro, you can still do some conf, I suggest to go to linuxmao.fr the website is mostly in French but have a lot of configuration documentation.

This audio interface will not be an issue as it’s plug and play on Linux since a while now.