So you want to get into making Music, great! You are on Linux, fuck. Let's get into this. Most commercial or "PrOfEsSiOnAl" DAWs only work on Windows and Mac. This is due to corpo shills convincing people in the early days that Macs are superior when it comes to producing music. This of course was a self fulfilling prophecy because companies started focusing on Mac software and thus more people started using Macs due to their better software support. This is an infinite loop of eating your own shit and does nothing but make Apple richer and make software more locked down.
Windows naturally got software too because its marketshare was and still is huge, which leaves us Linux users with lacking support for FL Studio, Ableton Live, etc. But do not give up and submit to the Windows overlords. As I am your savior and have done the homework to present to you, a very advanced and modern music production setup that runs natively on Linux.
When initially researching and collecting DAWs, you find the usual suspects: FL Studio, Ableton Live, Apple Logic, etc. but you also find more interesting offers such as Reaper or Bitwig Studio. These are still proprietary and cost money to activate, but we will get to that shortly.
I personally like Bitwig Studio, their software has a nice UI and they include lots of tools pre-installed or easily installable via their built in menus. It has a nice workflow and in my opinion the best overall performance for any native Linux DAW. Only too bad it costs 400 euros. They do offer discounts for students but it is still 269 euros. The price is a lot for people who just want to start into music production and as such, may not be able to afford this very expensive toy.
As an alternative there is Reaper, which too technically requires a license, but their trial, even after its expiry never stops you from using the full suite. In addition, a non commercial license is only 60 euros. Its UI is a little old but still definitely good enough to do some serious work.
Now, for all FOSS people out there, a open source and free DAW does exist and its name is Ardour. I personally never managed to come to terms with its UI but reading its very positive feedback and the mere fact that you can compile it yourself if you want, makes it a good option in my book.
Is there more? Probably. But I didn't care enough to test the others so I can't tell you much. One DAW I can still recommend is FL Studio. Wait what? But it has no native Linux build! Yes, but it runs with almost no issues on wine and its cracks are plentiful online. For anyone that wants to use a very popular DAW, this might be a good solution. For me it didn't work that well because every time I launched it, the logo had a dark edge and if you opened the about section it would freeze up entirely and nuke itself. Aside from that, everything worked as expected, small bugs like not being able to adjust knobs with the mouse and stuff but you can work around it by entering values by keyboard.
Trying to find a Sample Manager was like shoving a cactus up a virgins ass. The pain was just too much. Samplecat is complete garbage and all other open source variants severly lacked features or had terrible UI. So I tried running ADSR on wine and it was horribly broken too, the rendering it uses does not like wine at all and shit itself completely. So I stumbled upon Sononym, it has a native Linux build, its UI is manageable, its features are good and the price is also not that much (Still more than Reaper which is ooof) at 90 euros. The great thing about Sononym is that you can quite easily circumvent its licensing system. I will not show you how in this blog and as far as I know, no cracks have been released for the current release but it is really simple. Maybe you dumbasses should not use Asar to package your code but I digress.
A great thing that Linux has is Jack. It stands for Jack Audio Connection Kit. It enables you to route audio very easily and with very low latency between applications. Something that Windows struggles with. It makes building a studio setup arguably easier and in general is such a great tool. I personally just stay with Pipewire as I do not require that very low latency configurable audio interface, but more serious folks will enjoy this very much.
This is not specific to Linux but I still felt like mentioning it. If you require free sample packs, you can get them at audiostorrent or vsttorrentz. Just throwing it out there.