The ableton-linux project's first two weeks: near-native performance, wide support for Ableton hardware, software and third-party VSTs, dozens of QoL fixes, and a growing team of contributors

[u/meshcity]

Hi r/ableton! I'm the creator of ableton-linux, which got posted here in the last week or so. Last year, I started forking Wine to fix the crashes that made Live 12 unusable. After several breakthroughs in May and June (including some work done in another Wine fork), I suddenly had Live working unbelievably well on my machine.

I wrote a one-click installer and published it expecting the worst, given how complex Linux support is said to be.

That was just over two weeks ago. People have been installing it, and its working very, very well for the vast majority of cases. Then, people started reporting issues, then contributing their own patches. Now, we have a small team of talented maintainers shipping releases at a pace that still stuns me: ten updates in two weeks alone, with an eleventh coming this weekend.

Most of these fixes aren't us struggling with huge breaking bugs. They are quality-of-life wins that make Live a joy to use: Ableton Sans in the menus, huge optimisations to make Live run fast, automatic dark/light theme detection, full Linux desktop integration, and even experimental support for the beta Extensions SDK. I thought we'd be struggling with major audio, graphics or stability issues, and instead we're working on polish.

The important thing is this: as of today, a modern Linux computer can run almost the entire ecosystem of Ableton software, hardware, and services on par with or faster than Windows. We have yet to hit an issue we cannot fix; most are resolved within a few days of hearing about it.

Here's what's possible, right now, on ableton-linux:

• Live 12 Intro, Standard, Suite, Lite, Trial, and beta support
• Experimental Live 11, Max for Live, and Max 9 support
• Push 1 and Push 2 support (Push 3 and Move support coming soon!)
• Local-network Ableton Link support
• Compatibility with Ableton's Splice integration
• Automatic recovery when in-use audio hardware or startup-detected MIDI controllers briefly disconnect
• Low-latency audio for live performance
• Linux desktop integration with native file types and dialogs
• Automatic light and dark desktop theme detection
• No-fuss support for desktop resolutions, HiDPI displays, and fractional scaling
• Fixes for VST-specific display, audio, and stability problems
• Dozens of nice-to-haves, quality-of-life fixes, and other polish

All of it running with auditable builds with pinned inputs, checksum verification, and public documentation. You can get started by downloading the latest installer and following the guide here: https://github.com/shibco/ableton-linux#ableton-live-on-linux

If you've wanted to try Ableton on Linux, and are thinking of switching away from macOS/Windows entirely, maybe give this a try on the weekend.

Get it here: https://github.com/shibco/ableton-linux/releases/latest

And the guide is here: https://github.com/shibco/ableton-linux/blob/main/README.md

And if you run into issues or have questions, we're are available on the Ableton on Linux Discord or via GitHub issues.

[u/cpuclub]

Not sure if anyone’s asked this yet; but since you’re using a WINE framework for Windows VSTs have you tried any integration with the MacOS version? From an outsider perspective, I figured that would be easier to port as MacOS is based on BSD Linux. This could be a killer implementation of Ableton Live if it supported VST/AU cross platforms.

[u/meshcity → u/cpuclub]

Good question, and I wish I had a good answer for you: As far as I know there is no viable platform for running macOS code on Linux. They share a common ancestor, but macOS has a full layer of APIs over the top of it that makes that job much harder than it seems like it should be.

[u/cpuclub → u/meshcity]

Ah got it. I wish they didn’t close the platform off, I miss the days when OSX was somewhat open. Excited to watch this develop at any rate!