You can install all kinds of plugins for Windows on Linux using wine and then route audio through them using Jack from ardour. Search YouTube for videos of Melda productions plugins installed on Linux.

I haven't bothered with sonar myself on Linux, but there was someone who just about had it working. Search old threads. I don't remember who it was.

gswitz
You can install all kinds of plugins for Windows on Linux using wine and then route audio through them using Jack from ardour. Search YouTube for videos of Melda productions plugins installed on Linux.

I haven't bothered with sonar myself on Linux, but there was someone who just about had it working. Search old threads. I don't remember who it was.

Platinum won't work with wine.. Issues with MFC dll's. Have no tried 32 bit. X3/X2 apparently works never tried it.

You are probably better off with a DAW built for Linux.

There's just not enough profit to justify the expense of porting to Linux.
 
It's been a long journey getting to where we're at with audio under Windows.
We're truly blessed with incredible recording/editing tools, great fidelity, low latency, top quality EFX/Instruments, and loads of DSP processing power.
Personally, I don't want to take three steps backward just to say I'm running Linux.
I'd rather see more refinement under Windows.  
ie: Tighter integration that would yield even lower round-trip latency a-la OSX

Jim Roseberry
There's just not enough profit to justify the expense of porting to Linux.

Probably not. And the Linux using community is strongly biased to open-source and low or zero software purchase/licensing pricing as well. Somehow I can't see any major DAW builders making their proprietary algorithms open source any time soon.

There's also the question of whether hardware manufacturers would throw the same kind of driver support behind Linux as they do OS X and Windows. And again, I doubt they'd want to go open source either.

Linux is very good indeed at what it does well (I've a small mail and NAS server running it) but it's been "about to make a major breakthrough in the home/small business desktop market" for 20 years. Progress is being made, you can buy laptop computers with Linux pre-installed nowadays, but it's still at a very slow pace.

There's essentially the problem that Linux won't make a major breakthrough into the general purpose/home computer market until there are state of the art applications, especially games, available in numbers. And software houses won't spend lots of money coding for an operating system that's very much a minority one. Even OS X has little in the way of games available despite being around for many years and the advantage that all the hardware configurations possible are known.

tlw
There's essentially the problem that Linux won't make a major breakthrough into the general purpose/home computer market until there are state of the art applications, especially games, available in numbers. And software houses won't spend lots of money coding for an operating system that's very much a minority one. Even OS X has little in the way of games available despite being around for many years and the advantage that all the hardware configurations possible are known.

This is a very good point.
We (DAW users) are an extremely small niche segment of computer users.
Gaming drives the performance of hardware... and we benefit as a byproduct.
Apple ultimately made the move to Intel based hardware (so they could benefit from the same developments).
 
 
 

The main advantage of a Linux port would be if the DAW developer were to do his own Linux distro tailored to his product so that Sonar came with its own specific version of Linux that you would install and boot into as a unit. Complete control of OS and DAW compatibility and efficiency. The downside is that you would lose virtually all of the plugins and equipment that makes a DAW useful. There would not be enough incentive for the developers of these products to re-engineer their stuff to work with just a single DAW application.

To continue the pile-on, consider that even were Sonar was able to be ported, what of all the plug-ins?

It's just a really bad idea, I used to run Linux quite a few years back, for a number of years, and things don't seemed to have changed that much overall, and I doubt they ever will. This is what it came down to for me. I can do everything I want to in Windows, I can use everything I want to in Windows, in Linux neither of those statements are true. And that is true for most honest Linux users, that is why they still have a Windows partition or drive, because Linux simply can not do everything they want from their PC's, not without serious compromise and pain.  Linux is a continual struggle, bashing your head against brick wall after brick wall, that is if you are expecting it to do what you can do in Windows. If you just want to surf the net, and do basic stuff, it will do fine, step out into something a bit more specialized, and the cracks chasms become readily apparent. People will bring up, that such and such a company has just supported Linux (IIRC the last mentioned was Bitwig or something), the simple response would be, well why don't you use it then ? You have no choice in Linux (and I'm not talking about the gazillion dinky little things you find in the repositories) I mean real stuff, stuff we use on Windows, stuff we want and choose to use, not just the scraps that get tossed to Linux via a handful of companies/developers. To me it was really simple in the end, after getting out of that Linux mindset (it's sort of like people want something to belong to, to believe in) Either be able to do and use what you want, or not.
 
I for one hope Cakewalk don't invest 1 second of time in this endeavor, and I doubt they will, because it's just not worth it.

Doktor Avalanche
We seem to be getting more demands for Linux ports than Apple nowadays. Neither will probably happen but still in favour of Linux..

Not surprising. There are several professional standard DAWs available for OS X already (unlike Linux), and Logic Pro in particular isn't very expensive and is a pretty easy learning curve for anyone whose been using Garageband.

That and it's the (understandable) nature of Linux users to put in lots of requests for Linux versions of applications.

Doktor Avalanche
We seem to be getting more demands for Linux ports than Apple nowadays. Neither will probably happen but still in favour of Linux..

 

tlw
Not surprising. There are several professional standard DAWs available for OS X already (unlike Linux), and Logic Pro in particular isn't very expensive and is a pretty easy learning curve for anyone whose been using Garageband.

That and it's the (understandable) nature of Linux users to put in lots of requests for Linux versions of applications.

I don't get the logic...
 
There certainly has not been a shortage of Apple DAW's, and the number of Apple DAW's has hardly increased over the last few years. However the number of Linux DAW's have gone up quite dramatically.
 
Also the idea that Linux Desktop is just for hobbyists and nerds is well over nowadays...