I was kind of surprised to learn the Reaper guys hadn't made it operational in Linux out of the box. There are reports of it working in Wine but... well I was just hoping it would work as is. I don't expect Sonar or other programs to but I figured the very nature of Reaper would make it an ideal program to code for Linux.

Some of the same things that make Linux awesome also hinder it for things like music production.  The android branch is a prime example.  In theory android could be even faster than apple ios, but it's not even close when it comes to media applications because of the vast differences in distributions.  As ti is , Android had to shift further and further from mainstream linux development in order to to make it competitive with iphones and ipads.  In the video world these problems have been overcome mostly through borderline fanatical dedication and pricd considerations.  High end film work requires so much processing power that Linux options often come into play.  It would seem if high end programs like Nuke and Resolve can handle massive video data, that porting DAWS like Sonar should be possible.
 
My guess is that many of the companies that make mid-level products don't see any profit to doing so.   The media production programs that are most successful on Linux are either free, open source models or so high end that piracy is almost irrelevant.  Example:  I doubt a production house would spend 30k on custom control surfaces and then try to steal licenses for software they will undoubtedly need support for.

Well I guess unfortunately in today's hyper capitalist system money is the great motivator for innovation. People can't feed their families on good intentions and day dreams so those with the financial backing win the day. It's a shame because it's so hard for the 70s-80s era garage based companies like Apple to get going. I also watched a documentary recently about technology advancement basically stating we've become so advanced that no one can really make large scale achievements on their own anymore because any one person cannot become specialized enough in all the fields necessary to make true breakthroughs. There needs to be collaborations of specialists all giving their input to make things happen. Pretty interesting.
 
Is it good? Well it's forcing us to work together as a species so I guess but sadly the days of the basement tinkerer/inventor are over.
 
But that's just absent minded blathering. Cheers.

Beepster..not sure if it is as dismal as that.  Although commercial products like Sonar are less likely to take the Linux leap, there are plenty of amazing applications that are available for free on Linux that bring processing to ordinary people not available years ago.  Blender is a notch below Maya,zBrush and other commonly used commercial 3d animation apps....but not that big of a notch and it gets better all the time.  To get the power of Blender would have likely cost over 100k 15 years ago.  Ardour is amazing and the commrecial Harrison Mixbus is heavily based on Ardour.  The differences between Da Vinci Resolve and Resolve Lite is practically irrelevant to the hobbyist, meaning amateur film makers have access to professional grade color correction for free.

Yeah, sorry. Didn't mean to pull a Debbie Downer. I've got some old laptops I want to start my great Linux experiment on. Unlikely they'll be any good for audio but maybe I'll try and build a junker system to load Linux Studio on. I know enough now to experiment like that. I've always been fascinated by the open source world but wasn't really smart enough  nor had the time to screw with it. I'm exactly the kind of rube companies like MS and modern day Apple feed off of. I'll show them! lol

I certainly don't want to dissuade anyone from using Linux as a DAW. I love the fact that Ubuntu has become somewhat of a standard Linux, and it can run some serious applications now. I still find it more clumsy than Windows, but nobody can argue it's rock-solid platform and lower harddrive consumption. It's quite efficient!
 
But I personally would not try using Linux to emulate a DAW, regardless of how fast the emulation can run. Unless the DAW is tested and supported for that hardware, I would highly recommend against doing it to save some $$. Just ask anyone who's tried running MAC OS X on a PC, and you'll find very few of them successful, and even less than that number recommending MAC OS X running on a PC.
 
Sure, there's some success, but only in a perfect environment of hardware, drivers, and a little bit of luck, but I dare say that absolutely none of them said it performs faster than a real Mac, and that they didn't encounter some strange errors along the way.
 
With all of that said, emulating Sonar on a Linux machine in at least some stable method might be useful for editing or automating, things you may not need super speed to accomplish. I have a Mac Book Pro from 2012, right before the retina screens were released. From what I've seen, it performs well for DAW work, but it's a total dog for other applications, such as Camtasia, Photoshop, Mac Mail, and even this forum. It's a slow performer when it comes to multi-tasking. I won't consider using it for DAW work at all. As a VM, Sonar performs very poorly on this machine (I tried it here to test editing).
 
 

Personally my main purpose for using Linux for audio would simply be to capture live sound. That way I could hopefully drag a crummy laptop that I don't give a fart about around to clubs or whatever to capture the tracks and then just copy the resulting waves onto the big rig.
 
I do have many other non audio related reasons to learn linux though. Mainly not wanting to drop cash every time I want to get a computer running just to arse around with.

Ubuntu and various forks of it (I'm a big fan of Linux Mint for Linux beginners) are amazing in that they are much easier to use than most people would think when they hear thre word Linux.  Unfortunately, some of the speed advantages fall by the wayside.  For the true Linux geek, one of the biggest advantages is the ability to streamline by not adding all the bloat that comes with other OS's.  linux machines used fror pure processing power like a render farm typically forgo even using a GUI.
 
Beepster, if you are just recording, an old laptop with Audacity will probably do the trick.

Thanks for the tip. As far as Linux/Ubuntu or whatever the only time I used it was when I had an HD fail on me and someone tossed me Penguin on a disc. It was certainly usable and pretty easy to figure out but being on a CD the crummy disc drive had to spin up every time I did anything like navigate to a new webpage. The fact I was able to even surf the net with absolutely no hard drive on the system though was mind blowing. It does go to show that you don't need all the extra crap MS puts into their OS just to do general stuff. Very cool.

with a faster computer i have done tasks like watched movies online with disk based linux distributions.