State of music production with Flatpak

Updated: 2024-04-17

Since the "rise" of Flatpak (see also Flathub) as an effort to establish a stable and accessible platform for distributing software on Linux, I've been on board and trying to help audio software vendors optimize their products (especially audio effect and instrument plugins) for Flatpak.

I see this as an opportunity to invalidate the anti-Linux argument of fragmentation and provide both software vendors with a stable platform as well as users with simple and reliable means to access software that works reliably regardless of the Linux distribution used.

Because after all, Linux still has a bit of an image of being a system for hobbyists or not being suitable for professional use (apart from Linux as a server operating system). And I would like to help change that.

Flatpak

Flatpak is a utility for software deployment and package management for Linux. It is advertised as offering a sandbox environment in which users can run application software in isolation from the rest of the system.

Flathub

Flathub is the place to get and distribute apps for all of desktop Linux. It is powered by Flatpak, allowing Flathub apps to run on almost any Linux distribution.

In the beginning, Flatpak applications sometimes caused me problems, such as a wrongly scaled mouse pointers or not respecting the theme of the host system, the latter also in connection with QT or GTK and light and dark modes.
In the meantime, these problems have completely disappeared, at least on my systems, and everything works as expected.

Nowadays I only install the distribution packages with pamac or pacman (I'm on Manjaro Linux), while all third party applications are installed with Flatpak.

Flatpak, like probably most things in life - especially when something is supposed to revolutionize a certain area - has of course not only advantages but also disadvantages, as discussed in the linked articles "Flatpak is not the future" from November 2021 and a reaction to it from May 2022.

With 1.6 billion downloads and over a million active users on Flathub, I think it's fair to say though that Flatpak has been relatively successful. Nevertheless, it remains polarizing for the time being.

In my article I would like to shed some light on how Flatpak works in the context of music production on Linux. In particular, the fact that audio plugins hosted inside a Flatpak DAW are restricted to the limitations of the Flatpak application's sandbox and can cause problems if the developers are not aware of this.

The findings in this article are based on my personal experience with my computers (a Lenovo Z16 AMD laptop and my ASUS ProArt X570-Creator WiFi/Ryzen 9 3900X/Radeon Pro WX 7100 studio computer), Manjaro Linux 6.5.13-7-MANJARO with GNOME 45.4, Bitwig Studio 5.1.6 (Flatpak), and the latest stable plugin versions at the time of writing. Since I cannot use LV2 plugins in Bitwig Studio, I will only discuss VST2, VST3 and CLAP formats in this article.

So, how well do the respective plugins work with Bitwig Studio (Flatpak)?

• VST2 and CLAP plug-ins that have freely scalable user interfaces which are not divided into fixed sizes generally seem to have the problem of not scaling correctly on high resolution displays (in my case 3840x2400 px at 200% scale). In most cases, they load at 50% of their correct size. In exceptional cases, however, the plugins load at 400% scale and sometimes even cause the plugin sandbox to crash. The latter seems to be not only a problem with Bitwig Studio, but also with Ardour 8.4.0 (Flatpak) according to some random tests I did.
• In general, VST3 seems to be the most reliable format.
• If a VST3 version of a plugin is available, I do not test the VST2 version. This also because almost all VST2 plugins scale incorrectly on my computers.
• All Audio Assault plugins need to be patched with patchelf --replace-needed libcurl-gnutls.so.4 libcurl.so.4 <PLUGIN_PATH>.
• All AudioThing plugins work fine. However, they currently cannot load any presets.
• Out of 104 installed plugins, 68 work correctly. As I said, the 23 AudioThing plugins also work fine, but they cannot load presets. Since I also work with the plugins without the presets, my personal conclusion is that 91 of my 104 plugins work pretty much perfectly.