The Stack Tracer

Background

Bitwig is a Digital Audio Workstation that runs natively on Linux. That means it also runs fairly well on the Steam Deck using its native SteamOS. And of course, you can always install another OS if you like, but I wanted to explore how well I could get it to work on SteamOS itself.

Since Bitwig can be installed from a flatpak, this is fairly straight-forward with no known issues—it just works.

One challenge though when using a modern DAW on Linux is that many closed-source VSTs are Windows/Mac-only. But there is a really nice solution for that called yabridge.

Using yabridge, you can take native Windows VSTs and run them in wine, but at the same time make them available to native Linux applications like Bitwig. It's really neat and generally works well—when it works. Except in one case: When the “native” Linux app is running from a flatpak. In that case, the app can't see the VSTs from yabridge.

But there are workarounds for that, and in this post I will describe one such workaround that worked for me.

Alternatives

The workaround is a bit messy, so it is worth considering the alternatives first.

Install another OS instead of SteamOS

A “simple” option would be to ditch SteamOS in favor of another operating system. Bitwig officially supports Ubuntu, so Ubuntu would be the perfect alternative. But I hate dual-booting. Might as well boot into Windows 11 then and have no compatibility issues at all. If I can, I want to stick with SteamOS for now, since I like the experience and the easy access to my steam library.

Install Bitwig from AUR

Since SteamOS is derived from Arch Linux, you can enable Pacman and install it that way. (It's fairly easy to convert a .deb package for Ubuntu into something else it seems). But SteamOS is basically an immutable OS, so Pacman is disabled by default.

When you enable it, you quickly run out of disc space since the OS partition doesn't really have much free space. I could maybe resized it with gparted or something like it, but with each SteamOS update, I risk losing all the packages that has been installed since the last update. This is not feasable.

At this point, I decided to see if I could somehow make Bitwig from flatpak work with yabridge anyway. Turns out, using a few tricks, this is actually possible!

The solution

Wine

For this to work, I need a working wine installation that is usable by yabridge. Something that just works from the command line. There are plenty of options on the Steam Deck. Launcher likes Heroic and Lutris all bundle their own wine derivatives as well, but I didn't have much luck using them directly.

What I ended up doing was simply taking the one you can install with pacman. The OS partition doesn't have enough space for it, but you can change the installation root easily to “pacman” in your home folder, like this:

$ sudo pacman -S wine --root ~/pacman

Pacman gave me a few errors, but wine was downloaded and actually works from the folder I picked. Just put the bin folder into your path, and then you have wine from your home folder. Viola!

And yabridge seems happy with it as well. Problem solved.

Flatpak security

I found an really easy workaround for the security model build into flatpaks. I know nothing about flatpaks really, so this was just a lucky guess. I did read somewhere that you can just change the permissions using flatseal, but another option is to simply start the executable directly from where flatpak put it in your system, like so:

$ /var/lib/flatpak/app/com.bitwig.BitwigStudio/current/active/files/bitwig-studio

It starts up, without any of the security restrictions it had before. Or at least it sees the VSTs from yabridge now, which is what I want.

I tested the whole setup by installing the Spitfire Audio Discover instrument in a wineprefix, give the directory to yabridge, and then into Bitwig to see if the VST was recognized. It worked!

I did the same thing with Valhalla Super Massive. Proof:

Though with Spitfire, I had to reinstall it a few times before it would load its sample libraries. Apparently this is a known issue.

Conclusion

I'm glad that a DAW like Bitwig exists natively for Linux and that it works so well on the Steam Deck. But if you need Windows-only instruments, you should consider if it is worth the hassle. I tried some other VSTs and had to implement a few more work-arounds mentioned in the known issues and fixes. Someone really did their home work there, but it is far from “plug and play”.

If I did music production in any professional capacity, I would most likely not be using Steam OS (or the Steam Deck) for that. But for hobby usage, this works much better than I had expected.

I haven't really tried to tax the hardware yet, but for light usage, the hardware seems plenty powerful. Each of the demo projects plays and runs fine as well without any performance issues. The steam deck is a beast.