mega post warning

this post is from an answer I wrote to someone asking for Linux plugin recommendations on r/REAPER

Linux VSTs

These days we are spoiled for choice on Linux, a lot of the good free plugins are cross-platform, and I think it's only getting easier for devs to make plugins like that. The issue is that it's not worth it for large companies to support Linux since we are generally a very vocal bunch when it comes to bug reports, but also a very tiny percent of the total sales. So as long as you don't mind digging for free plugins or plugins from smaller developers, then you will have a good time.

The List

So here are my favourite and frequently used Linux VSTs (all free):

• Swanky Amp (really solid guitar amp sim)
• All the Chow DSP stuff are very well programmed and come with tons of antialiasing options. (chow tape, BYOD electric guitar amps/pedals, modulation stuff, chow kick kick drum synths ...),
• Vital (powerful wave table synth),
• Surge XT (another powerful wave table synth that has many more presets and FX than vital)
• DSP56300 Access Virus emulation (might be called Osiris, not sure) (setup guide)
• Fire (multiband saturator),
• VCV rack Euro rack simulator (cardinal for the free VST version),
• adl-plug (old school OPL/midi synth),
• sfizz and decent sampler (for SFZ and other sampled instruments)
• OB-XD (virtual analogue style synth)
• many of the TAL plugins are Linux native now (TAL filter, reverb 4, chorus lx noisemaker and TAL sampler)
• Nils kv1 (90s/2000s cheesy rompler keyboard emulation)
• Stochas (midi sequencer plugin based on randomness and probability with scale snapping)
• Fircomp
• Soca Labs mverb (also lots of chip tune inspired plugins and some staples like delay, chorus, comp, etc there)
• Dexed (Yamaha dx7 clone that can load dx7 sysx patches)
• Collab3 (excellent Hammond organ)
• Bertom denoiser and EQ curve analyser
• WolfShaper (FL studio style wave shaping saturator)
• Then there's airwindows. I don't like most of them because they are very subtle and single purpose but tapedelay2, totape6, galactic, verbity, reverb, vibrato, glitchshifter, infinity, consol7cascade, and some others are good. Surge XT contains a good subset of the useful airwindows plugins in its effects section, so look there for what you might like and then go download them from the airwindows site.

Corporate (Paid) Stuff

There are also some companies doing paid plugins now. I only know of u-he at the moment, but the fact that Bitwig and Reaper have native Linux versions (and maybe the new CLAP format) might encourage more companies to make their plugins available natively.

• u-he u-he stuff. diva, hive 2, repro and also the free ones like zebralette, podolski, triple cheese and the classic tyrell n6 are also available for Linux

Conclusion

There really are absolutely tons of great native plugins, and plenty of the free windows free VSTs (ones without registrations) work well if you use yabridge and wine.

I have used Valhalla supermassive, Venn audio freeclip, the bedroom producer blog plugins (i.e. saturator, dirty filter, dirty spring) as well as lots of the analog obsessions plugins.

Linux can also take some work to set up and be a stable audio system, but I have had luck with pipewire and the pipewire-jack system. If you use something like qjackctl or helvum you can visualise the flow of audio and midi across your OS and even use non VST audio software with your DAW, as it makes it trivial to connect different pieces of software together.

Some Resources

You can filter for Linux plugins on audiopluginsforfree.com and plugins4free.com. Searching Github can also result in finding some cool plugins.

Here is also a massive list of even more plugins you can sift through, but the ones I've mentioned here are most of the good ones.