Linux does a lot of things well. Music production is not usually one of them, mainly due to a lack of good programs available on Linux. Fortunately FL Studio, one of the most popular DAWs out there works flawlessly through Wine.

Wine is a Windows compatibility layer for Linux. You can often run Windows programs with it, though personally, my success has been mixed (especially for performance critical applications like videogames). In this case though, we can use it to run FL Studio, and it works perfectly.

Here’s a quick preview of our end product (sorry for terrible video quality, but it shows we have a nice, working install):

Setting up Wine⌗

The following instructions are written using Fedora, but should work on any variety of Linux (adapt the next command to your package manager of choice).

To start, we’ll need wine and winetricks:

sudo dnf install wine winetricks

Once this completes, you’ll need to install some fonts needed by FL Studio. Run winetricks in the console, and select “select the default wineprefix”. Install the “core” Microsoft fonts.

Install FL Studio⌗

Download the FL Studio installer from the official website. Once it’s downloaded, run the following command and install with all of the default settings:

wine flstudio_12.5.1.165.exe

Protip: in terms of ASIO drivers, use FL Studio ASIO instead of ASIO4ALL (it’s just better).

While things are installing, download your registration key from the FL Studio website (FLRegkey.Reg). You can register it with the following winetricks command:

regedit FLRegkey.Reg

Congrats, you now have a fully working version of FL Studio on Linux. And before you ask, yes - all of your VST plugins will work out of the box.