Check out Audio Video Linux "AV Linux". It's like a turnkey media workstation OS: https://www.bandshed.net/avlinux/ https://bandshed.net/pdf/AVL-MXE-User-Manual.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV_Linux
this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2026
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It's been a while since I've had the money/equipment/etc, so this may be out of date information, but there at least used be Ubuntu Studio, too. But nowadays I see a lot of hate for Ubuntu/Canonical, so who knows. Just thought I'd mention it in case it's helpful to anyone!
(Someone already mentioned Ardour... I think there was Reaper, too, but I could be mixing up my OSes lol. My brain is trash, my apologies)
That's the beauty of AVL, it includes the kxstudio repos and some others by default. It's all there all incl. Should even do the job on an air gapped studio workstation.
Ardour
I use mostly hardware, but Ardour for the mastering.
I occasionally make MIDI covers, so I use Rosegarden for actually transcribing MIDI songs and Sonic Visualizer to figure out the exact notes used in the original tracks. I've also messed around with Reaper, FL Studio and various music trackers (SunVox, MilkyTracker etc)
If you play guitar, you might like tuxguitar for doing guitar notation. It does both music sheets and tabs
Sonic Visualizer to figure out the exact notes used in the original tracks.
Does it have any specific functions for this that applications like Audacity or a DAW don't have, or did you choose it for other reasons?
I used to use a similar piece of proprietary spectral analysis software called SpectraLayers; after switching to Linux, I wanted to move to something open-source. So, I'm just used to that kind of workflow. I mean, Audacity also has an option to display a melodic scale spectrogram, but it's rather awkward to use, and I don't believe it ever giving an option to see the pitch of a specific note.
Whereas, Sonic Visualizer lets me do this: 
That's really cool!
A friend of mine produces her music with lmms. She plays guitar and then adds drums and other instruments in lmms and arranges them I guess. https://lmms.io/
Pure data is one i like to use
I have also been interested in exploring more open source tools for music. I used to produce a lot in ableton but want to use exclusively linux. Bitwig seemed interesting but it is not open-source.. I may try Reaper or Ardour but they seem kind of blocky for my workflow(maybe I am wrong though). Anyone know what would be the closest open-source daw to something like ableton?
SuperCollider, LilyPond, ffmpeg, Ardour
I'm not much of a musician, but I've used MilkyTracker for some chiptune work
TIL it's open source, neat.
Sometimes Ardour. I use a neural amp modeller made by the guitarix dev (can't remember if this is the exact name) along with files from tone3000. LSP plugins, Vital synth, and a bunch of other plugins. I've been looking at opendaw which recently added tone3000 support which is pretty cool but it didn't really replace bitwig for me, interesting tool for collabs though.
rm mostly:)