VST Trouble in Linux Bazzite/Manjaro

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Hey there, I'm working on transitioning over to linux and i've hit a roadblock with setting up LMMS where every VST2 i try to load in VeSTige either does absolutely nothing, hangs the program for a minute and then does nothing, or in one case manages to load a window for the VST GUI, but with bugged out graphics and no functionality (Keyboard plays no sound).

Here's the laundry list of what i know. I have a laptop with Win11 i'm pulling my old VST plugins from. They work perfectly fine there, so i assume the .dlls are fine. My Linux system is Bazzite (Fedora-based), and i'm currently using the latest nightly appimage of LMMS (@d36f3f0). I've copied the .dll files to the default plugin directory (Documents/lmms/plugins/vst/), but trying to open them in VeSTige simply fails. I've gone through a number of iterations shuffling things around to different directories with different settings, but no dice there.

The closest i've gotten so far has been installing the windows version of LMMS with WineZGUI, and copying the .dlls into the plugins directory on the c_drive, but that only gave me the glitchy, unusable VST mentioned above. Not to mention that all the fonts in LMMS under wine were crunched and barely legible, so it wouldn't be my favorite solution anyway.

After a couple days of trying to troubleshoot and not finding a good solution online, i decided to try spinning up a different distro on Virtual Machine to see if i could get it working there. I picked Manjaro (Arch-based) as i have a little prior experience with it, and it's not immutable like Bazzite. Unfortunately, i have had pretty much the same experience there. Got the latest appimage of LMMS set up, tried working with both wine and wine-staging, shuffled between different plugin folders, and still the VSTs do nothing. At this point, i'm really assuming that i must be doing something wrong.

I also made an attempt to install yabridge on Manjaro, since i'd seen that come up as a solution somewhere. I'm pretty useless with terminal programs, but i think i managed to get yabridgectl to set the plugin directory and sync the plugins inside. From there i wasn't really sure what to do, and trying to just load the VST into VeSTige again afterwards failed in the same way.

Long story long, if anyone has an inkling as to what i'm missing, i'd love some help or suggestions. It'd be nice to figure out making it work within Bazzite (something, something, distroshelf maybe), but honestly i'd just be happy to get it running in a VM if there's a linux distro that just works. Thanks in advance!

First off, Welcome to the Forum inedibleshultz !
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inedibleshultz wrote:
Mon Feb 23, 2026 6:40 am

, something, distroshelf maybe), i'd just be happy to get it running in a VM if there's a linux distro that just works.

There are many things that can make linux installations problematic

  • WINE
  • Distros
  • LMMS version
    -are the most common, but unfortunately also other things like missing components in Linux, and even the sequence of installing can mess it up.
    I am not at all a linux expert, but some things you mention could be done different. For that reason i would like you to test 1.3-Alpha instead of Nightly, more precise this one:
    https://github.com/LMMS/lmms/releases/d ... 4.AppImage.
    Before installing backup own files and remove current installed Nightly-AppImage
    This is a wine-guide
    https://linuxgenie.net/install-wine-9-debian-12/
    I know it has worked for Debian distros, but idk if that also is valid for you, but give it a read.
    You must install wine before LMMS remember that.

The last thing is the VST. Normally all VST2 works, but i like one as proof-of-concept:
MDA-Piano https://plugins4free.com/plugin/201/
It is free, and very small in size as well as resource usage. Further its a quite good piano-instrument, so it is a win win
Lets know the outcome

I am not at all a linux expert, but some things you mention could be done different. For that reason i would like you to test 1.3-Alpha instead of Nightly, more precise this one:
https://github.com/LMMS/lmms/releases/d ... 4.AppImage.

I'll have a go with that one. Bazzite seems to discourage using standard wine/winetricks, so i'll see if i can get it running in a seperate distro.

You must install wine before LMMS remember that.

Is there more to installing an appimage than just downloading the file and running it as executable? I don't think i started fiddling with wine until i had LMMS and discovered the problem. Aside from the appimage and the LMMS documents folder, is there anything else i should make sure is uninstalled before wine?

inedibleshultz wrote:
Tue Feb 24, 2026 6:58 am

Is there more to installing an appimage than just downloading the file and running it as executable?

True -afaik that is it.

is there anything else i should make sure is uninstalled before wine?

Not that i know of, but afaik you must make sure that your own files own samples, presets etc are placed outside the folder where the exe-file of LMMS is placed. Default LMMS expect userfiles to be in Documents/lmms/
whereas program-specific files plus all factory-files, are expect in %USERPROFILE%
Never has anything youself writes to in %USERPROFILE%.
If you do you will rights and access-issues.
Let us know if you find a solution!