Quark pulled their fingers out about 5-6 years ago and stopped ignoring their customers, though I suspect it’s too late as Adobe have probably all-but blown them out of the water. I find QXP a lot more intuitive and efficient than Adobe stuff (why use one click when thirteen will do?!?) and it’s come a long way.
I keep trying to ditch Photoshop, but the competition sadly doesn’t come close.
Snakeeyes - is Dorico 3.5 running in Wine on Linux?
Ta
Rob
That’s correct. See my youtube walkthrough up a few comments in this thread for installation instructions. If I had to give how well it runs a grade, I’d go B, maybe B+. Usable, but a tad rough around some of the edges.
A few notes/caveats:
Let me know if you have any questions 
Thank you for the info.
Ordinarily I’m a bit of a hacker, but I’m not brave enough to risk losing music that I’m working on.
If we got the other three packages working well then I’d ditch MS and Mac tomorrow - already I’m clinging on to Windows 7 like my life depended on it.
Hey all, I’ve been getting some PMs about whether or not Dorico 4 is up and running on Linux yet. Until today the answer was no, but I’m happy to say that I’ve just gotten it working (with some… caveats…)
I’ll do a quick writeup here about the steps in case anyone is itching to get going with things, with hopefully some improvements to the process and an instruction video (or heck, maybe even an install script, who knows) to come in… hopefully… the near-ish-future. Be forewarned that some of the steps right now are a bit kludgey, but they work. Mostly. The one thing that I don’t have working yet is audio, though it does look like Dorico/wine sees pulseaudio, so I’m not sure what’s up with that.
The reason this all has taken so long is that, one, life got busy with a recent minor career upheaval (those are always fun) and, two, I still haven’t managed to get the activation manager to open links from a web browser in Linux; it can open a browser, but getting it to listen to one is a different story (the download assistant has the same issue, but that’s not a prerequisite to running Dorico). The release of the offline activation feature seemed to elude my notice several months back I guess, but, luckily, as I suspected, activation was the only real substantial roadblock to the entire install process and everything else works, at least mostly.
Also, right now, this relies on having a Windows machine handy to do some file transfers. Can totally be virtual, in fact, this is probably preferable because a shared folder makes file transfers super easy. If you’ve already got a Windows machine with Dorico 4 already installed, that also works great.
So without further ado, strap in, because here’s how I’ve gotten things running, for now:
C:\ProgramData\Steinberg\Content…
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Steinberg\Shared Components…
C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3…
C:\Program Files\Steinberg\HALion Sonic SE…
C:\users\YourUsername\AppData\Roaming…
Basically, just look everywhere you can, and anywhere you see those things, grab them and transfer them to the same place in the wine prefix. Have fun…
Note, this is not the exact order I’ve done everything in, and, for instance, I had to reinstall the dotnet48 thing once or twice again after I’d screwed other things up, but I’m fairly certain it should work as written. Though while not the exact order, this is every step that I took, at least every step that changed something or had any effect on the install. Feel free to try installing noteperformer if you’ve got it, though obviously, it’s not working without sound right now. Once again, I’ll do my best to see if some of these steps can’t be cleaned up and made simpler, especially that HALion stuff and the Lutris step, etc etc. Hopefully I can make that happen soon, but I guess we’ll see.
Totally open to suggestions, corrections, improvements, etc.
If you want to try to tackle getting the activation manager to work online, here’s a starting point on that (for some reason this has played funny with firefox for me, so I usually use librewolf while fiddling with this): https://www.reddit.com/r/winehq/comments/v40jas/how_to_get_a_wine_app_to_open_a_url_redirect/
Stay tuned. It likely only gets better from here, and the semi-working activation manager means that new versions of other Steinberg software can likely be made to run on Linux as well. I seem to remember getting Cubase working one time a while back.
Cheers!
-Matt
Thanks for this. As a reluctant windows user and active apple-phobe, it’s good to know there may be a practical alternative.
And of course, magically, sound seems to be working without any discernable reason as to why. I didn’t change anything. I did set the desktop file to restart the bottle every time the program opens just to avoid any licensing failures, but that’s it. On the off-chance that’s what’s caused it, here’s that:
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Dorico 4
Exec="/home/matt/.local/share/applications/wine/Programs/Steinberg Dorico 4/run_dorico.sh"
Type=Application
StartupNotify=true
Path=/home/matt/.local/share/bottles/bottles/Dorico-4/dosdevices/c:/Program Files/Steinberg/Dorico4/
Icon=/home/matt/.local/share/applications/wine/Programs/Steinberg Dorico 4/dorico.png
StartupWMClass=dorico4.exe
and the shell script the Exec line points to is:
#!/bin/bash
WINEPREFIX=/home/matt/.local/share/bottles/bottles/Dorico-4/ wineboot -r
WINEPREFIX=/home/matt/.local/share/bottles/bottles/Dorico-4/ wine C:\\users\\matt\\AppData\\Roaming\\Microsoft\\Windows\\Start\ Menu\\Programs\\Steinberg\ Dorico\ 4\\Dorico\ 4.lnk
You may need to edit things slightly based on where you like to keep your desktop files and so forth, and you’ll need to either repoint the Icon line or put your own custom icon where it’s specified (I can’t stand the orange/brown/sienna color of the default icon, so I may have… improved it… slightly 
)
Absolutely great work! Dorico is the only reason why I am not moving (completely) to Linux. The day Dorico will run natively on a Raspberry Pi I will believe that heaven on earth exists! 
I tried both methods (for Dorico 3.5 and for Dorico 4) on Linux Mint, each with both the stable and development version of wine.
In case of Dorico 3.5 wine always crashes when I try to install the .msi installer. For Dorico 4 I had to stop the procedure as the sys-wine-7.19 never showed up in the list. I would love to see Dorico running on Linux, but I am only a musician with very basic understanding of this OS.
Ugh, that’s frustrating. Sorry to hear it hasn’t worked out for you. I’ve not ever tried any of this on Linux Mint. And sadly, I don’t ever seem to have much time these days to sit down to work out the kinks and come up with something simpler. It is very much something I want to get fixed, both for myself and the community, but I am also a lowly user myself–definitely not a Linux expert by any means. I know just enough to be almost helpful. And then there’s the whole trying to squeeze it all in around the full-time job thing… 
Not that this will be of much use, but how did you have Bottles installed? As a flatpak or native .deb? (is there even a .deb version? I’m fully out of the loop on that one) If flatpak, I’m not exactly sure what the solution is there. Presumably, the flatpak version would come with its own “system” version of wine installed. If not… hard to say how to proceed. Merely installing wine on the system might not be enough. You’d need to also get the application to see the system installation (part of which can be done using a program called flatseal, which manages flatpak permissions, so allowing Bottles access to user and system files is a start, but…), but I’m not sure past that if there’s a way to point Bottles to your system installation of wine. Maybe it would just see it, but maybe not. Google might have answers as to how to install additional versions of wine in the Bottles flatpak. I can definitely look into it at some point if I get a chance.
If you’ve got Bottles as a deb, I’d also be fully perplexed by that, since Bottles would/should just be able to see wine. Conundrum.
Alas though, I understand even if getting vanilla wine into Bottles (gross sentence if taken out of context) were to get you unstuck, there’s no guaranteeing that there wouldn’t be further snags down the road. The current state of things is 100% not ideal, and I’m as much bothered by that as anyone else. I do very much hope that I can find some time in the near future to remedy any of this, or potentially I could enlist some help from the wine community. As it is, if you’re on Linux and you need to use Dorico (and you’re not able to get it installed on Linux), I’ve found that the most convenient way is to run a virtual machine with a Windows 10 guest and install Dorico on there.
No promises about timelines, but I will certainly add some Linux Mint testing to my to-do list. And on all fronts, I’ll absolutely report back here when I have anything of note. Once again, apologies that nothing’s worked. I hope that won’t be the case for too long.
I had to disable the DXVK and the VKD3D settings to make it work (Step 7 from the guide). The installed wine version didn’t show up either as runner (in flatpak-version-Bottles the wine runner is supposed to be chosen from a list that is “baked” into the program, so it doesn’t even look after the version that is installed on the system.). So grab the installed wine version from /opt/yourwineversionname and copy that folder to /home/yourusername/.var/app/com.usebottles.bottles/data/bottles/runners/, at least these are the folder paths for KDE Neon.
Also I had to change to Windows 7 in the settings of the bottle, which was mentioned in the first guide but not in the most recent one.
Didn’t need to do the lutris step though. Good luck!
Only problem I have with flatpak-Bottles-Dorico that I either have no sound (when choosing an older wine version that is baked into Bottles) or the blue gradient inverts when hovering above some buttons (when choosing wine 7.22 which is also installed on my system). But the second glitch is not really a problem, so most of the time I’ll take wine 7.22 as runner…
@snakeeyes021 I don’t think there is a .deb version, I tried to convert a Fedora package of Bottles to .deb with no luck. Flatpak-version has indeed really long path names, but the advantage is that everyone should do equally good/bad with it, so if you ever come to make an installer script (which would be great obviously), the flatpak version is probably the most universal option.
(I realsie this almost seems off-topic, given the WINE discussions …)
Just ducking back in here after some time to revive memories of a similar debate I started in 2014:
Cubase for Linux
… where all the same tired platitudes were rolled out, over and over, with no basis in fact.
We must demand consumer choice (in the form of i.e. not being herded into a subscription model).
That choice must not be contingent upon surrendering personal privacy.
Thanks for your efforts. Running Win10 on a virtual machine is not really an option for me, my processor and RAM is limited - one of the reasons why I prefer Linux over Windows on this particular machine. I think I will use a laptop running Windows whenever I should need Dorico - which probably won’t be too often: Musescore was recently updated to version 4
dorico on linux would be such a dream. I just bought dorico last week; moving from lilypond. My mind is blown by how much I can get done without ever touching the mouse.
Unfortunately, I’m not really attracted to running anything in WINE since the last time I did that was 15 years ago and it was invariably a mess. I imagine it’s easier now, but the trauma persists lol.
I just wanna say briefly: There are a lot of people in here who just don’t get why linux is perfect for some of us. And that’s okay. But I personally consider it a shameful act to speak loudly on things you don’t understand. If you don’t understand why linux is attractive to some of us (or in my case, makes me very very happy) then go do your own thing. Be an adult and know when your words aren’t necessary.
to pivot to the real why’s of linux (for me, in no particularly order, and not comprehensively):
so, your smarmy “people who use linux don’t like it when things work” doesn’t apply. at all. go rant about something else you don’t understand in the privacy of your living space where noone can hear you.
I know Dorico probably won’t ever get flatpacked for linux, but a girl can dream. and I intend to. <3
If my killer-apps could be used on Linux natively, I would have been hopping distros twenty years ago.
I do not speak for Steinberg, but I think two things are at-play:
The Linux user-base is too small for Steinberg to make money off porting Dorico and its other products to Linux.
As others have said in the past, which distro should be ported? Ubuntu? System 76? We are talking about literally hundreds of distros with ever-changing versions and code. And even if Steinberg were to restrict itself to even just Ubuntu, the low user-base would kick in and not make it worth Steinberg’s while to make Dorico work natively on Linux.
Developmental difficulties and low user-base plague PC gaming, too. Apple is woefully weak here, and we still live in a Microsoft world. 
Been meaning to post an update on this for some time now (big breakthrough came around the time D5 was released), but life has been, as it usually is, a tad busy. I haven’t had time to sit down and do a full writeup on this yet, so stay tuned (and definitely reply or message if you’ve been patiently waiting for one, because I will happily put it on the front burner if so), but I’m pleased to report that the “new” Steinberg Activation Manager runs mostly just fine through WINE. It will authorize Dorico and it usually doesn’t eat your license! (And when it does, it will often decide that it was just kidding, lol. Note below on how to avoid this). Here’s the SparkNotes:
Ok, here are those .desktop files (not sure where these go depending on your OS, but I put mine in /home/matt/.local/share/applications/).
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Steinberg Activation Manager
Exec=bash -c 'URL="%u"; flatpak run --command=bottles-cli com.usebottles.bottles run -b THENAMEOFTHEBOTTLE -e "/home/YOURUSERNAME/.var/app/com.usebottles.bottles/data/bottles/bottles/THENAMEOFTHEBOTTLE/drive_c/Program Files/Steinberg/Activation Manager/SteinbergActivationManager.exe" --args "--redirect \"$URL\""'
Type=Application
NoDisplay=true
Terminal=true
MimeType=x-scheme-handler/net-steinberg-activation-manager;
and
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Steinberg Download Assistant
Exec=bash -c 'URL="%u"; flatpak run --command=bottles-cli com.usebottles.bottles run -b THENAMEOFTHEBOTTLE -e "/home/YOURUSERNAME/.var/app/com.usebottles.bottles/data/bottles/bottles/THENAMEOFTHEBOTTLE/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Steinberg/Download Assistant/Steinberg Download Assistant.exe" --args "\"$URL\""'
Type=Application
NoDisplay=true
Terminal=true
MimeType=x-scheme-handler/net-steinberg-sda;
What these two .desktop files do is properly route the login authorization from the web browser back to the specific app you’re using (this was the last blocker for getting those two apps working; took me essentially the entire lifespan of Dorico 4 to figure out ). Make sure you change THENAMEOFTHEBOTTLE and YOURUSERNAME to their proper values. You may need to update your application database once you’ve put the .desktop files in the right place depending on your OS (I think it’s just sudo update-desktop-database).
A few other tiny notes:
Alrighty, I think that’s all the big stuff. Like I said, I’ll try to do a more thorough writeup sometime in the near future, but that should be enough info to get up and running for hopefully a decent number of people. Enjoy!
I got a basic installation running with wine-staging on Arch - no HALion because of issues with installing MediaBay. NotePerformer works fine for now since I very rarely use the built-in VST, I’ll see if I can do more tweaking to get full functionality.
To fix the distorted mono audio, I installed wineasio from the AUR to my Dorico wineprefix and selected it as the audio device in Dorico. It hooks into your system’s JACK (pipewire in my case) and works perfectly as far as I can tell so far.
Dorico was initially complaining about not having a proper graphics driver, so I installed DXVK via winetricks and set the Dorico prefix to run with Vulkan as its renderer. This works great for Dorico, but breaks the Download Assistant. I’m working on a compromise solution to this problem.
edit: I redid the wine prefix to get rid of DXVK and it turns out Dorico is happy without it even if it complains initially. I also copied over some HALion files from a Windows install and that seemed to also fix the built-in VST.
Hi @Derrek ,
Pretty nice statement by Linus Torvalds. 
As a former Linux and BSD server system administrator I would agree with him on this Linux related topic.
Entering the Unix-like OSes area for Steinberg is a matter of time. It’s not about are they going to make their products available for such platforms, or not.
Would be better for them and for those of us who would like to move away from Windows, or MacOS if they make this step earlier, than later.
Still, I’m wondering why Linux is in the focus here, at all?!
I would recommend FreeBSD (or some of the FreeBSD based distros) as a better platform for porting Steinbergs product to. It also shares many common core elements with MacOS.
All BSD distros have two ways of installing apps:
Not to mention that FreeBSD is far more stable, secure, well organized and hardware resources lighter than any Linux. The Kernel could re-compiled far much easier than the Linux’ one. The support for the Steinberg products will be easier on FreeBSD, than on any Linux.
There are NVidia drivers for FreeBSD…
Just the Steinberg management should contact the original FreeBSD Project:
Or some more Desktop oriented distro:
The BSD distros like FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD (the last two used mainly as server OSes) sharing the same package management and ports system. Exactly the thing that Linus Torvalds pointing to, when talking about standardized Linux OS. Just OpenBSD and NetBSD are designed for server needs, even more security and ability to run on ancient hardware.
Still this is a pretty serious topic and we need to start discussion with the developers behind the products. We need to hear not about what is planned, or not, but their personal opinion about supporting FreeBSD, or Linux distro. What is possible, and what isn’t? Which platform would be the most appropriate for running their products on?
Best wishes,
Thurisaz
Out of curiosity, is that a D4 or D5 installation? I still haven’t been able to get 5 running (I’ve only just recently gotten to the splash screen, lol). Feels like a this rate I’ll always be one major version behind 
Hello,
I am grateful to have found this thread since I am on the market for a new laptop computer I would like to run only on Linux (no dual boot).
Dorico is indeed the only software I would lack on such system meant to work out of the studio…
Have you managed to run Dorico 5 these days?
TIA
TIA
I wouldn’t recommend relying on some kind of compatibility/emulation layer like Wine if you’re needing the software to be stable and reliable. Either use a different OS on the laptop computer (like Windows), or dual boot, or run a virtual machine with Windows or something for Dorico.
If Steinberg ever releases a Linux version of Dorico this may change. Since Qt is cross platform, I would assume this might be possible, but I suspect the hard part would be the Cubase Audio Engine which is separate and is Windows/Mac only.