As a side note: PreSonus Studio One took the dive into Linux a few minor versions ago… so there are some companies managing the cross-over.
That’s a bit different though - Studio One is entirely built on a fairly modern framework, unlike Cubase/Nuendo, so it is theoretically easier for them to target an additional platform. It is a much newer codebase overall.
There would probably have to be a Linux Cubase version first to get a Dorico version for Linux, because you would need the audio engine on Linux, which means trying to make all sorts of ancient code work cross-platform on a third platform it was never intended for.
I agree. I was just making the observation (irrespective of difficulty regarding legacy code base) that there is a relatively big-named audio software shop stepping into the linux world.
Refer to the Cubase forum category to see the endless and completely futile discussion about Cubase on Linux. The executive take away is that it is never going to happen. Same with Adobe, darn it.
I think they would build support for Linux if there was enough demand for it. The problem is that there isn’t enough demand, and I can’t see this changing anytime soon. Pretty much everybody who does music/audio professionally uses MacOS or Windows. Very few use Linux because the sample libraries, plugins, etc. aren’t available for the platform. You would have to limit yourself to what is available on the platform, and that isn’t much.
So it’s mostly hobbyists who use Linux for music composition/production, because they don’t care if their finished product can’t compete with others since they are just doing it for fun. Of those hobbyists, a sizable number are opposed to any kind of proprietary software to begin with and want everything open source. The people who are opposed to paying for proprietary software aren’t likely to want to buy Cubase on Linux, and that leaves mostly the small group of hobbyists who aren’t opposed to proprietary software. That’s probably not nearly a big enough market to recoup the development costs of porting it.
I was deep in the linux audio world for much of the 2000s. The only thing that kept me migrating back to Windows/Mac was the complete lack of sampled instruments. I believe that hole exists to this day. Ardour is a fully capable DAW, Muse, and my favorite, Lilypond, are also fully capable and there are a many “pro” tools available in that environment and many “pro” users utilizing them in a professional capacity, but until Vienna, Eastwest, Native, et al. offer Linux builds of VSTIs, there is little to offer composers, arrangers or engravers who utilize these sample libraries in any capacity.
… so it isn’t a matter of just porting a single application, but rather an entire ecosystem (think Halion, Iconica, Groove etc.). Even if Dorico were available on Linux, I wouldn’t use it because none of my sample libraries are available.
I would tend to agree with @mducharme that if you need stability or reliability (or Dorico 5 for that matter), the current state of Dorico on Linux is not for you. I’m sad to say there’s been more or less no movement in getting Dorico 5 running (for me at least; I don’t know what version of it @dfisherman is running on Arch).
For some context, there are a couple of problems that have been less than surmountable. The first is that sometimes Wine is just not capable of running a piece of Windows software (because of unimplemented DLLs, bugs, or the like). Last I checked that was the case with D5, and as ambitious as I was in one of my previous posts, it’s not something I’ve had time to look into directly myself (subsequently the solution there ends up being to simply wait and hope that some version of Wine, Proton, or other Wine-based compatibility layer ends up with the necessary fixes or patches in one of its versions). However…
Secondly, merely keeping an already working installation in good working order is not always a given. Whenever there are even minor changes in one piece of software in the stack, e.g. Wine, Bottles (the Wine prefix manager), Dorico, various OS components, etc. etc., things can break without any clear reason why, and it’s not always fixable; I’ve had installations “go bad” despite not touching them that I could never get working again. It’s always been my intention to get something set in stone and reproducible, like a Bottles config or something, but I never got things to a satisfactory enough state that warranted distribution in the first place (a quick scan of this thread will yield quite a few “hey, I got this working, here’s the rough steps, better instructions coming soon” type updates without the “better instructions” ever coming 
). Ultimately, I think the only way to get something working that stays working would be to take pretty drastic measures and containerize already working installations, rebuilding and redistributing them every time a new version of Dorico comes out. For ease of use, you’d need to go with flatpak or appimage or something (and that would be predicated on even getting permission from Steinberg to do so in the first place since you’re redistributing at that point, not just tutorial-ing).
Long story short, I just don’t see it happening any time soon or even necessarily at some distant point in the future. Every once in a while, I throw several hours, an afternoon, or an evening at it (that is, both Dorico 5 AND just trying to get things running again when they’ve stopped), but I don’t make fast enough progress that warrants thinking anything is on the horizon. I still personally plan on getting it to work, but I guess I’m just saying you shouldn’t make any of your own plans based on mine. Ironic aside, running Dorico in Wine actually works pretty well; it’s installing and signing in to activate it that are the hard part. Doable, but hard.
Best advice I can give is to go with a virtual machine or grab yourself a spare Windows machine that’s just for Dorico. I do both: I’ve got a nice little custom “D” icon that starts up a virtual machine on my big beefy home Fedora box, and then I’ve got a tiny little Dell Latitude 2-in-1 tablet/laptop thing that fits in my backpack even with other laptops already in there; despite/besides running Windows, it runs more or less the same suite of open source software apps that I run on the rest of my machines… just plus Dorico. Good luck!
With estimated 200 million users plus about to be punched into the outer darkness of no updates or security patches next October by Microsoft (somebody explain to me why Microsoft wants to smash apart half its user base…) many people are looking to move to Apple or Linux. But so many can’t move to Linux because Adobe refuses to even consider despite years of customer pleading and it appears Steinberg is the same.
As an aside, although Linux is open source, plenty of people are happy to pay for high quality commercial apps on Linux (I don’t have hard proof of this, but people do buy Studio one and Bitwig for example). So I do not accept that there is a loss of income from running on Linux.
Come on Mr Steinberg, port to Linux (because I am not going back to a decade of Lilypond).
As another comment, partly irrelevant here, vendors complain Linux only has 4% desktop market share. But it is interesting to consider that almost all ISPs and hosting providers all run Linux servers, to a very high percentage. This is not relevant to desktop applications but it is relevant to the credibility of Linux as a very mature OS (30 years now).
[I’m not talking about Wine here. but a native port.]
And here’s a hint Steinberg: Qt runs great on Linux.
You think that people upset about MS ending support for OSes that are more than a decade old will move to… Apple? 
You don’t think they’ll just get a new PC?
Ubuntu “Long-Term Support” is only 5 years, from what I can see.
Windows 10 was released in July 2015, so it will be more then ten years of support for this OS.
In comparison to Apple, the currently supported MacOS release is Ventura (MacOS 13) and that was released on June 2022, so everything before that has no support from Apple.
Yes, but that doesn’t help if there are no instruments and plugins.
I honestly don’t know what they will do.
The ecosystem will develop.
Dorico does not have plugins, so what do you mean?
I observe that all of u-he’s plugins are available on Linux, so it is entirely possibly for makers to do this.
Of course, this forum topic will go on forever - until the cows come home, or Dorico ports!
And as aside. whjle Dorico has playback it is primarily an engraving program. I’d happily buy it on Linux even if it had no playback (but that’s just me). Dorico Engraver Pro for Linux? There you go Steinberg. you can have the name for free. 
i am not optimistic this will happen
it would happen if there was a very large market share for linux users
as a rule of thumb people are interested in macos, windows and ipados
Dorico comes with Instruments like HALion Sonic and Sounds Like Iconica Sketch, etc. There are tons of other plugins out there and just a tiny part on Linux.
I would not buy it.
Sure, but everyone has their own use case.
I hope in the future Steinberg will develop versions of their software to run natively on Linux systems. With Microsofts focus on making everything web based, I get a nervous tick. We are seeing a global rise in cyberattacks, taking down networks and more. At the moment the takedowns haven’t been that long, but what if a big one happens?
I would be more comfortable and feel a whole lot safer, knowing that my data is saved on my computer and backed up on my NAS. And that I would be able to use the software I’ve paid for without an internet connection.
AFAIK at this moment no active internet connection is needed to use Dorico.
Just when you want to transfer your license to a different computer.
I’m not suggesting it’s a bad thing…it’s actually pretty cool, but…the Linux world has always been extremely web based. Web and networking stuff is what it does best. It’s the webbiest web serving and web reliant OS of them all. Every other app requires another 23 ‘other apps/libraries’ be installed from somewhere on the web, and it’s all created and maintained by lots of different folks all over the web. Pick almost any app desktop, gui, dev-kit, driver, browser, protocol, or even file format, and you can find a dozen different halfway developed webby forks all over the web.
There is nothing about Windows or Mac OS preventing this. It is true that many classes of devices (plenty of them happen to run on Linux or Android) these days skimp on physical storage to make it cheaper/smaller/lighter, but plenty of device classes still exist that can be packed with loads of local storage and backup.
Smaller, less expensive classes of devices, regardless of the ‘kernel and supporting OS’ are going to be aimed at web and cloud users in the first place. I.E. Every Fed Ex driver in the country can carry a small, inexpensive device and tie in to the same central database, all at the same time. Everybody on the board of directors can easily share a database, spreadsheet, and other kinds of documents.
I agree, and that’s how it was with Steinberg for a long time. People complained about the dongles forever (especially since portable computing became an affordable reality). Users lobbied hard for a long time to say goodbye to the dongle. The trade off was not having to worry about maintaining another piece of hardware, and the ability to use the same license on a few different machines easily.
Once activated, Dorico can go for a while without needing to call home. Thing is, updates and such come around frequently enough that you’ll want to go online, run SDA, and get everything up to date anyway.
Yes, with most commercial software there are risks that someday it just won’t work anymore. I still have some old 32bit machines in service, and it’s a royal PITA to keep them working (even with a Linux distro replacing Windows).
This is true, in the past it’s been way too easy for a user to bypass security and install malicious software. Security is much tighter now, but people complain loudly about this and go online bitching that they can’t install their favorite piece of free/malicious software. As much as half the user questions out there on modern Windows releases are related how to ‘disable’ all the security stuff. First thing they do is disable security and go put that stupid shopping cart thing back on the PC. Then the phishers call.
I think the number 1 ‘complaint’ about Windows 11 is that a TPM chip of some kind is now an official requirement to run the OS. People have found away around it for now, but the marketplace is traditionally pretty HOSTILE anytime security features are ‘strong armed’ onto the public. TPM is one of the most significant security precautions in a long time. Any OS that takes advantage of it is much more secure, and it also has the potential to leave more fingerprints out there for authorities to ‘track and nail’ malicious users. Hackers are the leading campaigners against it! It makes it harder for them to cover their tracks as they tunnel around through the various compromised systems of unsuspecting users.
So, is ‘Microsoft Windows’ always the problem? Has it been Microsoft ‘servers’ that went down? Are you positive it didn’t involve servers running stuff other than a Microsoft OS?
Are you sure it wasn’t a simple matter of some meth-heads digging up some copper somewhere and taking out user access to a crucial tower or dish in a time and place where there’s not a good enough backup route to handle ‘all’ of the usual traffic it normally does (they’ll still prioritize and reroute more mission critical stuff, and that kind of priority is ‘expensive’ to get)? Where I live that kind of mess happens way too often. People dig up copper and boom, the phone towers and internet is out for a week. Some have even been climbing the cell towers and ripping out anything they think they can melt-down and sell. So, now companies have to spend a lot more on security for that infrastructure, and they pass the expense on to us.
Hackers find and exploit weaknesses in any ‘system’. Even when the technology itself is pretty darn bullet proof, there are still people around it and hackers know this. It can even be through things like the firmware in radios (WAN/BT)/routers/hubs/printers/other-devices (Windows users complain all the time about needing signed drivers…having to manually go in and disable security to use more ‘free webby software’ like they can with a Linux distro).
Quite often it requires a ‘person’ on the ‘inside’ with the right ‘keys-to-the-kingdom’ to either intentionally, or accidentally open the door. It’s easier to get spies/cameras/bugs/bribes/extortionists/blackmailers/etc. in a place and snoop the passwords over a sysop’s shoulder than it is to break all those levels of security, and hackers do plenty of that kind of thing.
Once activated, it can go forever without having to call home. Although I’m not sure this holds in the case of major hardware changes to the system in question (ex. if you took the hard drive out from an old computer and moved it to a new one).
There is also the availability for “Offline Activation”.