Linux operating systems may not yet be the dominant choice for audio and music production workstations, but over time the emergence of sophisticated free and open source sound server software and music and audio production applications (sound and notation editors, digital audio workstations, plugins, music trackers and software synthesizers) has made the Linux desktop a viable and dynamic environment for making music. Even some popular proprietary software now runs on Linux desktops and benefits from this underlying free software ecosystem. We will explore the music production tools and workflows available to the Linux desktop user and conclude with a demonstration of signal processing and software synthesis in a Linux environment.

Nix is a package manager that introduced a novel approach to resolving dependencies, creating reproducible builds, and isolating conflicting package versions. Nix packages are defined in a declarative, functional, domain-specific programming language. They are stored in separate directory structures indexed by a cryptographic build hash, and injected into the runtime environment as needed using symbolic links. Nix forms the core of the NixOS Linux distribution, and inspired a similar GNU project called Guix using the Guile Scheme language. The innovations of Nix cause some challenges for software packagers used to producing more traditional RPMs or Debian packages, but Nix packaging also shares some commonalities with the software packaging process for desktop container platforms like Flatpak or Snap. This talk will present simple techniques for packaging software for Nix.