Hey David!

Thank you for your comments!

"I listened to Droning 300 today and the instruments sounded just like the ones my friend uses in his FL Studio songs."

You mean "Healing Fountain"? Healing Fountain is all DSP and samples that I created myself. There is a glissando that uses some sort of marimba, but even the "laser" sound is the sound that I created myself from scratch using 3xOSC synth.

In general, if you avoid using exactly the same presets, I think it's very difficult to gauge what you use to create music. If you would go back to my droning project, I doubt that in most cases you can tell when I used FL Studio and when I used my Linux Audio setup.

"getting good sound and high quality mixing required tools that are simply unavailable on Linux today.

Really?"

Unfortunately.

I think I won't make a claim that it is totally impossible, but it's definitely not trivial. I have produced hundreds of tunes with Linux Audio and explored loads of tools during that time, but I couldn't even find an EQ that would work well for me. There is one EQ product that seems ok, but for me it was unstable and kept crashing my projects.

Additionally, high quality plugins matter, just like high quality equipment matters. I was using ZynReverb while on Linux and it created all sorts of problems for me. The quality of my mixes has changed dramatically when I switched to Valhalla, because it's reverb made by a company that put a decade into perfecting it. They made sure, for example, that it would produce a smoother sound, heal resonating frequencies, etc. They have a description of this on their website and a YouTube channel too.