

I read the drama in Twitter and PR.
While Bottles maintainer does not do a great job to politely prove the point of the patch to disable Bottles outside of sandboxed environments, he is not required to be a diplomat as mainter (though it would be better, of course) and Bottles decision makes total sense - they asked to not package their software long ago as they drown in bugs and supporting non predictable environment with unknown dependencies creates too many problems for them. I can understand that, development is hard as it is, unpredictability of environment multiplies this complexity.
They are maintainers and they do what they can to support the project, so removing donate button while packaging software done by others (who asked not to do it) is a childish move. Yes it’s FOSS, but morally it sounds a bit wrong.
We ask too much of mainters when it comes to soft skills, not all of us got these, but also not all of us are FOSS maintainers. And I think we should stop asking everyone to possess all skills in the world and react on someone’s rudeness as we are 5 (not saying we shouldn’t improve).
I am a hobbyist and was using ableton live before. As mentioned by others, unless you dual boot - try bitwig studio for similar experience. It is from people who worked in ableton. Have a trial, pirate if can’t afford now.
Foss alternative - ardour is great, but you will have to bring your own plug in suit.
Yabridge tool can help you to run windows vsts on Linux, but not everything works. And beware - it does not work with flatpak version Bitwig, at least it did not.