There’s two aspects of it, one is the technical aspect (learning how to use relevant software and/or hardware) and the artistic aspect (how to make a good beat, melody, chord progression etc.). Both need to be learned, and both can be learned! TBH I’m not sure what I’d recommend to a complete beginner here, but learning a DAW (digital audio workstation) like Reaper or Ardour is a good start.

I’ve been active in the Linux music production world for like 5 years, and I haven’t seen much talk about LMMS. Last time I tried using it, I didn’t manage to get it working, but that was probably mostly because they had very little documentation on how to set up and use it. Might be different nowadays, or there might be more functions that are obvious to me because I have more experience with DAWs now. I used Ardour for a couple of years, which is also FOSS but well-documented and very powerful, but its workflow isn’t great for electronic music; I’d say its main audience are people who are recording physical instruments. I use Bitwig now, it’s the only “big”, commercial DAW with a proper, native Linux version; not FOSS, though. If you want to try Ardour, look up Unfa’s tutorials.

Once you learned the basics of your software, you can search up tutorials that are more about how to make a specific genre of music.

For linux I think one of the most professional and affordable digital audio workstations is reaper. But it does not really matter what you use. My music production at the moment lives on my mac. I have too many paid plugins i like to use and i could not be bothered to get everything to run on my linux machine.

To learn I would say just try to immitate/copy the music that you love. Listen carefully and try to make something similar. If you want to make a good beat, listen to a good beat that you like and try yourself. And do not worry if it sounds shit at first. Everyones first beats sound shit haha. If you do not know where to start just search for tutorials on youtube. But try to also explore things on your own. There is no set way to do any of this. If you find something that sounds cool to you, use it.

Also join a forum like newgrounds for example to share your work and discuss music production with people.

There are some great tutorials for beginners on youtube of how to make a beat.

As for software, your options will be more limited on Linux, but thankfully there’s some good ones available nowadays. Though one thing to note is that If you’re on a Debian based distro, you’ll need to make sure you download the pipewire-jack package and then add pw-jack to the start of your DAW’s executable to access the Pipewire-JACK backend, otherwise it’ll only work with the ALSA backend.

1. Reaper: A really solid and affordable DAW. It doesn’t have the most modern interface (mostly just noticeable in the settings menu), but it’s extremely versatile, stable, and has the biggest community of support out of any DAW out there, with tons of good youtube tutorials or written articles. The free trial is actually endless like WinRAR is, it’ll just nag you when you start it up for 5 seconds, but it’s the full version, and you can produce full songs in it. This is the DAW I would personally suggest trying.

2. Bitwig: This is a really visually polished DAW, and has first class linux support, but it can be a bit expensive, and the new 6.0 version is a little buggy, while the stable 5.x release lacks some of the really nice quality of life improvements in 6.0. It has a lot of features from Ableton Live, such as the ability to work with ‘clips’ of music that you can arrange freely. The company isn’t as chill IMO as Reaper, and they pulled some greedy stuff a while back that got the community angry at them, which I think they walked back, but I can’t trust them after that. It has different tiers ranging from $99, $200, or $400. The $99 version can’t effectively control hardware synths if you have any, since they restrict the use of Midi CC data. If you’re only using virtual synths, then the cheap version should work fine.

3. Renoise: This is a really powerful and polished DAW that uses the Tracker style of composing, much like was done on the Amiga or DOS back in the day. There’s a free trial, and if you end up liking that style of music making, it’s a pretty cheap DAW at $88.

4. Traction Waveform: This DAW recently added Linux support. I haven’t used it yet, but it’s completely free and quite polished looking. Most people report it being pretty nice, though community support will be more limited since not as many people use it.

5. Fender Studio Pro: Another DAW that recently added Linux support. It used to be called Studio One, but was traded around for a while, and now Fender owns it. It’s a bit more focused on guitars and comes with a lot of Guitar effects, but from what I can see is a fairly capable DAW that could be used for any type of music. It costs $199.

For the FLOSS DAWs, there’s:

1. Ardour: Usually available in your distro’s repo. It’s technically well made under the hood and very capable, but I personally found the UX to be… difficult to get used to, and there’s not many up-to-date tutorials for it, unfortunately. If you can jive with it, it’s a solid DAW.

2. Zrythm: A much more user-friendly DAW compared to Ardour, but not really usable at the moment. They’re totally re-writing it for a major 2.0 release, which is something to keep an eye on for the future, as it’s quite promising.

3. LMMS: A pretty decent FL studio clone, but unfortunately it still only supports VST2 instruments, which is highly limiting nowadays, so I’d probably skip it unless you’re okay with that limitation (they are working on VST3 support, but it’s taking a while).

Download FL Studio and search on YouTube for beat tutorials. That’s the fastest way in 2026.

Learning music theory and understanding chords, melody and song progression is more difficult but I found beats are enough to find the fun in the process and give you some momentum to learn those. I don’t have any great resources for those, unfortunately. You may want to buy a midi/USB keyboard just to have something physical to help learn, however.

Edit: I’m on Windows but it looks like WINE on Linux should run FL Studio without issue. I found this guide: https://jstaf.github.io/posts/flstudio-on-linux/

Learn by building/ something. I find that I organically retain more info than I would by rote memorization.

I’m also very much a beginner, but on Linux, you seem to have the choice between two open-source DAWs: LMMS and Ardour.

Ardour has more features, by quite a bit. Which basically tells you the rest of the story: Ardour is more capable to become the tool that you use long-term, i.e. even for more complex projects. But it’s also much more likely to overwhelm you right away.

Personally, for example, I have a knack for weird, changing time signatures, i.e. I might go from 5/4 time to 7/4 time to 3/2 time etc…
LMMS couldn’t really do that, when I dicked around with it about 2 years ago. You could change time signatures in the middle of the song, but it was only dynamic, so your notes didn’t get displayed in the different time signature until you triggered playback.
As a result, I felt kind of forced to learn Ardour …and then fucked off in a different direction anyways. DAWs generally just felt like they introduce a lot of complexity and aren’t really made for the kind of music I want to make. 🫠

Your mileage will obviously vary.