Best Lighting Design Software for Linux

LWA Light Controleur is locally installed DMX lighting-control software for Windows, macOS and Linux, designed for bands, DJs, lighting technicians, venues and event production teams. Its setup wizard builds a virtual console from selected lighting fixtures, with faders, color controls, PAR effects, moving-head movements and an XY pad. Audio Live can synchronize lighting to music, and the software supports MIDI Clock, MTC and Pro DJ Link, with output through DMX-USB interfaces, Art-Net or sACN. It includes a fixture library and editor, support for about 40 MIDI controllers, a browser-based phone or tablet remote, and LWA Vision 3D stage visualization. The Pro plan adds video mapping and Soundtrack Show for programming a show to prerecorded music. Shows and presets are saved locally, and the software can run without an internet connection. It supports live entertainment and event-lighting workflows, from automated operation and fixture programming to venue and façade shows.

Rayfront is a platform-independent toolkit that provides a graphical user interface to the lighting simulation software Radiance. It can be operated as an extension to Autocad or Intellicad, together with the 3Dsolar building modeller, or as a standalone program. Radiance is the industry standard raytracing engine for physically correct lighting simulations (see comparisons). While Radiance can be downloaded for free from LBNL, only a toolbox such as Rayfront enables people like you and me to use it effectively on desktop computers and in your local network. You can also use Rayfront together with many other CAD and modelling programs, as it reads all DXF files, and translators for a large number of other data formats are included. Just select the free or commercial geometry modeler of your preference, and there will be a way to use it's output data with Rayfront.