Really want an honest answer here and not a full blown Linux cult answer.
I'm a new dad (kid is 1.5months old) who used to game pretty hard and do music production in cakewalk and ableton, but the crotch goblin is getting in the way. With windows 10 support coming to an end, I'm faced with a choice to either jump on the Linux train or take the safe way out and eat win11. Please keep in mind that I run a super clean machine (no porn (that's what mobile is for) or tormenting or anything sketch) and have no intention of doing anything unclean. I have a lot of music prod data that I don't want fucked and a steam library that I want access to but don't really care about the data associated with them (saves, profiles...i could care less). So it's really my ableton and Cakewalk files I want to keep. There was a time I college 2010-2011 where I borrowed a CS majors Ubuntu laptop for a few months to just get work done (just webbrowsing and office app stuff). Shit was annoying and difficult to understand but I was able to make it work-ish.
I'm savvy enough where I can adult Lego a PC together but struggle when it comes to software and troubleshooting and really don't have the time for that stuff.
Basically, I'm not in the position right now to learn a distro and struggle around with all that crap and I need to keep my music shit. I also despise Microsoft and AI in general but I'm perfectly fine just eating it for simplicity. Is there a low effort Linux solution to my situation? Looking for automatic updates where I just click "express install i don't fucking care" and im not searching for drivers every day.
My build is basically what's shown below minus the SLI'd 1080s and with 32gbDDR4. Any upgrade apart from the gpu would essentially mean a wholesale at this point. I used the 2nd card to build my wife a pc since SLI is effectively useless now.
Linux for gaming is easy. For the most part it’s plug and play. I’m on an AMD CPU and an NVidia GPU, and I even do VR in Linux.
As someone who does a decent amount of stuff with DAWs; VSTs are tricky. You might be able to create a similar workflow to what your used to, and many plugins might work decently well, but for me at least it was a lot of fiddling about and it isn’t as smooth as I’d like. My comfort compressor works, but the UI doesn’t render.
I’ve gotten my music workflow to work alright, but it’s wonky enough that I don’t do it as much anymore. Thinking about trying to start over with a new DAW and whatnot.
If privacy is a concern there’s a decent amount of stuff you can do to strip down Windows 11.
What screws me is the DRM iLock software. I've tried running Reaper in Wine/Bottles but the playback with guitar is no longer realtime due to the emulation/translation going on.
I just switched to an AxeFx FM9 so I don't need realtime playback as much but I can't use any of my Neural DSP plugins.
Let me know if you've found workarounds.
Yabridge might help for the plugins, it's kinda hit and miss though.