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.
If you're not in a position to change your workflow and deal with new stuff, you can simply use windows 10 lts for a longer support and postpone the decision between linux and windows 11.
Personally, I'd recommend trying linux some day. It can drain some free time at first, but in the long run, you will find yourself dealing with much less bullshit than windows, and actually saving time in your life. Some linux users like to make things complicated and pass their time tinkering with the system, so it passes an image of linux being like that, but if you run a simple and stable distro, things will work nicely and will rarely require your time. I'm running fedora for a few years, and my laptop became so boring. I just use it for my work and hobbies, and turn it off when done. No bullshit.