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.
I think you could still use that music software on Windows 10. I'm not sure when they'll cut off support for outdated operating systems but I don't think many would jump ahead of Microsoft. Windows 10 being unsupported doesn't mean that much if the software you use is trusted and you have a disaster recovery plan.
It's important to have a solid backup policy in place for any data you don't want to lose. Regardless of whether you're on Windows 11 or Windows XP. If you want to keep using Windows 10, you can. Just gotta only install trusted software and use a browser that is getting security updates for Windows 10 (so not Edge, don't know which others will be fine). You can watch porn on it too, porn sites are only as dangerous as your browser is insecure.
Now, the question of gaming. Dual-booting into Bazzite should meet your needs (I've never used it) but the question is how to keep it away from Windows 10. I live booted into a system with Windows 11 installed and could easily view and modify all the contents. Any malware that gets through Steam's and Linux's protections could easily install ransomware and cookie-stealers on Windows 11. This is true just as much for running the games natively on Windows 11.
Seperate devices would solve the issue, but that'd be a waste. Security in computing really needs SO much work. There are so many levels to this. If your security posture is relaxed enough you can just hope no malware gets through Steam's checks and onto Bazzite, or into any of Bazzite's dependencies. With meltdown and spectre I'm failing to imagine how I could keep Windows 10 or 11 safe from malware from gaming beyond Steam's protections.
TLDR: Stick to Windows 10, install trusted software only and keep backups, dual-boot Bazzite for games, hope Steam catches any game malware I guess.