Fyi, Reaper and Bitwig both have excellent, native Linux support. If you're willing to re-learn a DAW, both of those are great choices. Reaper is by far the best mixing & mastering DAW out there, IMHO. Bitwig is great for composition and has awesome, intuitive modulation features, as well as great stock plugins and MPE support.

The part that takes energy and effort is making the switch.

I'm really familiar with Linux. I've been using it on and off since the days of Slackware. My work computer was Linux-only for several years.

But, even with that, it took weird driver issues with my GPU, combined with the impending death of Windows 10, combined with the ridiculous heavy handed Copilot BS on Windows to finally convince me to switch my main desktop PC to Linux.

It was just the momentum that was so hard to overcome. I knew what worked in Windows, and I knew what didn't. I had already found and installed all the programs I needed. My settings were all how I liked them. I knew the keyboard shortcuts. With Linux I didn't know what would work or what wouldn't. With Linux, there were a lot of things I'd need to install and set up, and I knew that was going to take some effort. But, worst were the unknown unknowns. I didn't know what was going to cause me problems, and didn't know if they were things I could resolve in a couple of hours or if they'd take weeks.

I'm glad I made the switch, and the overall maintenance load is much lower than it was in Windows. The frustration factor is 10x better. But, I did have to make a real effort to make the switch. There were a few weeks where it was pretty frustrating.

Basic install yes, getting all your favourite apps and network connectivity...well, it's much better than before, but still a short term pain.

Yeah, it was way less friction than I was expecting. It went smoother than some windows updates do (specifically the ones where they just reset settings to their shitty defaults).

I like Mint. Got two boxes. 1 bazzite, one Debian and one Arch for shitz and giggles.

Mint is wonderful though I am considering switching back to a system with GNOME instead of Cinnamon because the screen reader works better under GNOME.

I am thinking about giving NixOS another shot or at least going with an immutable system, but Mint is a great place to start your Linux journey, and hell, it's a great place to end your Linux journey if you don't give a shit about computers and just want the damn thing to work reliably.

I installed Bazzite, and I had a bit of trouble!

... Because I pulled out the USB halfway through the install! Like the world's biggest dumbass! Couldn't boot the computer at all! Oh no!

Then I stared at what I'd done for a while, sighed, rebooted and started again.

And it was easy as piss. Bazzite 10/10 for me.

AMD is better than NVidia anyway

Bazzite also has a better package management system. SteamOS is meant for gaming almost exclusively, whereas Bazzite is meant for both.

Both bazzite and CachyOS are built for computers and will likely work better for a laptop than SteamOS. And they both have gaming focused builds. I haven't tried Bazzite in a while, but CachyOS has easy to understand instructions on how to install their gaming package.