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.
normally id say “linux is free, there’s no harm in giving it a go”, but between your lack of free time, nvidia graphics card, dependence on proprietary software, and previous experience (and slight distain) for linux i’d say just go with win 11.
there may be a way to get your music software to work in linux, but youll likely need to mess around with wine configs and it may never actualoy work right.
if you are interested ever, fire up a vm and play around with linux to get comfortable with it. maybe when win11 reaches eol (or even before) you’ll want to make the switch.
none of this is said to scare you away from linux. searching for drivers is rarely a thing in linux. there are built in tools in most distros to deal with graphics drivers, but apart from that, given the open source nature of linux, everything else is just handled by kernel modules and are basically seamless unless you have some weird proprietary hardware. linux is fairly easy to use these days, but there is quite a bit of a learning curve because it is a fundamentally different os than windows, and the way you solve problems is very different.
I’ve wanted to be able to spend the time to jump to Linux for a while but the sex trophy demands attention. Maybe when I can leave him alone without fear of strangling himself on a stray wife hair or less, i could look into it. I’ve also thought about just dropping another 2-3K on another future thinking machine and using my current for Linux experimentation. Maybe I start the crotch goblin on Linux with this machine after I buy new and transfer everything to a new one.
Alternatively, consider the following:
Save your money. Kids are expensive. Dual boot or use a live ISO and toy around with Linux mint. Keep Windows 11. You got a lot on your plate. I loathe saying this but use windows for the important stuff and get your Linux thrill from a dual boot or side project. Linux can be full time but until you can jump all in you seem to want backup from others to tell you to go the sane/safe route for now.
This is actually a pretty good idea considering your current specs may not actually be able to support Windows 11. It’s a little unclear whether you’ll be able to get it running because while your motherboard meets the TPM 2.0 requirement, your CPU is technically listed as not being supported.
It won’t officially work, but it’s not too hard to get it going. I just moved a similar box to 24H2 LTSC.
OP, you’ll probably need to run “setup.exe /product server”, or follow a recent guide. You’ll also need to do this for every major upgrade (i.e. yearly)
I agree though with the plan to use this as a test ground. I also recently upgraded a Lubuntu system to similar specs, and it runs pretty smoothly. But learning Linux takes a lot of time they don’t have.
Could also just setup a bootable Linux USB and run his system from that