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.
Hey there! I’m an avid music producer and gamer.
I made the jump to bitwig while I was still using Windows in 2019, and made the full jump to Linux as my daily driver late last year.
My mint journey was Mint (Cinnamon) > Debian (KDE Plasma) > Garuda (Dr4g0niz3d KDE plasma)
I think mint was great and I was still able to do a fair amount of gaming on it and Cinnamon desktop environment is very similar to windows so it’s not too big of a jump.
Debian was fine - I wanted to use Plasma as the desktop environment because I wanted a touch customization for how I can set up windows, widgets, and different desktop panels. I had issues with some games on this though.7
I like Garuda but I would not recommend if you’re not too familiar with tinkering and troubleshooting. In hindsight I probably should have gone with Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE plasma as its desktop environment). I have experienced some odd bugs with the desktop environment and I think it has to do with how nvidia and Wayland play with one another.
I haven’t had a game that didn’t run, the only odd bug I’ve had is some games won’t recognize my new soundcard from bitwig.
using WINE and yabridge I’ve gotten all my plugins to work seamlessly as well - and that includes Omnisphere which is a beast on resources.
I was really fed up with the direction that windows has been heading for quite sometime.
TL;DR: I think mint or some Ubuntu distro would be a good fit for right now, and any future GPU upgrades consider something from AMD.