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.
Your win10 computer doesn’t get nuked from orbit after magic date. Others pointed out music software is not portable enough.
I got a new win11 computer with space for linux. Can remote desktop (free options) into old computer. This is more convenient than dual booting. If you don’t use internet or install new software, not much will break on it. My old computer didn’t work for linux because of waking from sleep issues. My new computer is $450usd minipc 7840hs dual lan, 2 usb4 ports, that allows me to expand from 3 to 4 monitors with a desk edge portable touchscreen usb monitor. win11 is not that bad because it allows for a single task bar on the front monitor. The iGPU is a big upgrade over 1650super I had, and 32gb/1gb nvme is also an upgrade that gives me the room to install linux. I haven’t yet.
Linux is pretty easy for software installs. Mint is a good choice, because google will have the most hits. There are some distros that come with closed GPU drivers, but that is not particularly difficult to do yourself. win11 on a new computer can be ok, though, but I have had issues with every monitor waking from sleep every time (unplug/replug solution), or sleep command not lasting more than 3 minutes. Boot time is much quicker on new computer though, so shutdown not as painful. But if sleep worked flawlessly on this one in linux, would be good reason to go with.