In short: I jumped on Mint some months ago and it just works.
The first time I jumped on Linux, I got burned haaard. I picked openSUSE, and I’m not sure if my hardware was crap or that distro is finicky, but nothing worked and it was just issue on issue on issue and I hated it.
Fast forward a couple years and Mint is nothing like that. It worked as it should out of the box and the only real tinkering I had to do was update the driver for my GPU manually because it was still so new.
Sure, some things work differently, but it’s not too complicated to get into.
You can enable automatic software updates and configure the built-in backup program Timeshift, so you can revert the system to a previous snapshot if ever something should go real wrong.
But with all that said, I see that neither Cakewalk or Ableton are easy installs, as they’re not officially supported on Linux. Will require some tinkering to get working. So maybe for that reason only Win11 would be the better choice. Or try dual booting to get a feel for it, best of both worlds.
Aaaw maaaan :(