I notice there are only a couple replies here that have experience with music production. Obviously core desktop stuff works great, gaming is pretty universally fixed, but music production is a different story.

I have extensive experience with linux and music production. You can use yabridge to run Windows VSTs. However, they can be extremely fussy with graphics compatibility. I estimate that I couldn't manage to get about 20% of my plugins to work despite hours upon hours of troubleshooting. This is coming from a Linux-native software developer. If you're just learning Linux, you could be in a world of pain.

I'm sure folks out there have gotten all of it working individually, but I doubt anyone has your exact setup working perfectly.

Ableton and FL Studio will have to be ran through Wine. I experienced major performance issues with FL Studio before switching to Bitwig.

Linux is great. But the music production industry is not kind to it. If you're cool with being a linux music producer you'll have to accept that some things just will not work well. But if you want 100% access to everything you're used to, stick with Windows.

"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."

If you don't want to have to learn anything new, then switching your OS to something you don't know how to use is a stupid idea.

the crotch goblin

you’re disgusting

I hope you mean torrenting and not tormenting 😸

Just install Linux on an external SSD and test it.

I started with a dual boot. Very easy to do, if you have two hard drives. I have landed on Bazzite because I just game and watch movies at home. It does those things very well.

I use Windows 11 for work and honestly don't know why so many folks complain about it. I like working in it better than 10.

The forced Microsoft login is absolutely a valid privacy concern - I get that. The copilot integration is annoying and not helpful but can be turned off. The general UI and compatibility is pretty good. I'd just go ahead and upgrade to 11.

I had my first kid a little over 2 years ago, and my interest in twiddling with my OS plummeted. I use Linux, and it's great for what I do, but I don't do any sound stuff. I bet you could do it but that there'd be a lot of twiddling with your OS.

I use my desktop primarily to play online shooters, so I don't see Linux really being an option in the timeframe I have to decide. If Proton/Bazzite/whatever gets the anti-cheat shit for games like Call of Duty and Battlefield together by mid-October, I'll probably do an about face. But as of now, it just doesn't make sense to make it so I can't use an expensive thing for its intended purpose just to stick it to the man or whatever.

Not the exact answer you’re looking for, but a $500 Mac mini would be a fantastic solution. That or an entry level MacBook Air.

I run Linux on my desktop for most things but all my music production is done on MacBooks. If you want a turn key solution, this is the way.

Every vst, midi device and mixing console I have just works. Well worth the sub $1000 investment.

Hell, my touring setup runs off a 8 year old MacBook Pro you could likely pick up for under $400.

For music production on a hobby level? Linux is not what you want.

The VST availability is abysmal. For a DAW, you can choose between Reaper and Ardour. Both are reasonably good, but without decent third party VSTs you’ll suffer. You won’t get iLok working, you won’t get any commercial plugins working. Your old project files won’t open.

Now, if you are exclusively working with Airwindows plugins (look it up!) in Reaper, you could get away with a Linux migration. Cakewalk and Ableton? Not a chance in hell.

Go buy a cheap used 16GB M1 Mac Mini. Music production stuff ”just works”. Given your config, looks like that could be within budget. Or upgrade your old machine to Windows 11, pick your poison.

You have a 1.5 mo old. You don't have time. Be a dad. Be a husband. Be a hobbyist.

Take the easy route now. Come back when your kid and family are in a flow state.

Of note: Microsoft is offering an extended support program for Windows 10 consumers. It's $30, or free if you opt in to Windows Backup, or you can buy it with Microsoft Rewards points. I would see if you have any of those points and go that route. It means you can delay 11 safely for another year.

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.

The problem will likely be the warped perception of "low effort" users like you have, that I went in detail on here

This is indicated by phrases like these:

struggle around with all that crap and I need to keep my music shit

Which translate to me as "I don't want to learn or change a thing, so tell me how I change the most fundamental part of my computing without doing that".

As I wrote in the comment linked above, with an attitude like that you'd have a significantly harder time than some non-techy person who just wants to have a system that "just works" without preconceptions, not bother with the technical details, but is entirely open to using new programs and doing things differently, as long as they work reliably.

In your case, I'd say stick to Microsoft until you get your mindset and priorities straight. Because then you'd have an easy time without much tinkering at all. But as it stands I think you'd be setting yourself up for misery and failure.

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.

No idea about Cakewalk etc but your Steam games will almost all be fine and Linux is honestly great right now and always getting better.

Having used Linux Mint, Windows 10, and Windows 11, I can honestly say that Win10 is okay and Win11 is annoying dogshit. I'd recommend taking the Linux plunge of course, but if you're desperate for Windows I think paid extended support for 10 might be a thing?

But like I said 11 is dogshit and there's no time like the present to just grab 3-4 USB sticks at Microcenter, download a bunch of ISOs and Rufus or Balena Etcher, and just dick around. Linux Mint with Cinnamon or KDE will probably give you one of the slickest Windows-like experiences OOTB. Only recommendation: some wifi cards (with certain chips, I forget which) in my experience have required me to go hunt down a driver, so check reviews for any card you're looking at to see if people report it working out of the box.

If you move to Linux, you gotta be committed. I didn't learn Linux until I said "fuck it" and forced myself to use it exclusively.

You will run into problems. You'll have some days where you'll spend 10hrs fixing something that no other person on the entire planet has encountered before, only to realize you needed to type in 1 very simple command to fix it.

As much as people hate AI, it can help with Linux troubleshooting. There's also wikis and manpages.

If you switch at all, pick something that won't break. Debian will run on your hardware just fine. You won't have the latest and greatest packages, and as a newbie you DO NOT WANT the latest and greatest.

Nvidia drivers are a hassle, be prepared.

If all that sounds doable, send it.

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.

Really want an honest answer here and not a full blown Linux cult answer.

And so you ask in a linux community...

Go ahead and update to the newest spyware. 🤷‍♂️

Debian 13 comes out in a week or so. I have 1 fewer corporation spying on me.

If you want to dip your feet in without making any permanent decisions, try using a virtual machine or a live USB.

The virtual machine is effectively no risk but slightly slower. The live USB gives you a more realistic experience (except for boot times) but it is possible to erase your data if you miss the several warning messages and press the "I know what I'm doing, proceed anyway" button.

If you feel like Linux could work but you're not ready to fully commit, you can dualboot. I had both Windows and Linux for 2-3 years before I was comfortable enough to not boot Windows.

My personal preference is Linux Mint because it looks and feels very similar to Windows (I'm currently running LMDE). Any distro with KDE should also feel fairly familiar. Bazzite is more designed around gaming, but should still be adequate for most of your needs. It does have the reputation of being unbreakable.

Here's a dad's reply in a similar place - Win 11 is fine. I put it off for a very long time and just upgraded a couple weeks ago. It hasn't really been an impact.

Is Linux better? Yes. Does win 11 just work without too much fuss? Yes.

I still have Linux on many machines in my house except for my gaming rig, just because I don't want to have to break it and spend time refreshing it because my Linux skills aren't up to par. I have a full time job and young kids and don't have as much tinkering time as I used to.

That being said, I'm migrating ALL machines that aren't compatible with win 11 to Linux to avoid tossing them in a landfill like many will do, like my son's gaming PC.

just buy an extra ssd (i'd recommend 200 gigs at least, but if you're gaming, obvs more space is needed), and install linux mint or pop os on it. imo pop is easier, but mint is more windows-like
set your bios to boot from the new ssd, and make sure you install everything on the same drive
and just keep the windows install, so if you need it or linux is too hard, you can go back easily
i think you have physical space for several more sata drives, so if you need even more space you can get a larger regular hdd, for linux stuff

fyi, while most games will happily run on linux, but you can't use the same steam library folder, i've tried lol, so take that into consideration (however other loaders, like heroic launcher and lutris can run stuff installed on a windows partition, as long as the prefix is on a linux one. technically i guess you could use drm free steam installs too, but i'm already getting into the weeds, for simplicity's sake, just use a separate drive)

you can use ntfs (windows) partitions, for example i use two for downloads, movies, music and other platform agnostic stuff

i'd be happy to help if you need it

Man, you're basically saying "I want to move to a new country, but I don't want to lose any of my friends, I can't change my job, I don't want to learn a new language, I want to bring all my furniture and appliances with me, and we just had a new baby a month ago so I'm sleep deprived and don't have any spare time. How do I do it?"

If you're going to have to change OS anyway you might as well try Linux first. I'm doing a trial run on Bazzite and so far has gone pretty smoothly with the gaming stuff. There's other stuff I'm having to figure out but I'm pretty optimistic that I will not be putting Win 11 on my desktop.

I don't know what all these doomsayers are doing. I installed Bazzite and it just worked. I decided I didn't want an immutable system so I switched to Garuda, and it just worked. I have Nvidia and didn't have to do anything extra.

I went the other way, just installed LMDE and it all worked (AMD system) Then didn't use stuff that didn't work. Steam.worked but im not really gamer, the few non taxing games all worked no issues

Figured I'd get a handle and disto hop later but cant be ass'd, used to it now and 80% of what I wanted worked with zero issues from thebhet go, another 10% I evetually got around to tweaking and works no issues and the other 10%, fcuk 'em and their lack of Linux supoort.

18 months, all on, no dual boot etc

Kick the can down the road. https://massgrave.dev/windows10_eol

There's no reason to hope that you can change to a new operating system and you can copy paste exactly what you did in the other, completely different operating system. However that doesn't mean its hard. There are distros that make it really easy to transition too. I had a really easy moving over, but I was fine with adapting to new workflows and software and OS.

I run Linux while having 3 kids, my fiancee, a full time job that has a lot of OT, family health issues I have to support etc. Life is always busy and will always be busy. I pace myself with what I want to learn based on how busy my life is at that time. Not pacing I would burn out. I advise the same.

I also think being pissed off at Microsoft isn't enough to get into Linux for the long term. Its enough to just start. You need to be able to want to learn something new because if you make the switch, run into an issue with some distro, can't get past it, you'll end up right back where you left off.

Best of luck either way. Definitely do your research first and follow good rules for backing up your data.

if you're going to be too time pressured to have fun with Linux, probably don't for now

bro just grab a cheap ssd and enclosure, install linux on that, slowly play around and setitup, if you like it eventually swap ssds or install it on your main one

I would say the biggest problem is the music production on Linux. Especially VSTs - those are still hit or miss. And unfortunately the DAWs you mentioned doesn't have Linux support.

For example I was really trying to do music for several years on Linux, but in the end I gave up and now I'm dual booting Windows... 😿

Rather than leave another long reply to read, I'll leave my thoughts simple: if you have another computer you're not using, try Linux mint and see if it fits your needs. If it's too much and you can't get the time needed to figure things out, 11 might be the choice (for now).

But either way, keep Linux on the second and learn a little bit as you get time to! :)