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.
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