Linux

It’s always a heartwarming experience seeing someone passionate about a subject enough that they’d be willing to dedicate what was likely at least twenty minutes of their own free time to writing a detailed response to a stranger on the internet.

❤️

(1) VMX (outside TXT) disabled…;

From what I can see, this isn't that big of a deal. It's just a warning (technically it is an error, but, essentially it's a warning), that Virtual Machine Extensions aren't enabled in the BIOS. Unless these are required for the boot process of your distro (which I seriously doubt), it shouldn't cause you any problems, unless you explicitly require their functionality for some other program.

(2) ima: error communicating with TPM. I went into the BIOS and figured out how to turn the TPM on, and when I did so… what do you know, I started boot-looping again, just as before.

That's... strange. Are you certain that it isn't the converse? Very strange that enabling the TPM would cause issues. It could certainly make sense for it to cause issues if the TPM was in use, and it was disabled.

In case you are unaware, the TPM is essentially a chip on the motherboard (in most cases, anyways -- it potentially could be in a different form within the CPU e.g. fTPM)

Apparently I’m going to have to do a bit of troubleshooting to get Linux operable with the TPM

It's completely possible, and I would certainly not discourage it's use -- especially if the device is a laptop. It's, of course, not the be-all and end-all of security, but full disk encryption with a TPM is definitely a good first line of defence. Obviously, it's better to manually input the encryption password, rather than having it be released by the TPM, but I certainly wouldn't blame someone for opting for the more user friendly alternative.

Finale works just fine on my system and I don’t intend on changing away from it anytime soon. I’ve been using it for so many years, it’s like second-nature to me. I couldn’t imagine dropping a software I spent hundreds of dollars on now for something else if I still get great mileage out of it.

For sure! If you are comfortable in your work flow, then by all means stay wiht it. Ethically, though, it of course doesn't hurt to keep FOSS alternatives to proprietary software in the back of your mind 😊.

It certainly seems more complex than Ubuntu

It sort of depends on exactly what you mean by that, but I certainly wouldn't argue with the colloquial statement that it's more "complex" -- especially the installation.

but at the same time, boy does it give you a rich experience in learning the intricacies of your system and how everything functions together.

Absolutely! And if you want to go another step further in that understanding, then I would recomend looking into Gentoo.

but then others will actually cause the drive to crash in some spectacular fashion

I think I may know what you are talking about with this. I have experienced issues with external HDD's going to sleep when they are being read from, or written to, but I attribute that to USB sleep modes. So, if you are referring to an internal SATA drive, then I'm not sure what would be causing that issue.

and I have to sudo umount -l

I would caution against using the -l/--lazy flag. It may present you with unintended consequences. It woudl be better to find what process is keeping the dive busy before attempting an unmount.

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then remount again with ntfs-3g

Out of curiosity, is there any particular reason why you're using the userspace NTFS driver, rather than the included kernel driver?