Linux

The kid is 1.5 months old and you don't have time? Once that kid gets mobile you'll really not have time! And I don't mean crawling or walking, I mean rolling and scooting.

When my kid figured out how to get places by rolling I had gotten up with her early on a Saturday morning and was letting my wife sleep in... I went to the basement and turned on the Xbox to pay some Rocket League and in the middle of a game she started to roll out of the room. I put the controller down and went to pick her up... 4 years later that controller was exactly where I had put it. She's now almost 9 and is a great gaming partner, and is getting into robotics, 3D printing, and is interested in programming, so I get to jump right back into my old hobbies, and pick up some new ones.

All that to say, Linux is only going to get better and Windows will continue to get worse, but there's more important things for you to have to worry about in the very near future than troubleshooting an OS that you're not familiar with, stick with Win 10 for as long as you can and some day you'll sit down at your desk and realize you have time to look back in at Linux and you'll find that it isn't nearly as difficult to use as you remember. Congratulations on the kid, it can be an incredible journey watching, and helping, a person emerge.

Go with windows. Especially because of your abelton use, you will not be able to keep it. With steam if you play multiplayer competitive games then it won't work either on Linux.

So, the questions really are can your hardware support Windows 11 and if not can you easily flip to Linux.

1. The Asus Z170 motherboard looks like it supports TPM 2.0, but it doesn't look like the i7-6700K does as that is a 6th gen Skylake CPU and Win11 starts at 8th gen. You might double check that with the TDM tool Microsoft offers though.

2. Cakewalk and Ableton appear to work in Linux, but not without some tweaking.

My suggestion would be to do nothing. If you can't update without a rebuild and you can't migrate without a lot work, just do nothing. Your Windows 10 installation will still work. You won't receive any additional updates for it, but if that is the best solution for you at this time, then that's what you should go with.

For the kiddo: Get a body wrap. It lets you because hold the baby to you securely while you do other things. I worked on-call shifts handling downed MPLS circuits for a carrier back in the day with my daughter strapped to me. A couple years later she would get to visit me at work. She was the only 2 year old who technically had PBX configuration experience (I didn't know the keyboard was still connected).

Linux for gaming is easy. For the most part it’s plug and play. I’m on an AMD CPU and an NVidia GPU, and I even do VR in Linux.

As someone who does a decent amount of stuff with DAWs; VSTs are tricky. You might be able to create a similar workflow to what your used to, and many plugins might work decently well, but for me at least it was a lot of fiddling about and it isn’t as smooth as I’d like. My comfort compressor works, but the UI doesn’t render.

I’ve gotten my music workflow to work alright, but it’s wonky enough that I don’t do it as much anymore. Thinking about trying to start over with a new DAW and whatnot.

If privacy is a concern there’s a decent amount of stuff you can do to strip down Windows 11.

Your lack of time is the biggest issue, followed by your music needs (which are not impossible but I also know its not plug and play).

I would recommend going with win11 for simplicity and times sake. I would also recommend at least trying out ameliorated windows11. https://ameliorated.io/

Basically their stock run book makes the OS far more secure and private by setting up an admin account and then making your account a standard user (the way it should be done). Then it strips out all the bloat, restricts services, and installs open source alternatives like libre office and libre wolf. It also drastically changes the UI, which most of it I like and some is meh, but its all much better than the crap stock UI. I run this as a VM for all the stuff I still need windows for and I love it. Nothings ever going to make windows not windows, but this is pretty close and a simple click install. I highly recommend it.

Add another SSD and dual boot. Keep the windows 10 install for the audio software and use Linux for everything else. Nvidia cards will work in Linux, you just have to install the driver. That's just a couple of clicks in many distros. I would suggest sticking with a distro that uses X11 since Wayland can still cause some issues with Nvidia GPUs.

Back up your music data to an external & a cloud backup. Then the OS matters less.

I'd say look after your kid and try out Linux a bit later when you have Leisure for it. You can use Linux and Windows in parallel on two computers networked with Samba.

Your easiest way is to upgrade windows normally and if you dislike all it's bloated software, just install Atlas OS on top of it. It's just a software that will go through your windows and debloat it as much as possible. Simple as that. Easier done than reinstalling windows for an LTSC version. I personally have a dual boot with a win 11 with Atlas OS specifically for the software I can't install on Linux.

I ended up switching to Linux recently for same reasons, but my kids are older and i had time to nerd out and go full Archwiki. Ableton was one of the last holdouts that was keeping me from switching.... and I spent a good month dicking around with wine trying to get it to work. And I couldn't! I ended up selling my Ableton license and buying Bitwig, which is natively supported in Linux, and actually pretty amazing... (I don't expect you to switch, just telling my story. It has really fun modular synth-like interface, with all the other VST support and quite good out-of-the-box plugins etc.)

I also couldn't get Affinity Photo working in wine.... and gimp doesn't quite do it for me. So I'm not sure what to do there, so my photo editing hobby is on hold til I figure that out.

That said, some of my other windows stuff works magically in wine (sierrachart, games, etc.).

So with all that in mind, I'd say if you don't have time to figure it out, and still want ableton to work, it might not be worth the mental load until you have more time on your hands. Unless you have an old laptop lying around, it wouldn't hurt to just try it and see what you can get working.

It all boils down to how willing you are to troubleshoot an odd problem or post on a linux nerd forum. I transitioned from win10 to fedora KDE pretty painlessly, though I did have to hit up the fedora forum for an answer to a weird hardware issue specific to my machine. Learning to use the command line for doing a few weird customizations I wanted was a bit of a stumble too (though I've heard from my mint using buddy this isn't an issue on Mint?)

My steam library works fine with the default proton option enabled and my day to day experience has me forgetting that I'm even on a weirdo operating system made by FOSS cultists (love you foss cultists, mwah.) I literally do just press a button every couple of weeks that updates the system in the way that you're looking for.

Are you intent on ableton and cakewalk (holy shit I haven’t heard cake walk in a minute)?

For ableton, I’d even consider Mac.

I have never personally used ableton and I was not very advanced with FL studio, but at least LMMS seemed to be FL studio like .

As most people suggest, I'd also recommend going with Windows 11 for this use case, but with the caveat that you should get a Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC license if you can find it.

It's the best version of the OS. It only pushes security updates, no new features ( this means xbox and candy crush won't magically show up in your start menu after major updates) and it comes with all the AI and Microsoft Store stuff stripped out.

Theoretically, this OS was designed for things like kiosk computers and control systems that need to maintain a stable environment, but it can do everything the pro version does with no hassle.

The downside is that it's hard to find. Microsoft won't sell it outside of volume license keys under enterprise agreements, but it is available through grey-market key sellers, and can be activated using the MAS if the high seas are an option.

2 kids here.

Avoid any challenges until you can handle the most important one. Just come back when he's 1 y/o.

I now game with them on my Bazzite Linux desktop PC and our Steam Deck. Kids love it.

Some things designed for Windows just don't work on Linux, Windows LTSC is a great choice for those situations. Some people have had better experiences, but debloating scripts have always been finicky and fragile for me. LTSC comes out of the box without the usual crap and there's no risk of it all coming back after an update.

You can grab a copy of LTSC 2021 and activation if needed, which will come with the Windows 10 UI and updates until 2032.

A lot of Linux distros are set it and forget it these days. Nvidia can be finicky though, so i suggest a distro that installs proprietary nvidia drivers for you—I think Linux Mint and Bazzite do that, though I'm not personally familiar with either.

The other thing is music prod which I am not familiar with. I've heard that there's a lack of Linux software for music prod but hopefully some other users who know more can explain what the situation is like on Linux these days.

Steam won't pose a problem. Steam does something called Proton, a compatibility layer allowing Linux users to run Windows game, and the vast majority of Windows games run flawlessly with Proton. Similarly, you shouldn't have to worry about losing saves, as Steam Cloud should save and transfer them all automatically.

You don't have to upgrade to 11 for at least a year or longer. Register a free MS account for your win 10 and you get free patches for Win 10 for a year. Otherwise it's $30.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/microsoft-is-giving-windows-10-users-free-security-updates-for-a-year-but-theres-a-catch/

No. Don't do it.

You're not experienced enough to install and maintain a Linux installation. Fuck those who says "Bite the bullet and just install Debian! It will never crash!" They won't fix it for you when it does.

You don't have anyone who's supporting you physically. They are not a phone call away. They are ten forum replies away and won't be there when you need them.

Windows 10 is no longer supported, but no one is forcing you to either uninstall or upgrade. You can keep running it if you don't care about potential security problems.

Windows 11 is bad, but not as bad as you accidentally sudo removed /etc/fstab in Debian. Between bad and unusable, ask yourself which one you want less. This is assuming you spent your whole life using Windows and less likely make major mistakes.

You can schedule your migration to Linux in the future though. Just build a second machine. You must have the money to build a second one. Don't fuck with your production build.

Whatever you do, don't switch to the react start menu OS.

Stay on win10 with an ltsc version, or don't. Get a second SSD or your crotch goblins mom's laptop that you install Fedora, LMDE or another "easy" distro on to experiment with. Either way, you are not in a rush. Win10 support ending is not as imminent.

Honestly, at 1.5 months it's hard. Really hard. But once you get the pattern down and sleep schedule starts stabilizing, say 4-6 months in, it may be your most productive time when you know the kid is asleep for the next few hours.

This is how I've learned to solder and build mechanical keyboards during the first kid hitting that age# and ditched ms shit for Linux during the second. There's always other challenges, but not having to deal with a user hostile OS reduces stress tremendously.

Only get the odd releases.

Ima say something controversial but, a stripped down Win 11 is perfectly fine. I’ve been using various Linux distros now for a good while and there’s still something just not quite right for non-enthusiasts.

So the simplest way to score a light 11 is making an ISOQ with the official tool, or rufus. Then use the unattended script to rip out everything pre/during install.

The next level up is using something like AtlasOS playbook with WindowsAME tool to rip everything out post-install.

Or you can completely customise your own ISO with (I presume it exists still, nlite or similar).

Or start with the LTSC/IoT offerings.

I really hope Microsoft release their Xbox variant for general install and not just handhelds.

Id recommend mint, but ableton I have no idea. If you want to bite a different bullet if you go with linux, buy bitwig instead - its very, very much like ableton in the sense that you can map pretty much any parameter to any other parameter and I have enjoyed it a lot. super modern interface as well.

Running daws on linux is bad. Just go to win 11

Even with windows 10 support ending, critical bug fixes usually still go through to users.

Just because there’s “no support” doesn’t mean it will stop working. It may eventually have some security vulnerabilities. If you’re a normal user using purchased commercial software you probably have a good 3-5 years before you’d start to notice anything.