Saw Arthur Brown live this summer at a small festival, it was pretty epic. He still puts on a great show despite his age. Go see him if you get a chance!

Like others have said, reaper runs very smooth on linux. I’ve been using it for years now and it has been a rock solid experience. The rare times it freezes, is almost always due to windows vsts I’m running through a bridge.

I tried ableton through wine but that was not the best. Also, it was ages ago so it might be better or worse now. Bitwig looks pretty good and I’ve read good things about it as well.

If you’re into max for live, definitely try out puredata. It’s my main music tool now, together with sooperlooper and reaper.

As for distribution, I would go with debian. It’s a bit older but has never let me down. Coming from Windows I think the KDE desktop environment would feel the most user friendly.

Personally I would not do a dual boot. Either wipe the windows partition or swap ssd. It will be more pain free in the future. Windows has a tendency to mess up your linux install which is just plain annoying. Fixing it is always a major hassle.

You could have a look at munin. It’s incredibly simple but effective. Quite easy to write your own plugins for if you’re missing some data. http://munin-monitoring.org/

Reminds me of a presentation I saw a few months ago by netsafe which is an new zealand non profit that has an ai driven system to keep scammers busy. You can try it out or learn more about it here: https://rescam.org/

Dangerous Dave on DOS, must have been in the early 90ies somewhere. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangerous_Dave

If you’re not yet using reaper I highly advise you to try it out. I run it on debian and it works extremely well. For noise reduction you can use reafir which is one of the built in plugins of reaper. Here is a link with basic tutorial on how to do noise reduction with it.

https://www.homebrewaudio.com/9603/reafir-madness-hidden-noise-reduction-tool-in-reaper/

Good for you! I’ve been free of windows for a decade I think. There’s nothing I miss as most of the programs I like and need have linux versions. The main program holding me back was reaper, an audio editor, and when they released an alpha version for linux I erased my last windows hard drive. I only run debian stable, but I’m not too fussed with bells and whistles.

I used the bandit game as an in class exercise when I was teaching basic linux skills to aspiring system administrators. It was always a great success because everyone got to advance at their own pace. Plus, they felt like real hackers because it was really over ssh. Anyway, have fun!

Although it’s not in the fediverse I quite like reading https://tildes.net. It’s quite slow paced but the quality of conversation is quite high in my opinion.

Quite a good follow up talk posted not so long ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4

At the bottom of every lemmy page you can see the server version and UI version used by the instance. On the github releases page you can follow the server releases. For the UI there aren’t releases, but the versions are tagged so you can follow that. Hope this helps!