I might sound like an old fart but here’s my 2 cents.

I was exactly in the same situation in 2005. I was heavily invested in commercial products but I wanted to switch to an all open source workflow. My advice would be to start small. First dual boot with windows. Get your DAW working at a basic level. Then get your hardware setup the way you are fully comfortable. Then try to get your visual instruments to work.

Keep in mind that it will be a somewhat different workflow. Linux is highly modular. You can definitely achieve the same results but sometimes with more tools. Jack is an amazing sound system which is now seamlessly integrated into the system with Pipewire. It makes routing your audio stupidly simple and opens up a whole different universe of possibilities.

All this is coming from someone that’s using an all open source approach for almost 20 years now.

And if it does’t work, it doesn’t. No need to swim against the current.

and as if like there will be one monarch to rule them all! all by himself, waiting by the dock, preparing for a duel.

just because we don’t officially call it monarchy, people think that it’s a whole new system. every critique you have against monarchy is valid for the billionaires and vice versa.

jeff bezos is a monarch. he has an empire with people doing literal slave-work and practically untouchable by the judicial system. if you are not willing to overthrow him now, you won’t be willing to overthrow a “literal” monarch. same goes for every billionaire.

as there are middlemen protecting the billionaires now -like mass media, military industrial complex, heavily armed local police, union busters, corrupt judicial system etc.- there will be middlemen protecting the monarch then.

you think you would be willing to overthrow the monarch because it’s not real, a fantasy. but you’re willingly turning a blind eye to the exact same thing that is real and happening right now.

if it’s a really old laptop, Ubuntu might be overkill, spec-wise. In that case i would suggest Alpine Linux, it’s super lightweight and a really good distro for server use.

i think codeberg.org would be the flagship instance, since they’re the ones that has been supporting the development most as far as i can see.

quantity doesn’t always mean quality and when the subject is aur, i wouldn’t count that as a metric. there are lots of orphaned packages, packages that have their source / binary / git versions, older libraries etc.

it USED TO be a nice repository, i don’t why. but it’s one of the main reasons i’m keeping away from arch because i cannot trust those packages anymore.

I second this. I have been using Void for a year now, and it’s blazing fast.

Additionally FreeBSD is amazing, too. As Gentoo is almost a BSD distribution, you would feel right at home.