Linux

Running FOSS is practical for the long term, even beyond moral judgments. Proprietary software starts strong with lots of funding, but it only gets worse and worse as it goes along. Open source starts slower but plays the long game. You can take a look at something like Windows itself for an example of the gradual infestation of ads and user-hostile features/tracking. It's never going to get better. The only hope for proprietary users is for a new proprietary app to be created and start off more user-friendly because they need to attract users. Once they have the users they'll restart the cycle again.

Okay, lots of other comments I didn’t read, and this might have been mentioned.

👏Syncthing👏

You mentioned OneDrive. I also jumped around storage solutions as I explored the FOSS world, and nothing hold a candle to Syncthing (in my opinion, but I want/need to try nextCloud). I won’t drone on about it, but if you’re looking to ditch another big data company that’s probably scraping your files, check out Syncthing

I do gaming and music production on Linux without much issue at all these days.

Most games are pretty easy to work with these days thanks to Steam, Lutris, and Bottles.

As for audio, there are 4 key ingredients to my setup: Pipewire, Bitwig Studio, Wine and Yabridge.

Pipewire is pretty easy to use and works in a low latency setting just fine, so imo you no longer have to juggle PulseAudio + JACK.

Bitwig isn't open source, but it's fantastic and inspiring and supports Linux natively. They've also been great about stuff like the new open source CLAP plugin format.

I've found that Wine (staging) does a pretty reasonable job handling any Windows VST I've thrown at it, but it's a bit of work getting it setup, especially if you're new to the concept.

And finally yabridge is a great CLI tool for turning all of your Windows plugin .dlls into Linux .so, that you can easily use in your DAW of choice.

So if you want to do music production on Linux then definitely check out Bitwig and Reaper (along with Ardour, like you mentioned). And personally, I think that if you have a decent chunk of Windows VSTs it's worth investing a bit of time learning how to getting them working in Wine and then bridged with yabridge.

Welcome back. Good decision.

What you have learned about Linux is that the most important thing is FOSS/Libre computing.

Namely, that the user is no.1 and everything that the software does must always respect the freedom of the user and be to their benefit, and NEVER harm them.

THIS is what makes GNU/Linux special. Not the fact that it's generally free of charge.

Now you've learned this, you will know why it's impossible for any true Libre Linux user to ever go back to proprietary software. It doesn't respect him or his freedom.

Now that you're back, you have a ton of distros to choose from. Personally I use LMDE 6 but regular Mint is also great.

As for software, you may have to give up on some proprietary stuff if there is no FOSS equivalent but it's worth it because you get your freedom in exchange.

If you depend on that software to make a living, simply install Oracle Virtualbox and run Windows in a VM just to run that software.

At least it can't affect your Linux system and your main OS will be FOSS and when you're done using your proprietary program, shutdown Winblows and it goes away until next time you need it.

Technically, I've done as you've described several times over. Did it with IOS and Android - I approached both with an open wallet and open to doing things differently than I was used to. Could say the same for several gaming consoles and Chrome. ALL have required concessions on my part that left a bad taste in my mouth - speaking strictly from a User Experience perspective.

The worst of it has been all the apps that dissappeared from the IOS Appstore - apps I paid for and now all that's available are pale imitations full of ads and demanding subscriptions.

I'm not asking the same apps to work across multiple decades either - the gap between my first iPad and my second was less than eight years.

Same, I switched to windows for a while for work and it was hell. None of the kde window management (using mod key for moving and resizing windows) and the Adobe and autodesk softwares wanted to take over my computer with their genuine, license, desktop "service" apps. I felt like i broke my kneecaps on purpose to walk on crutches. And pressing mod key opens the fucking ad start menu every single time, I hate it. Went back to Linux using photopea and inkscape.

I think Windows does some things well, that are just worse in KDE

• Ctrl+Alt+Delete, Taskmanager is actually privileged and can force close running apps. On KDE the same apps exist but they are not privileged enough. EDIT: of course it is privileged, but it doesnt even open if the "Desktop" hangs. There seems to be no privilege isolation, nothing left as security space for these tasks.
• The UI is more stable, the bars dont weirdly load, App Windows just open in full size and not fly around. When an app crashes I can still use the cursor (often)

The Rest is crap, like everything. Updates are horrible and intrusive without a single reason. Immutable updates are so much better, regular Linux Distros probably cant compare regarding security.

Eh, I can't use windows for any longer amount of time. I am WAY too paranoid. I always get the feeling of being spied on when I use windows. Like this slight nagging feeling in the back of my head. Never at ease as I am with linux.

I'm running windows and others craps at work.

Like this, its working as a daily vaccine for me 🤣

Daily Linux user since 2013, specifically since the Snowden's leaks.

Nextcloud or a samba server are good options. But if storage is not a issue I'd recommend checking out syncthing. I run it on my server and sync some directories to my phone and other directories to my desktop. And one directory between phone and desktop(obsidian notes). I don't think you can run sycthing on iphones though.

When I was still new to Linux I also had these phases from time to time where I went back to Windows, used mainstream software, like Microsoft Office, etc.. I was still undecided if Linux was really worth all the hassle and I wasn't quite settled on either side.

But I always returned to Linux for whatever reason. Probably because using Windows just didn't feel right ... The times where I returned to Windows got rarer and shorter the older I got. The last time I used Windows for an extensive amount of time was during the Windows 10 beta period. I even had a Windows Phone for a year! I returned to Linux roughly once Windows 10 was released as stable (funnily enough).

I believe that you are likely in a very similar situation at the moment as I was. I think you might just need some time to settle with something and get comfortable. ;)

You and I are in similar situations. I discovered Linux around 15 years ago and I wanted to fully switch over to it but found I couldn’t run games or photo/video/sound editing software the way I knew how (grew up with sailors discounts on the Adobe Suite).

Nowadays most of my previous hangups are solved. Almost all of my steam games work in Linux without any issue (1 or 2 games needed a single google search to paste the change needed to fix something), GIMP and Inkscape have way more extensions that increase QOL (not to mention Photopea being a literally photoshop clone with the exact same keyboard commands so your workflow doesn’t need to be relearned).

The only computers running windows in my house are my server (cause I just repurposed it and it’s working for now) and my VR computer (and that’s just because I’m lazy too since the Valve Index is fully Linux supported).

I use Windows at work and have no other choice. I don’t want any of my other computers to feel like my work computer. Feels like I haven’t left work.

Have you considered Bitwig Studio? It has native linux support.

Studio One is coming to Linux. It is imo one of the best DAWs.

Insync supports OneDrive on Linux, been using it for a long time although I don’t touch cloud storage that much. I like having local copies of everything that does happen to be in the cloud.