Linux

Ubuntu, broadly, is usually a good first distro. Lots of info available, Canonical support if that's your style, etc. Studio has some bits that are useful for the music side, but not some that are good for the gaming side. Others would be the opposite. Don't worry too much. Pretty much anything you can do on one distro you can do on another. It's mostly picking what comes pre-installed versus what you have to install.

Long term, don't worry about picking and sticking. Just try a few and see what feels best to you and your hardware. If you have a spare USB drive you can empty, put ventoy on it and a handful of live ISOs. You can get a quick poke at each and see whether one feels right.

The biggest advantage of ubuntu studio is their special pipewire setup, included in a package called ubuntustudio-pipewire-something. This can be installed by any distro that uses Ubuntu's repositories, e.g. Mint, Zorin etc. As for the apps included, they're easily installed manually. So you can go with Mint for a first distro.

Basically irrelevant what you choose as first distro. Do backups early and often, hopefully automated, and make sure to document your experience a bit so you know what you like and dislike. Afterwards you can check if other distributions might do the things you like better and do the things you dislike less.

The quirks are half the fun and part of your journey.

I would try it, but focus on those included applications. If you don't like anything else about Ubuntu, those production programs will work just fine on any other distribution.

This was (and still is) my first distro, made the switch about 3 months ago. I read about the low latency kernel being good for recording but I'm not sure it's necessary. I went with LTS for stability and regularly use Reaper, Bitwig, Blender, Krita, and as of today after getting it working finally, DaVinci Resolve.

It works for me with a Behringer UV1 preamp and a Scarlett 4i4, but it did take a lot of work to get the audio working right. At first I could only use ALSA, which only allows one program to use audio at a time. If I remember right I have to install Pipewire and Wireplumber and was then able to use JACK.

My GPU is Nvidia and there's been some hiccups but it generally works well.

One interesting issue that happened today though was after rolling back Wine to 9.21 and reinstalling yabridge. I tested with launching a Windows app and it screwed up Plasma, seemed to delete it. I had to log into xorg and reinstall KDE. I can now log in with X11 but for some mystery Wayland is just gone. Bonus was that X11 has fixed my DaVinci issues haha so that's something I guess.

I use Pop!_OS with Bitwig, Renoise, and Reaper as Linux native DAWs and Guitar Rig 7 through Wine emulation. I haven't given the Guitar Rig 7 install a proper run through, but Bitwig, Renoise and Reaper work great.

I have used multiple brands of audio interface with between one and over fifty mono inputs to record, loop and analyze signals in real time on windows, linux and macos. I have used amd, intel, nvidia and arm/apple gpus to play games on linux, windows and macOS.

If you can tolerate the old man gaming experience of fiddling with some settings, maybe editing a text file or something then you’ll have a better time gaming on linux than on windows.

If you understand what your daw is doing under the hood then you will do fine using linux for production. If you need to use a specific daw or you need to be able to use its plugins on an alternate platform without much effort you won’t have an easy time.

Ubuntu studio is probably a bad choice. You’re likely better off starting from the ground up with a non-Ubuntu distribution. Especially if you have a paid copy of reaper then you’ll have no problem finding support for whatever you wanna do.

What DAW are you planning to use?

I really love Ubuntu Studio but Plasma/KDE doesn't seem to run well on my machine. Its the result of having old hardware and not having the expertise to figure out why it doesn't run properly. If it weren't for that I would use it.