I know this doesn't address all your concerns, but I switched from Ableton Live to Bitwig Studio for unrelated reasons to my leaving Windows behind, and I was thoroughly pleased with how easy the transition was between the two DAWs (I guess it shouldn't be too much of a surprise given how many ex-Ableton devs work on Bitwig), and how well the Linux build of Bitwig worked. Bitwig on Linux, with Pipewire as the audio engine for low latency operation, is essentially an identical operating experience for me.

Getting your plugins working is a different story. A small but growing number of mainstream audio plugins have native Linux builds available, a wide swath of them work quite well with yabridge (https://yabridge.org/ - so shim to expose Windows audio plugins running in WINE prefixes to Linux audio plugin hosts), and a few required alternatives to be found.

I found the workflow decent enough to use, but as one might expect, some plugins not working well via yabridge/WINE made things a little janky, and once I picked up a Mac device again, that became my production machine. That said, WINE's come a long say since I last tried this out a few years ago, and I'd be interested to see if things work better.

My point, I suppose, is to share a reasonably good success story (though perhaps still not of a grade that you'd be comfortable switching to for paid work), and perhaps to encourage you to consider some alternatives to the tools you use. Tool changes are expensive, sure in cost, but moreso in time, so I don't suggest it lightly. That being said, I think that it might be worth it to grab a Bitwig trial and see how you like it. I'd grab it both on Windows and Linux, so you can try it "how it should work" when your plugins and the DAW are working in harmony while also getting the Linux toolchain working. And from the cost perspective, Bitwig does not have crossgrade licenses, so you can buy Studio once, and run it on any supported platform.

Well, Ableton at least works pretty fine on macOS, if that's more acceptable than Windows for you.

>when this alcoholic is the only one that works properly for the sort of audio and 3D/VFX work

I mean, that seems universally truer than not.

IMHO:

I like the issues faced on Linux more, since I can solve them. I too have a handful of repair scripts.

I feel like an adult to be given access all the internals. I don’t feel that way on Windows (and any other locked down OS).

We should put in the volunteer hours to upstream these fixes to make it nicer for normies :^)

Very few are these days with the enormous amount of resources Valve has been pouring into Proton. The only truly Windows-only games I have encountered were online multiplayer with anticheat and that was almost always because the developer chose not to support Linux (e.g. EAC, Rust) and not for lack of support for Linux.

Perhaps that wouldn't happen if more people switched...

This hasn't been the case for at least half a decade. Most games run perfectly fine if not better on Linux. The only exceptions are purposely broken remote rootkit "anticheat" gsmes which no sane person would want on their system anyway.

This is why I own a playstation

I'm approaching a year now on CachyOS and it has been a wonderful experience. All the games that I play run just fine, maybe a few FPS drop compared to Windows, but it's not a big deal for me. I also don't play any competitive online games that require 3rd party anti-cheat spyware. Biggest positives, I got very comfortable with terminal and CLI work. My development work has definitely improved.

AHK is a pretty Windows ecosystem-specific crutch and everything it does is done in different ways in other systems. TC can be run on Wine absolutely everywhere, I used to do this on Linux for a number of years and it's perfect including plugins, although there are plenty of good FMs out there (e.g. DoubleCommander is a near-direct replacement) so feel free to try them if you just need a way to manage your files and not your specific setup in particular. Log in as Administrator... uh what? Not sure what you mean. Not requiring admin password on system-wide actions? Sure, it's trivial everywhere.

Double Commander is pretty good: https://doublecmd.sourceforge.io/

It's cross-platform, so could switch file manager on Windows first to make it easier to switch to Linux later.

If you need Autohotkey you can still run that under wine (if you are ahk on windows applications), you can run total commander under wine. You can log in as admin I think its time to make the switch

Oh, I also need a way to compile CodeBrowser 4.9 [1]

[1] https://github.com/nilslindemann/Code_Browser_49

I understand. Different people have different thresholds for trust. Unfortunately, I have lived in DC for a long time. Long enough to know the basics of how espionage works. And, appealing to authority is very effective. Humans love authorities. Write a few papers. Give a few conference talks. Get a few magazines to report on your expertise. That's pretty much all it takes to get entry. Otto and Olaf are probably great guys. I'm just extra cautious.

Few were as potentially deadly, at least at the time (in earlier times there might have been less we could do to treat them), and in the 80s the main source of fear of HIV was that it was not understood (people feared catching it in ways that are not possible, and so forth) were those that had been around much longer had well known risk factors.

They could still switch to using a Linux machine for most things (that don't belong to the employer), segregating the Windows machine off as much as possible and never letting Microsoft near any of their own data.

Honestly, even as a Linux guy who doesn't use Windows (almost) at all anymore, I trust Microsoft to be generic and corporate in their spying.

They'll spy on users usage habits, and likely backdoor their OS for the feds, but they won't individually exfil your browser cookies and steal money from your bank account.

A random closed-source black-box "privacy" tool though? You have zero guarantees.

>Closed source doesn't mean not trustworthy

Yes, it does.

>O&O has been making tools like these for a long time.

Microsoft has made Windows for a long time. Longer, even.

Non-smartass answer: https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil

Linux is a great FOSS alternative.

I get the sentiment. But for the record, O&O has been around for a long time, they were known for their excellent defragmentation tool, which isn't so much required nowadays. Their business model was never close to Adware (to my knowledge).

ShutUp has also been around for a while and always seemed to me like a O&O side project by someone who got really pissed at Windows taking the spyware tangent. The distribution model is still that of shareware / freeware (no source), because that's what O&O does. But as far as closed software goes, that's _probably_ as clean as it gets.