Hi all.
I have depended on Microsoft operating systems since around DOS 3 and am, starting in 1995, making my living as a software developer, in and for those environments, something I hope to keep doing until I eventually retire.
Yet, here I am, typing a draft of this post in Kate on Debian 12, because, nevertheless, I am increasingly wary of Windows itself.
An operating system should, by definition, manage computer system resources, preferably in a safe, sane and consensual manner, while mostly - much like good typography - generally staying quietly in the background, mainly serving as a vehicle for the actual content. Though the NT kernel might qualify, its mandatory desktop environment, with its swelling plethora of forceware, has become a noisy, bloated, in-your-face, late stage surveillance capitalism marketing machine, increasingly unfit for purpose. 
While I can kind of understand why, as people no longer wants to pay good money for an O/S, I still have issues with being treated as if my hardware and habits somehow aren't my sovereign property. It also irks me that it needs hundreds of processes, with thousands of threads, just to be on. For reference, my "internjet" XP would, once upon a time, idle at eleven processes.
So, I put a second SSD into my studio computer (no, I don't have an actual studio), read up a bit and set up a dual boot with Debian and KDE, with the intent to see which parts of my personal computing I can move to less distracting and more privacy respecting surroundings, starting with my music making hobby.
Thus far, the basic operating system is up and running, with a few low latency tweaks, and my virtual organ Organteq just works, while JuK can't properly play an mp3 and doesn't seem to know what a wav file even is... so I clearly have some work to do.
As I, spread over 20+ years, have put a non-trivial amount of money into the (nowadays) Reason Studios ecosystem, one goal is to see if I can make Reason 13 work under Linux, ideally stand alone, so I can open my existing songs. It would be cool if I could get Reaktor (Native instruments) along too.
Somewhere, I have a very old softsynth called Reality (Seer systems), which I think needs direct access to some very outdated motherboard circuitry, so maybe not, but I have fond memories of it, and one can hope, right? Since I seem to like audio-software-whose-name-starts-with-RE, I should probably get myself a license for Reaper. Having a native Linux DAW available to me, seems like a good idea anyway.
Joining a Linux Musicians forum seemed like a good idea too. I have already found useful material just lurking around, so why not actually step inside and say hi too?
That'll have to do for now. I'm off to play with PipeWire or something. No, I don't expect it to undercut the latency of JACK. Rather, I am looking to play sound from multiple programs at once, in sync, with better quality than PulseAudio and with low enough latency so I can play along on some MIDI keyboards, and then feed that to my non-standard, somewhat improvised surround system.
