Like others have said, reaper runs very smooth on linux. I’ve been using it for years now and it has been a rock solid experience. The rare times it freezes, is almost always due to windows vsts I’m running through a bridge.

I tried ableton through wine but that was not the best. Also, it was ages ago so it might be better or worse now. Bitwig looks pretty good and I’ve read good things about it as well.

If you’re into max for live, definitely try out puredata. It’s my main music tool now, together with sooperlooper and reaper.

As for distribution, I would go with debian. It’s a bit older but has never let me down. Coming from Windows I think the KDE desktop environment would feel the most user friendly.

Personally I would not do a dual boot. Either wipe the windows partition or swap ssd. It will be more pain free in the future. Windows has a tendency to mess up your linux install which is just plain annoying. Fixing it is always a major hassle.

You could have a look at munin. It’s incredibly simple but effective. Quite easy to write your own plugins for if you’re missing some data. http://munin-monitoring.org/

This is pretty cool! Might test it out at some point. Thanks for the write up.