Reaper is the DAW for audio-engineers that is well supported on GNU/Linux.
FL Studio can works well with Wine or VM but its plugins are another story.
A few WebApps worth knowing (might not suit heavy usage):
There is also LMMS but this is more for small hobbyst rather than serious work.
You might wanna try running in a VM or WinBoat and maybe it’s worth asking on the CrossOver forum to see how well things run with CO.
oh, I need to look into it again for my old macbook.
Just have fun with your machine, learning is better when you are not forced to read the fucking manual. Of course you might need to do it but do it when you have the time on something you need to.
Of course distro-related forums are a great place to start, the legendary Arch Linux Wiki is a great place (even for other distros) and I know this might be contreversial but LLMs nowadays can be useful at explaining these kind of stuff to you, especially if you feed them the adequat ressources.
how to do this, best ways to achieve that etc
Often there is multiple best ways to achieve stuff and people are not agreeing on how. Of course there is often consensus on how NOT to do but doing and learning is better in my opinion than not doing because you’re scared it’s not the best way. Just do it!
Asahi while being an incredible project, that I fully support the people working on it, is not very usable.
It’s running, sure, but you will miss very important hardware features such as hardware acceleration and speaker. You cannot tell someone “Buy a supported mac and install Asahi on it!” it’s not honest about what how your software will utilized your hardware.
You can use nixpkgs and brew on macOS.
I have both kernel (GNU/Linux and XNU/darwin(macOS)) and even if there is tons of stuff I don’t like with macOS and their non-repairable hardware I have to admit that battery life, trackpad feeling, monitor, speaker and build quality are very hard to beat.
But unfortunately due to the undocumented arm architecture of Apple Silicon you will have hard time running GNU/Linux on M macs.
My MacBook is my last non-linux based machine as of today and I have difficulties switching it even if I want it very bad, some of my software don’t run well on Linux even through Wine/CrossOver and the battery life and idle power are the main reason why I am still using a lockdown OS on one of my laptop.
One step at a time, you will eventually move to GNU/Linux in the future if this new hobby persist. But there is nothing wrong with beginning using software and tools you are already familiar with. However you will probably have to use WSL (Linux inside Windows basically) to make things work and all guides you will find will mostly be based on Docker and/or Linux. So you will definitely use Linux on your Microslop owned machine.
If you don’t have the time to learn a new OS it’s fine, but it will not necessarly make things easier, especially on the long run. That’s my take on it.
My very first self-hosting homelab was a Linux Mint old refurbished desktop PC that I was remotely accessing through AnyDesk (I was a Windows kid user at that time). Now I’m on NixOS through SSH and still learning, I do not completely comfortable but I am able to use it and learn while doing so.
I would highly encourage you to try to run a lightweight beginer friendly Linux distro such as debian, Linux Mint XFCE or Kubuntu if you feel like you need a desktop environement and graphic user interfaces but if you really want to use that Microslop license you bought it’s fine, you will probably switch in the following months or years. Okay maybe not, some people are fine using it.
You can also take a look at stuff like runtipi, yunohost, CasaOS, ZimaOS, Umbrel, Cloudron and stuff like that. They aim to be beginner friendly self-hosting “OS” or “WebUI”.
Fedora is known to be a good middle ground, and that’s why Linus Torvalds is running it on its work machine. But Fedora is more GNOME focus, while it does not stop you from using KDE, if you’re on Xubuntu you might want to consider Kubuntu.