If you want a Debian-based KDE, Debian works pretty well for me so far.

I'd have thought cinnamon was a key draw for mint and lmde given it's overall familiarity with windows / user friendliness? Would kubuntu or the fedora KDE spin work here?

Debian lets you select KDE during installation.

Why is KDE more difficult to install than any other DE? Kubuntu, Neon, archinstall+KDE, etc...

Neon.

Mint worked better with my printer than windows every did right out of the box.

Reaper is great once you get to know it. It does everything you need and more for recording and editing audio and midi (and some video).

For Linux specifically... It's identical to the other versions, so you can download it to your current OS and try it out, if that's what's keeping you from switching to Linux. You don't even need to install it.

Plugins is a different issue for Linux. Some people use Vine or such to use certain VSTis. Personally I'm on a mission to avoid that, so I only use free plugins native to Linux, and honestly, there's not many. The stock plugins works fine, but they don't have any fancy GUIs or particularly great default settings.

A word of caution: Reaper is very customisable. I would recommend reading at least parts of the manual to ensure that you understand how it's "supposed" to be work before starting on some large project and trying to fit the square block into the round hole. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. I've seen lots of support posts where people describe their projects and even the helping replies are needlessly convoluted. If you know your way around a real mixer desk, you'll find that every combination of sends, auxs and busses are possible in Reaper, so there's really no need to stack up hundreds of tracks and effects and whatnot to achieve basic stuff. Just like every DAW it's easy to get lost in the routings, so it makes sense to get a well structured flow from the start. Especially because it's soo customizable.

Reaper is very stable, which is nice for live performance. I have only had crashes from dodgy plugins in Windows.

Unrelated to Reaper, my experience is that Linux works better than Windows when you have many USB midi controllers. Both Puppy and Mint recognized my ancient hardware straight out of the installation, no matter which port I use (unlike Windows).

I'll give a shoutout to a great resource, LinuxDAW.org. A still-being-maintained list of audio software that has an official linux version.

I personally use Bitwig but mostly do my noodling on my synths and never really record anything. I'm going to change that soon, I think.

I'm super amateur, I don't know that I'm the best person to ask. Sorry! It meets my purposes for learning, but I'm not in the best place to judge if it has better workflow than ableton or anything like that. I can say I've been pleased with how intuitive everything is though, when I looked at lmms and amour or whatever the other Linux one is they were completely incomprehensible to me.

Reaper is super rad! The scripts extensions are incredible and personally I'd have no issue using it for professional level use cases. And the licensing is so cheap!

VSTs are a minor problem but some can work under wine nicely, but this isn't reaper specific

I don't use DAWs but i just recorded with a guy using Reaper. He had nothing but glorious things to say. You can run it from a usb stick of your using someone else's studio. At one point he needed it to do something specific and just got in touch with the guy and asked and he sorted it. Apparently it's the guy who made WinAmp.

Ardour is also a great option

I run Linux on my regular systems with an occasional dabble in reaper on it.

On the flip side, I run ableton on Mac for a couple of touring projects and could never move off of it.

Reaper is a fantastic tool, I’ve had a license for years and really respect what they’re doing. But if you’re doing anything besides home production for fun, it’s just not there yet.

Studio One, which i have been using for years, has a linux beta that does already work quite well. But only in a wayland Session which means... no 3rd party plugin GUIs. And no clue when this might change, maybe never. Probably a deal breaker for 99% of the target group. I really want to switch to Linux, but for Audio guys it can be a pain. Reaper rules tho.

FL studio runs well under WINE, others may have more input on if/how Ableton runs.

Bottles is great for managing windows software/wine and has template for installing software with dependencies.

I could never get used to reaper, but ymmv as it is definately closer to ableton than FL.

I started using it at 17.0, Quiana, and used it for ten years. I'm on fedora KDE now and I kinda want Mint Cinnamon back.

Never heard of Ultramarine, but that sounds great.

To be fair, that long ago the Internet felt like nothing but flash videos and flash games

why would flash be a problem? for everything that's not compatible with ruffle, i just run the standalone projector application in wine.