“My Dad convinced me to try it” - Love it

I can’t remember why, most likely because i got tired of MS and wanted to finally daily drive Linux. I was already working doing windows support so it was a personal challenge. That was about 7 years ago and thanks to that I’ve also setup my own server

Is this the new “Arch BTW”?

And it’s a channel aimed at gamers. Seeing Wendell serving as advisor gives me hope that they can get good results and i agree with the choice of distro

I’m using airsonic, a foss alternative to subsonic. It can have multiple accounts and shared playlists

I use bandcamp regularly, although i tend to just buy and download from the webpage, and then I let beets organise and copy the files into predefined directories. It also can do zip files.

I created a Window Rule and so far it seems to be working. This was a test but I’ve done it before through the Window-Specific Overrides in Windows Decorations-Edit Breeze Theme
I use the keyboard very often and have a shortcut for that. It works for my use case, I always have windows maximized and tile them when i need it using the default keyboard shortcuts

I removed all the window titlebars on KDE and I’m happy

Yesterday I got into a “funny image” post showing someone who couldn’t use the correct date format online and quickly found a comment, with tailors, about the most efficient way of searching through a date-time format. I stopped and just thought that was the most "Reddit"moment I’ve had so far here and it felt nice

Bandcamp is where I do most of my shopping. Not sure where you are located. In Europe, for alternatives I use Qobuz and have used Bleep.
I tend to use it for more “commercial” albums.

Try the sim card, I have a Lenovo ThinkPad and it works

Any tips? Anything that stands out to you?

I was using Nicotine+ but having slskd on my server is a plus

“The cargo bike cult really thinks most of the world is a small town in central Europe when most of the world on avg is mountains in Indonesia.” - agreed, they can still go to other countries in Europe and make the same claim. I’d love to see them bike in winter on the Atlantic coast.

I’m currently using beets to tag my music and airsonic for streaming

I’m using airsonic with symfonium, gotta check Gonic (it’s been mentioned twice in the comments)

From what I’ve heard of seen in the Linux community music production on Linux is not easy. There is a fair amount of tweaking to get audio working and connecting instruments.

I’ve once created a profile with about 1500 lines of code for powershell, managing AD at work. It was great to learn, it’s great for scripting and it’s very intuitive (for me at least), I also liked working with objects.
I wouldn’t use it on Linux though, I’m not sure how well integrated it is.
I’m using fish at the moment, desktop and server, and I like it primarily for the functions and the autocomplete

As others have commented, stick with the Mac.
I recommend installing proxmox on it and run the apps you want. You can run pihole in a VM.
Do you need a NAS? Not really, but if you have cash available maybe get a used tower, use the disks you have and install TrueNAS. And this will only cost you max €200

Lot’s of great answers already. I’ll just had my thoughts and hope it helps.
Choosing a Linux distro is fucking hard, but the good thing is that you already have a DE (Desktop Environment) that you like, KDE Plasma (KDE is the community, Plasma is the name of the DE) and it’s my favorite.

1 - Manjaro was my first distro for daily use. I would not recommend it, i don’t think it’s stable enough to get into linux. Would not recommend any Arch based distro.
2 - OpenSuse is an old distribution, but not beginner friendly, so maybe not a good idea to dip your toes into it.
3 - Fedora is well established with lots of documentation, a big community and a 6 month update release model that should give you the newest features very fast while still maintaining stability. I don’t recommend the Atomic distros. If you’ve already installed and it works then stick with it for a while.

There are also the Ubuntu based distros like Kubuntu, KDE Neon or Tuxedo OS. Ubuntu has probably the largest user base, so documentation is abound everywhere regardless of the distro you pick.

You’re already testing out different distros, try to daily drive for a month and read up on what makes them different. In general it’s how to install software, the release model (“Long Term Support” or “Rolling Release”) and the core system. Apps are installed on top of the system and right now come in a variety of formats. I strongly recommend that you enable Flatpak on the distro you chose and use the Discovery app for software management.

Edit: Added “Tuxedo OS”