The correct number of files to have on your desktop is zero.

Thanks! That'll be the first one I try

Thanks for the thoughts! I downgraded to a "volt" as that is standards compliant (and just USB) so I have functioning audio on the machine right away. Last time I used a DAW in Linux-land was Ardour about 11 years ago. I never even liked protools (which is what Ardour is the FOSS equivalent of) so unsurprisingly I didn't get far with it. I agree that great music makers don't need a billion fancy things to make good music. I'm happy going barebones with it. BitWig comes highly recommended but it's not free and that undermines the overall effort of ditching MacOS in the first place. I'll probably try Ardour again or Audacity. Something to make simple video edits too would be great. Main thing is reliability and no weird linux stuff like random cutting out when you render files.

It's working surprisingly well

I still have it along with GNOME on here. Can switch to it again, though the keyboard navigation is actually pretty good on COSMIC already.

Blurriness. Text unpleasant to read. Apparently not uncommon to dislike KDE with this.

Audio was the thing tying me to Mac all this time. I basically have to trash an old UAD Apollo now as it's thunderbolt and I doubt any of the hacks would make it usable. If ableton would freaking add Linux I'd have made the switch a decade ago.

I tried KDE and all my displays looked horrible. I think COSMIC have managed to so something pretty great with that

Apple cancelled my order. Twice. So guess I am switching to Linux for my desktop/daily driver. So far discovered that Pop_OS! new COSMIC desktop requires restart if you ever want to change mouse speed. Spending an hour making a mouse not move 20x faster than it should is peak Linux. It's so annoying but I'm gonna make it work. I am sustained by a deep loathing of Microsoft and Apple.

What distro?