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/

If you’re not yet using reaper I highly advise you to try it out. I run it on debian and it works extremely well. For noise reduction you can use reafir which is one of the built in plugins of reaper. Here is a link with basic tutorial on how to do noise reduction with it.

https://www.homebrewaudio.com/9603/reafir-madness-hidden-noise-reduction-tool-in-reaper/

Although it’s not in the fediverse I quite like reading https://tildes.net. It’s quite slow paced but the quality of conversation is quite high in my opinion.