My reasons are almost the exact same as yours. CUDA, software compatibility, and not wanting to mess with dual boot in case I mess up. I ended up trying linux mint on an external drive and it works pretty well, but I don’t think I see myself using this full time beyond software development.
I’ve seen tutorials where people installed Linux using a virtual machine that can only see the ISO usb and the drive you are installing Linux on to do that. It’ll be a pain removing the drives from my laptop. I probably won’t be dual booting because I use nvidia GPUs + can’t switch to Linux full time because nvidia and I use CUDA for projects.
I’ll be trying out Linux outside of a virtual machine for the first time. I’ve got a SATA SSD external enclosure that I’ll be using to boot without messing with my current pc
I like the free version of waveform 17 as my DAW, but I’m not sure if it supports Linux. Vital is a good free synth with tons of presets.