Sounds just like the Photoshop trap for graphic designers. Some grudgingly put up with whatever Adobe decide to do this year while others decide it's finally gone too far and accept the pain involved in migrating to something like Krita.
I'm fairly certain there were several Linux only tools on the Knoppix CD I used for my Certified Penetration Test Specialist (AKA Ethical Hacking) training back in the mid-2000's. Offensive hacking might be one of the few exceptions to the 'rule'
I was literally just explaining to my daughter (a first year Architecture student) that Krita is the free equivalent to Photoshop. She has to do some free-hand design work for her next module and I was setting up a digitizer tablet on her new laptop (a Lenovo Legion 5, which is a very nice bit of kit for the money).
If Bitwig doesn't cut it, you probably are out of luck unless Ableton produces a Linux version, which may or may not ever happen. For your use case, stick with Windows.
I doubt it will ever happen. Wine runs many Windows apps, but not always without issue. Currently I have Rephase and VituixCAD running under Wine. They both run, but VituixCAD has some small annoyances under Wine. Still, it gets the job done.
I recently switched from PCLinuxOS to Mint-Mate DE after nearly 25 years. Sadly it seems that distro is slowly being abandoned by it's head dev and there's been a revolving door of good folks on the dev team.
I think user experience satisfaction is mostly bound to how one got socialized early on. The young ones at our company grew up with Linux and Gimp etc and love it. When forced to work with Photoshop their heads explode and you'll hear constant cursing in the office, about "what a darn stupid workflow!".
Most likely not. Let be honest, it's difficult to get a team of developers to focus on and put the time and enthusiasm into a project working for free. But get the right group together and line their pockets at the appropriate level and you can get most anything you want or a team leader (boss) asks of them. In most any endeavor , professional level tools are expensive but worth it.
Yes. It's hard to adequately finance, so the teams are volunteers, sometimes without much "targeted guidance" it seems.
I suspect you're thinking of a normal desktop, not the load of embedded uses linux gets put to. You couldn't make something functionally equivalent to piCorePlayer with Windows for example - it just can't run on something as limited as a Pi Zero, or with a footprint measured in MB not GB. MS have Windows IoT which will run on the higher spec Pi models, but that's about as close as you'll get.
Funny you should mention PiCorePlayer on Linux. In fact I tried to set up LMS on a mini PC running Ubuntu but I couldn't get it working. Probably my own fault but I was able to get LMS going on both Raspberry and Windows.
I know. My point was that some people report Reaper does better on linux than on Windows, and vice versa for others.
I'm not sure what you're talking about here - JACK emulation in PipeWire perhaps? It sounds like you'd be better off with something like Ubuntu Studio which comes already set up for audio and video production, rather than trying to tweak a more general purpose desktop distro.
I have LMS running on my NAS using Docker (Synology now calls it "Container Manager"). If you ever feel the need again to run it on Ubuntu, that may be the way to go. I suspect the reason you could not get it running on Ubuntu was due to dependency issues (e.g., missing dependencies, incorrect versions, etc.), which is an area of Linux where issues too often pop up. It seems to be better, though, than it was a decade ago.
