The NYTimes Popcast podcast recently[0] took up a form of this question while examining the relevance of album sales and Billboard charts as a whole. I highly recommend the episode, as well as the podcast generally.
Transitioning between Ableton and Bitwig is seamless from a UI standpoint. They have essentially the same controls.
The only thing that isn't great moving from Windows to Linux for production is your VST ecosystem becomes much more limited. Running plugins under WINE is alright, but if they're heavy you'll run into latency issues. There's a sizable collection of plugins that are native under Linux though[0]. I've used many of these with great success.
>>other than the typical setup issues related to Jack (one time thing resolved in an hour or so)
I was never able to get Jack up and running on my MBP. I tried both Jack and Jack2, compiling from source, using their prepackaged binaries, using the cli vs the GUI, etc, .. nothing doing. Do you have any resources you can share detailing how you resolved the issue or how you configure it? Feel free to PM, emails in profile.
I have a System76 laptop, a Gazelle 17-inch. See [0] for exact specs.
pop_os! has been fantastic, though it has some ways to go, particularly in the power management department. Overall, the biggest drawback is definitely the battery life. If you look around for System76 laptop reviews you'll see that battery life is a consistent issue. I'm able to get ~1.5-2 hours on integrated graphics, about 45 minutes using Nvidia graphics.
At first I thought it was just the battery/device itself, (the device is largely is a rebranded Clevo laptop with System76's firmware and other custom parts), so I installed Windows on the machine to see what kind of battery life I'd get under that. Windows was able to get ~6 hours with the same workflow (mostly browsing, streaming, email) and ~4 hours with the Nvidia graphics.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/22/arts/music/popcast-mercha...