

RE: Audio stuff I switched to bitwig long before I switched to Linux. Having familiarity with a DAW that ran natively was awesome; I also had a lot of plugins that ran as windows only VSTs. Yabridge + Wine was the answer.
You do have to downgrade wine to an older version (but this also helps you learn some Linux stuff) and works fairly well. I can even run omnisphere through yabridge (I do have a wild desktop tho so maybe not. the best point of comparison).
Mint is the first distro I used and most everything was really easy for getting audio stuff up and running quickly. I’m now using Garuda which I mostly like; there are issues that I’m still trying to work out.
I mean I like Garuda, but I would say it has taken a bit more to set up. I think if you’re running AMD you’ll be fine, it just depends on how much tinkering you want to do. Honestly the biggest reason I switched was that I had moved to Debian and games were not working too well for me - gaming has been much smoother but my desktop environment is a bit glitchy and buggy (likely due to my nvidia / Intel stuff)
Bitwig has better support on debian-ish distros, which mint kinda is (at least it is able to download and run .deb files).
Bitwig has been my favorite DAW since I began using it more in 2019, and as my only DAW fully but EoY '19; I enjoy all the flexibility I have with modules and the like.
I am unfamiliar with the Black Lion audio interface from what I’m reading it looks like they have class compliant interfaces so it should work with pipewire.
Ubuntu studio with the audio suite may be a good way to go too.
Depends on the total use case tho. I’m a newbie too in Linux but am happy to answer what I can