Thanks so much for answering, this is really helpful, even if I feel pretty indecisive now.

What do you think about LMDE? This would have been my second idea. I'm also not mad about going with Mint for a second time as you recommend. My disliking was purely because of aesthetics, which wouldn't be as important for this Laptop.

As I mentioned in the reply to Noo, I have already changed my mind about DE's. Honestly, I always assumed this Laptop had 8 GB of RAM just like the other - and there I've had the Laptop freeze installing stuff from the AUR - seems this is always the worst part of these Macbooks, but I'm never gonna buy one again anyway. But yeah, I dont have any clue about how much those 4 GB affect my Distro/DE choices, I'm here to learn :D I also saw your post on Mastodon about RAM on Debian Gnome a few Days back, which was one of the reasons why I began second guessing my initial ideas.

I know if I'd look for a substitute for Ableton it would probably be best to just go with Bitwig. But there's also aspects of Ableton I'm not happy with. I generally got bored of it a bit tbf, so it's allright if I feel I start from scratch for a while. Reaper was recommended to me by a few people already, so Reaper it is. Shortcuts and navigation will be hard for a while I assume, but nothing you can't get used to ;)

Yeah LMMS really felt close to FL Studio, used FL a bunch in my youth.

Ubuntu ran really bad on my other Laptop, and I felt overwhelmed by the amount of stuff pre-installed. So I doubt it will be better.

Concerning the Interface, I don't have the extra money to buy a new one currently, so this either works or not.

Ok, so I'll maybe wait on your opinion on LMDE in case you will have time to reply. Will keep Mint on my mind!

Thanks for mentioning Librazik. I'll take a look at it later.

You are right with KDE as DE, and I am happy you mention it. I guess I'm just being lazy with this as I am familiar with it and I like the looks of it. But true, given I really won't do much else on there, it's pretty much a waste of resources, so I'll take that into account.

I will go with Reaper first and hope this will be a good Ableton alternative. Ardour I'm generally just really curious to try out, so I will give it a shot too, maybe later. The website you mention will be great for this, hope I will be able to read through this ;)

It's good to hear about the inteface just working, will see how it goes. I remember searching info on that model I have back on reddit and there was one person who tried to get it to work on linux and it sounded complicated, but that was already a few years back

Thanks for the input! Testing is a good idea. I'll take a look at elive but from what you mention, it's probably not what I'm looking for. Not a huge fan of reading "it comes preinstalled with proprietary software". I'm up for learning the extra steps, I'm actually really interested in it, so this isn't really a big deal for me -- just, well, time-consuming. It's a helpful reply nevertheless, I'll think of this as a solution in case I would really fail. Oh and I probably mentioned the issues because I could not get Wifi/Bluetooth to work before and because I don't use one of the mainstream ones of the focusrite product line, and this could be an issue, maybe not.