This is very similar to my story - end of support for win7 meant putting Mint on the HTPC.
Soon after that, it was the old laptop my spouse was about to chuck out. Cinnamon was a little sluggish, so I eventually landed on Debian + XFCE
And when I discovered I could get my desktop’s audio interface working on Linux (it’s firewire, and by most people’s standards, ancient), it was game over for Windows.
I don’t know what Freetrack is but I hope it gets implemented for you :)
After having recently restored some stuff from an aging external hdd, i’m seriously considering getting a few dvdr discs and burning the important things every now and then.
I know they don’t last forever either, but - just as a random example that has definitely never happened to me hahaha - you can drop them from a height of 3 feet and still get files off them!