Cobiskuit

I would recommend dual booting if you can spare the drive space. If your computer has two drive bays (some of the gaming laptops do so I throw it out there), I always do two completely different drives and just have one set to boot by default. But it's a great way to try something out and see if you like it. One thing I would mention with deleting it later: Yes, you can delete the partitions and just resize them, but follow this link to also uninstall the GRUB bootloader if you decide to remove Linux Mint. That step can be done before you remove partitions or after, so don't sweat that. Hopefully you enjoy it! I actually moved to Mint a little bit ago after years on Fedora, highly recommend it.

Linux Mint has a new way of making Secure Boot work on systems with that enabled, involving a password that is usually set during installation. Might need to re-install, and if you can turn on Legacy Boot support or something like that it may help. You'll want to do that before installation though. And if this launched with Windows 8, it almost definitely has UEFI or Secure Boot. If you don't see it, it could already be disabled.

Article that shows app is down, later cites bug Reddit bug screenshot here I for one find this hilarious. Thoughts? (Mods let me know if this doesn't belong here)

Actually Ubuntu Studio uses low-latency kernels for a long time, to SOME success. I've used it in the past for like, personal home audio recording and it's work really well. It's probably as close to competitive as Linux gets in this space without doing like, an Arch install with that low-latency kernel or something completely custom like mentioned before.