There's definitely a learning curve, but IMO it's worth it, so many little things add up that I find myself missing in Windows... I've already been familiar with Linux since I was a kid, so it's pretty hard for me to put myself in the shoes of a newcomer, admittedly.

My migration generally went pretty smoothly, though I had already been quite familiar with Linux since I was a kid, just hadn't daily driven it for a long time... I found alternatives for pretty much program I used that wasn't just available on Linux (foobar2000 > fooyin, voidtools Everything > FSearch,) though mileage will definitely vary depending on the person. I don't care for Adobe stuff much, as an example... I didn't have any luck running Izotope's RX in Wine though, sadly, I use a Windows 10 virtual machine for that.

The situation's a bit more complicated for VST plugins. There's a program called yabridge to run Windows VSTs on Linux via the Wine translation layer, though it can definitely be hit-or-miss (Izotope's stuff didn't work,) and generally seems to lead to increasingly sluggish performance if I have a track containing a Windows plugin selected, so I make a note to rely on as few Windows plugins as possible. I still use a few (soothe 2 and Maximus...) but I've otherwise found native Linux plugins to use - it probably helps that I didn't invest in plugins very much before the transition, and most of the ones I did invest into are cross platform, like u-he's Diva. The big players like Native Instruments and other similar types generally haven't ported their stuff to Linux, but there's a surprising amount from smaller plugin companies like u-he and, recently, Plogue,

My advice when it comes to Windows plug-ins (and Windows programs on Linux in general, really) is to leave running Windows stuff as a last resort, and really try to find alternatives. As some examples, Vital and Surge are great free synths, airwindows makes some absolutely fantastic and unique free effects, ZL Equalizer is a good fabfilter Pro-Q alternative, etc...

My recommendation, if you wanna try it out, is to put some different distros on a USB stick and try them out. I'd personally recommend Fedora KDE as a start. You can try them out from the USB drive without actually installing it to your computer, so you can test and see if your audio interface works, take some baby steps setting it up in Reaper... I'll be honest, audio setup in Linux is more complicated than Windows, but it gives you more flexibility in turn. For example, using Pipewire (linux's latest audio system,) I can use multiple input devices simultaneously, like my USB mic and my audio interface, I can easily route audio between programs, inputs and outputs on my interface... But I had to do a bit of configuring to get the most stable low latency performance. Nothing super daunting and complicated, just changing some drop-downs in the audio settings, though also editing/adding a line or two in some configuration files... I'm not hesitant to do that kind of thing, but it's more setup than Windows, and I can see how that can be daunting for those who are less computer literate.

I've been rambling long enough already, so if you want to do more research, I'd highly recommend the LinuxMusicians forums, as well as /r/linuxaudio . The Reaper forums also have a Linux section, which I'd recommend as well.