[xxs]

there are (will be) lots of calls on the muscle memory slacking off. I can't think of anything that is not reproducible on Mint.

I have tons of Windows experience (starting off by manually installing windows w/o installation floppies and manually editing win/system.ini, through win32 to current day nonsense), yet I find the command line interface of linux a lot more powerful.

I am not aware of the exact use of directX, it should be possible to run Windows through virtualization just for this task. (unless wine is sufficient)