Vs dog crap windows…im curious.
My friend wants to go linux because he hates Microsoft but im worried he will have issues and hes not very techy. Mostly he uses it for a daw, and a lot of that stuff is not compatible with linux. An older MacBook would work better for him I think…he wants to be more privacy conscious but hes not crazy about it.
I would say let your friend try Linux, first. DAWs like Ardour support vst3 plugins, so most things would be fine. If that does not work out, assist them in running DAWs under wine or proton. FL Studio works under wine, probably Ableton too.
If nothing works out, then yes, macOS is fine. Just don’t login using your apple account, check privacy settings after every update. You can use apps like LittleSnitch on macOS to check which apps and services are connecting to which domains and IP and block them. This way you can get a lot of control of your privacy.