Ardour is riddled with bugs. The GUI is incredibly ugly. MIDI workflow is terrible. The developers seem slow, old, and very opposed to new ideas. You can't run Windows plugins in it, so goodbye productive work. No professional anywhere uses it. You have to use C++ (!!) to write support for control surfaces instead of scripting in a real language. Setting up your audio/MIDI hardware settings has its own window instead of being part of Preferences like any real DAW. And of course, no proper DAW workflow like Live or FL Studio. You can't make beats with Ardour, you need actual musicians which is just stupid.

I would definitely stick to Audacity.

To those who wouldn't realize, this message is from the creator of Ardour. I suppose he's tired of hearing the same complaints again and again so he decided to pack them all in a single message.

I'm not going to talk about how much I like Ardour because I feel guilty for not having donated yet.

Well, as Ardour's the only DAW i've paid for and you saved me from making a fool of myself countering all the things said above allow me to step in and say.

I really love ardour, thank you for all the hard work to the creator and devs that have worked hard making an amazing piece of open source software I obnoxiously like to point out every time people complain about a lack of professional quality open source tools.

I will take a look at it anyway. Using C++ to implement a DAW is a very good idea IMHO. Audacity is a mastering tool, not a DAW. I'm actually a musician myself but don't use Linux yet for music productions, but for everything else.