You get a 70 MB "Ardour*.run" file that is a bash script that contains setup instructions followed by raw binary code. And you good the feeling of knowing that you've supporting a great open source project.

Also note that only a few linux distros are bleeding-edge (such as Arch-Linux, which will contain binaries for newly released package versions pretty quickly). But if you are on a non-bleeding edge linux distro, your distro's repos aren't kept up-to-date and so the advantage of the Ardour binary download is you get an up-to-date package without having to install a 3rd-party repo or build it yourself.

Yep, our packages install in parallel with each other (and with repo versions too), so you can keep older versions around.

And we aim to release every 2 months.

People who pay monthly also get access to nightly builds, allowing them to test things out before release (useful for us, sometimes useful for them). Most of our alpha/beta testers, however, build it themselves, from source.