[dawhead]

The purely technical aspects of audio on Linux have always been better than Windows and OS X. Linux had lower latency than them more than a decade ago.

The user experience is a different story. That's the result of choices made by Linux distributions, most of which can be avoided by picking the right distribution or by doing some work. The biggest issue is the decision made some years (partly at my suggestion, ironically) to adopt PulseAudio as a desktop sound server (rather than JACK). This situation has been compounded by long-lived bugs in the versions of PulseAudio shipping with distributions that blocked the long-planned ways to tell PulseAudio to give up an audio device for "pro" use.

If you install the right Linux distribution (eg. AVLinux) then I would wager that its about 20 minutes from starting the install to "press the record button", with almost all of that being the distribution installation (it comes with Ardour already installed).

There's nothing to be done about the proliferation of Linux distributions that are not suitable for pro-audio or music creation workflows. It is a natural consequence of Linux' ecosystem that there are many, many distributions, each with different goals. A lot of people expect that "Linux is Linux is Linux", but for audio work, this isn't true. Installing Ubuntu and expecting that tools like Ardour will just work is incorrect and bound to lead to disappointment. It just isn't their target.

Note that Ardour no longer requires JACK on Linux. And this thread is actually about the release of Ardour 5.0, which runs on OS X, Linux and Windows. It seems a bit sad that people just want to talk about the situation on Linux as though that's the only place the program runs.

[metakeule]

I am using the latest AVLinux with the latest Ardour on a machine dedicated to Linux-Audio. I get lots of dropouts/xruns, crashes in Ardour etc. MuSE not running properly at all (losing connection to jack). The only things running reliable are Renoise, Tracktion, MuseScore and SuperCollider and only if I don't use jack, but just alsa exclusively. Been very disappointed with Ardour. Always crashing with demanding plugins (e.g. drumgizmo), with "kind of" video support etc. Also disfunctional in some areas like Midi-Editing, CD-Cue-Export, layered Midi-recording. User interface too complicated and obscured. Hate to say it, but I considered dealing with Ardour to be a waste of time.

[SwellJoe]

And this thread is actually about the release of Ardour 5.0, which runs on OS X, Linux and Windows.

Yeah, I noticed that, and that's awesome. But, I want to run it on Linux! That's one of the very big selling points of Ardour, for me, and one reason I would pick it over Reaper (on the day when I finally do pick it over Reaper).

I hope I was clear that I'm on your team. I want Ardour to be successful, and I want Linux to be a platform capable of media production. And, when I'm able, Ardour is one of the OSS projects I donate to.

But, maybe I'll try it on Windows sometime. That would certainly solve the VST problems, among several others.