Either your experience is really not so up to date, or you are being disingenuous about your own professional skills with Ubuntu Studio. Perhaps you have shitty hardware that requires vendor proprietary drivers - I don't. All my digital I/o is supported by Linux out of the box on JACK. I don't have to configure anything to get my 56+ channels of digital I/o (Presonus) working - just wire up to JACK and get on with work.
Another thing: in my configuration, REAPER runs better on Ubuntu Studio than it does on Windows - and not to forget that out of the box you have everything in a base Ubuntu Studio install, ready to go. Literally hundreds of plugins, already installed. Tons of usable DAW apps onboard, ready to go. No iLok, no downloads, no Catalina-style upgrade disasters disabling everything that was once working - oh, but we do have sources for everything, though.
Now, what you describe matches my experience with Mac recently, specifically after a Catalina upgrade in which absolutely nothing worked and that particular part of the studio was not production-ready for days of paid customer time until it all got sorted. Good thing we had REAPER on Ubuntu Studio to use for tracking while a junior engineer struggled to get the MacOS DAW back in shape ..
I'm glad your experience with Ubuntu Studio was positive! I don't know why you accused me of being disingenuous; I assure you I was not. Recording audio in was seamless, as you mentioned. Plugins were frequently unstable, however, and crashed my computer. It was hard to figure out what worked, and it was hard to find a decent convolution reverb that sounded as good as Space Designer. The only software I found that had easy timing adjustments was Tracktion, and that also crashed frequently. It was hard to use MIDI tracks side by side with audio, both because the interface of Ardour was confusing and because (shock) it crashed frequently when I tried to. And it took way too many steps to load an SFZ library. I certainly have problems with macOS too, but I really am desperate to leave Apple entirely, and I wish Linux worked for music for me.
All that crashing sounds to me like you had bung hardware somewhere.
Anyway I can only encourage you to have a closer look at Ubuntu Studio in a fresh instance. It really has been very stable and quite productive for me.
Another thing: in my configuration, REAPER runs better on Ubuntu Studio than it does on Windows - and not to forget that out of the box you have everything in a base Ubuntu Studio install, ready to go. Literally hundreds of plugins, already installed. Tons of usable DAW apps onboard, ready to go. No iLok, no downloads, no Catalina-style upgrade disasters disabling everything that was once working - oh, but we do have sources for everything, though.
Now, what you describe matches my experience with Mac recently, specifically after a Catalina upgrade in which absolutely nothing worked and that particular part of the studio was not production-ready for days of paid customer time until it all got sorted. Good thing we had REAPER on Ubuntu Studio to use for tracking while a junior engineer struggled to get the MacOS DAW back in shape ..