Yikes, tried to use Ardour multiple times back in the day (I used to work as an independent radio producer and sound engineer). Classic open source desktop software in that it promised the world, but in practice was extremely difficult to even get to install, and reliant on external packages that were themselves glitchy and baroque (I believe Jack was the common issue in this case).
The prebuilt binaries of Ardour that we supply have no external dependencies except for libc, the native window system (X11, Cocoa/Quartz, etc), and libstc++. Since Ardour 5.0, JACK has been optional.
Every week, more or less, someone tells me that Ardour is a piece of shit, and someone else tells me it's the best DAW they've ever used. I gave up believing that any given DAW could ever make everyone happy about a decade ago.
