I've had a few demos of Ardour in action and have yet to see it not crash during one. It always looked to me like they focus too much on adding every little bell and whislte (LADSPA, Jack, etc) before getting the basics working well. That is hardly uncommon in my experience with Open Source software.
I contribute some code to the cross-platform multi-media application Pure-Data (
http://puredata.org), which is a graphically oriented programming environment for audio, video and MIDI. I mainly concentrate on OSX, but have a good deal of experience working with it on Linux as well.
Another problem with Linux is the lack of choices for audio hardware. The RME gear is pretty good, but that's really the only 'pro' level interface on the platform. More hardware developer support for Linux would improve the audio situation immensely.
I would like to use Linux more for audio and video, but to be perfectly honest, I spend a lot more time working on getting things working and testing half-finished software under Linux than actually producing work. The unimaginative, copy-cat GUIs available have always struck me as a missed opportunity, and some of the dressed up Win 98 wannabes are just tragic.
