MIDI: those Atari apps you're thinking of didn't do audio.
General utility: perhaps you need to talk to various people who do, in fact, use Ardour instead of ProTools. As for the comparison with Reaper - Reaper is a very impressive project, but if you try it for pro- usage rather than home-style recording, you will very rapidly discover quite a lot of basic issues that they have not addressed, but were being done correctly by Ardour 8 years ago. I look to Reaper for good ideas and impressive development speed, but they really are focused on the needs of a different type of market segment than I really pay the most attention to.
It is true that there is no single DAW that is to everyone's taste, and Ardour is probably a more "acquired" taste than many others. At this time, I would say that more or less no DAW can easily "replace" any of the others. You can't really replace ProTools with Nuendo either.
jsprinkles: we distribute binary copies of Ardour from ardour.org that run on any Linux distribution (just about - we discovered a wrinkle that interferes with this on a few platforms, and the next release(s) will correct this).
Roadmaps: http://tracker.ardour.org/roadmap_page.php http://ardour.org/development/post3.0
MIDI: those Atari apps you're thinking of didn't do audio.
General utility: perhaps you need to talk to various people who do, in fact, use Ardour instead of ProTools. As for the comparison with Reaper - Reaper is a very impressive project, but if you try it for pro- usage rather than home-style recording, you will very rapidly discover quite a lot of basic issues that they have not addressed, but were being done correctly by Ardour 8 years ago. I look to Reaper for good ideas and impressive development speed, but they really are focused on the needs of a different type of market segment than I really pay the most attention to.
It is true that there is no single DAW that is to everyone's taste, and Ardour is probably a more "acquired" taste than many others. At this time, I would say that more or less no DAW can easily "replace" any of the others. You can't really replace ProTools with Nuendo either.
jsprinkles: we distribute binary copies of Ardour from ardour.org that run on any Linux distribution (just about - we discovered a wrinkle that interferes with this on a few platforms, and the next release(s) will correct this).
disclaimer: I am the lead author of Ardour.