actually I'm not sure what's considered the direct commercial competitor here for post-processing audio.
Audio is an interesting market. Sound Forge comes to mind, but based on the time I've spent in studios, I'm going to speculate that professional audio is either done with hardware, or really old software.
The particular example I'm thinking of was a MacOS9 computer (in 2009 or so). The tech told me two things kept him back; he had all the plugins he needed for the software he used (and that many were not available in newer suites), and something about realtime recording.
Most commercial studios would be running either Pro Tools, Cubase/Nuendo or Logic. There is nothing in the open-source world that comes even remotely close to rivaling any of these packages at the moment.
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).
Ardour is a cool project but again, it's not remotely close to Pro Tools, Logic, Cubase, or even REAPER. It's like comparing a military aircraft carrier with a canoe, sure they both float on water but they're not even in the same league.
I've kept up with Ardour progress over the past 6 years and it has consistently gone nowhere while the major players innovate continuously. The assertion that Ardour has a chance at competing with the professional packages is absurd given that they've been promising basic MIDI support for years now, a feature that was present in software packages on the Atari. Add to that the fact that the project doesn't even have a roadmap for future development and it all looks pretty grim.
My previous career was audio engineering, and I can't help but laugh when the FOSS crowd insist that Ardour and Audacity are capable of replacing the industry leading software packages.
Having used both, Ardour has a long way to go before it's remotely close to Pro Tools, even SE.
I think you might see interest in the platform develop if there weren't dozens of distributions to worry about. The distributions hamper Linux development, because you have dozens of different variants to try on, all with different versions of things and different bugs. As another commenter said, I bet you could get something Pro Tools quality if there was a consistent Linux-based desktop, not four or five frontrunners all doing GNOME differently.
Audio is an interesting market. Sound Forge comes to mind, but based on the time I've spent in studios, I'm going to speculate that professional audio is either done with hardware, or really old software.
The particular example I'm thinking of was a MacOS9 computer (in 2009 or so). The tech told me two things kept him back; he had all the plugins he needed for the software he used (and that many were not available in newer suites), and something about realtime recording.