I have been using Ubuntustudio for about 4 years now. Kernel panic never, low latency? yes. If you only have one audio interface pulse just works, other wise turn the other cards off in pulse and use only jack as it’s back end. 16.04 already has ardour4.4 in it. I do not know if 4.6 will make it or not… As for too many plugins, US has allowed choosing what you include in your install for about a year now. Things could move faster, but for doing audio it is the best ubuntu flavour to work with. XFCE is much more stable than unity as a desktop.
I’m using UbuntuStudio (12.04, now 14.04) and KXStudio (12.04) on several systems. Both run fine, I like KXStudio because of its surface. But it seems to me that a third distribution runs even more reliable on my systems: TangoStudio ( http://tangostudio.tuxfamily.org/ ) based on Debian 7.
Unfortunately TangoStudio is not maintained any more since last spring :-(… so I fear I will have to say Goodbye to it as soon as Debian 7 gets too old…
Allank, I’m rebuilding gentoostudio.org on a new server. If you want to give it a try when I green-light the install instructions, I’d love to hear any feedback you might have. 
My Fedora 27 with either ardour6 or mixbus6 never crashes or locks up, and is the system in other ways as well. BUT, it’s not tweaked for low latency at all, so has all those troubles. I suspect that CCRMA could fix this.
I also tried LinuxMint 19.3 with Ubuntu Studio Audio and low latency, both from the Ubuntu repo. That solved all the xrun issues. But, the system locked on me about once an hour during 5 hrs of use. Some of that looks to be nouveau driver related. My GeForce 7200 gs isn’t supported by nVidia for Linux anymore, and the legacy support for nVidia in Ubuntu only goes back about half as far as nVidia does.
I think CCRMA may be my best bet.
Before switching to CCRMA with Fedora I tried an experiment using
- The already installed LinuxMint 19.3
- The already installed ubuntustudio-lowlatency and ubuntustudio-audio
- The already installed nouveau video drivers
Then I installed XFCE as the desktop, and ran it instead of Cinnamon. The result is a stable Mixbus6 setup without a single xrun.
I hope this is useful for someone else!
Cheerio…
Nowadays since version 11 ( Bullseye ) came out, Debian has started to (slowly) deprecate PulseAudio in favor of PipeWire. This is a good move, I was able to remove that awful PulseAudio software from my latest install. Lo and behold - Firefox video sound still worked, even with Jack Audio Connection running!! No xruns, crackles or runaway processor usage 
I tried pipewire on a debian based laptop that I keep in my rehearsal room. I was not impressed. I have 2 USBStreamers (by miniDSP) to collect the ADAT optical output of 2 MOTU 8pre (can’t be bothered to use the firewire driver which still sucks, i.e. produces a LOT of noise). Anyway, one of my streamers did not show up, and the other one was displaying weird sounding port names.
I went back to jack and zita-a2j (for browser sound, I’ve always used the snd-aloop trick but just for playback). Everything in my sound setup lives in jack and works really great. When pipewire matures and stops giving audio ports weird names, I will try it again.
If I was only using ardour without the need to add extra input channels via ADAT/USB, I would use pure ALSA. I’ve worked with ardour with both jack and ALSA for many years and bypassing jack in favour of direct ALSA is really nice when I don’t need extra things to patch to my session.
At the moment, LibraZiK Studio, based on Debian 10, is the most reliable and most lightweight audio distribution on my systems.
Michael
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