I’ve happily paid for and used Ardour for a couple years now, starting on Kubuntu 23.10 and through Kubuntu 24.04. I’ve written, recorded, mixed, and mastered a handful of metal tracks for my project, all using 20-ish plugins total. I’ve not had any issues with latency (got round-trip to 7-8ms) or xruns on my Scarlett 2i2 with a 128 quantum, 48000 sample rate.
I’ve since moved on from Kubuntu 24.04 and have installed both Fedora 41 and Arch (CachyOS) to trial them both (I use the computer for gaming as well, and these distros ship with newer drivers that support multi-monitor VRR among other things that Kubuntu LTS did not).
On both of these distros, configured as close as possible for audio work as my Kubuntu LTS was, with all recommendations in rtcqs followed, and with the pipewire settings for my Scarlett 2i2 the same (128/48000). The round trip latency measures the same…but unfortunately Ardour is not usable. Even just simple playback of my existing projects results in thousands of xruns, glitchy audio, the the whole Ardour app and playback freezing for seconds at a time. I have to loosen the quantum to 512 to get glitch-free playback. This is in BOTH Fedora and Arch, the same exact issue (but not in Kubuntu LTS).
I re-created one of my projects in Bitwig 5.2, as identically as possible, with the same exact plugins, mix, and even track volume, in a painful effort to determine if this was a distro issue or Ardour. And to my surprise, Bitwig has no such performance issue and happily plays back and records glitch free with the same quantum/rate that causes Ardour to completely fall over.
I’ve left both Fedora 41 and Arch installed to see if this issue ever gets resolved. So far, no. So I’m wondering if this is something that is being looked at? I much prefer Ardour to Bitwig, maybe because I am used to it, but also for the open source philosophy. But the terrible performance is a non-starter.