This has probably been answered before but her it is: I have been financially supporting Ardour for a while but haven’t had a time to actually use it much. I have just rebuilt my computer and installed Fedora Jam on it which includes Ardour 5.12. What is the difference between the free version included with Fedora and the one I can download from the website?
The one you get from the Ardour website is guaranteed to be built with the correct versions of the required libraries = stability. Also the version you get from a distro repo is not supported by the Ardour devs. So if you have any problems with that you are first asked to download the official version from Ardour.org and test with that.
So just always use the version you can download from Ardour.org 
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As a Fedora + Ardour user I must comment that the Fedora provided RPM version, for me, seems to works flawlessly except for one minor detail: some WAV files cannot be imported due to an error in the Fedora sndfile library. I don’t know what version of the sndfile library is included in the Fedora Jam distro, but I have a fix for that should you run into this problem.