I have 2 versions of Ardour installed on my machine.
Ardour 3.5.403 preinstalled on my ubuntu studio distro
at “/usr/bin/ardour3”
and Ardour 4.1 installed , found at “/opt/Ardour-4.1.0/bin/ardour4”.
Since i will be upgrading to 16.04 i decided to delete both and install fresh after upgrade.
How would u recommend uninstalling them, and would u advice me to install ardour 5 as soon as it comes out, or would 4.7 be more stable and i would have to wait for 5.1 instead for more stability ?
“I hope nobody got the impression I was criticicing Ardour or the developers”
I didn’t get that impression.
“One can also always use the old and new versions of Ardour side by side.”
Good point.
The cleanest way to upgrade is to wipe your disk clean and start from scratch. This will give you the most stable system, and also remove both installations of Ardour.
You can also uninstall Ardour 3.5 with your distros package manager, choices are Ubuntu Software Center, Synaptic (if you installed it) or the command-line tool apt-get.
With apt-get you do it like this. Open the terminal and write the following command:
sudo apt-get remove ardour3
The command asks for your password.
I’m not sure how to uninstall Ardour4.1. You can leave it be and upgrade your os. Then it is probably best to reinstall Ardour4, be sure to grab the latest 4.7 version from this site. Many bugs since version 4.1 has been fixed in 4.7. When you run the 4.7 installer it finds the old 4.1 installation and asks you if you want to remove the old Ardour4.1 as it install the new 4.7.
All x.0 versions of any software are sure to have lots of bugs in them. If stability and correct operation are important to you stick with 4.7 for about 6 months after 5.0 is released. After that you could start testing the 5.x line.
This is true with any software, not just Ardour. The non obvious bugs will only be found after real people start using the software in real life situations. There are hundreds of different workflows and the developers can’t test them all, they cant even be aware of them all. It is best to consider all x.0 software as a public beta which needs real life hammering to get the hidden new bugs to appear.
To uninstall Ardour installed from this site, see:
http://ardour.org/first_time_linux.html
I disagree with waiting 6 months to upgrade to Ardour 5.0. Each version removes bugs and implements fixes. The Ardour developers consistently recommend using the latest version. Pre-emptively declaring 5.0 unstable prior to its release and any confirmation of an actual issue does not seem like good advice. You can always roll back to 4.7 if a specific issue is identified, but if no issue exists, I don’t think you gain anything by being a version behind.
I’m the IT / audio support guy at work I speak from experience, I also do some coding myself 
I’m not trying to downplay Ardour developers here, I have the greatest respect for them, and I use their product almost every day
However my experience is that most x.0 releases of any software are troublesome, because these releases introduce lots of new features = new code = new bugs. That is why all the x.1, x.2, x.3 versions are released later, they fix the bugs found in x.0. We are now on bugfix release 7 on the 4.x line and I consider 4.7 very stable.
I also wait 5.0 eagerly, but plan only evaluate it after the release and keep using 4.7 until I see bug reporting on mantis slowing down
I hope nobody got the impression I was criticicing Ardour or the developers, I was talking generally about software x.0 releases, not blaiming Ardour in any way.
One can also always use the old and new versions of Ardour side by side.