So I just ditched Windows, but then realized that my music production stuff (mostly REAPER and a few free VSTs) are all Windows/Mac only.
Audio on Linux is fun (as in, pain). JACK seems to be really flexible but is a pain to set up correctly.

Any of you use Linux for music production? Any advice?

I'm using Elementary. Essentially, I need:
1. A good DAW for recording, minimal MIDI.
2. A good sampler.
3. Standard plugin suite - reverb, eq, filters, compressors, delays, etc. I'm not too choosy.
4. Basic synths (I'll be happy with a simple saw/square wave generator, but the more the merrier).

How's Ardour? Compiling it from source right now.

REAPER on Wine doesn't run well for me, so that's out. And they don't have a native Linux version yet.

(no Bitwig, please, I'm not ready to pay $300 or whatever right now)

Is anyone familiar with Bitwig? It's a pretty good DAW and you can write your own controller scripts in JS. I bought two controllers (Launchpad Mini and Launch Control), one of which has a really outdated factory script and the other one doesn't have anything, so I decided to update the existing one and port it over to the other controller. They do similar stuff.

I started going through the code and I think it gave me cancer. It has many gems, but so far this is my favourite. The second is a function that takes two parameters and returns false.