[dead] New opportunity or just another failed attempt by the Linux camp?

I'd prefer a linux native version of Live and Wavelab... running them through wine is almost but not good enough. I don't have the time and energy to learn another sequencer, etc... let alone one that is still very far from having expected standard features.

I would LOVE for there to be good alternatives, or native ports of big name win/mac DAWs and such, but the efforts are hamstrung by a number of reasons. It's frustrating and slow going, but I think it's in everyone's best interest to keep an open mind and support the linux and open source community whenever possible.

I've never actually tried ardour, but supposedly, it's very good.

JACK however is much better than anything Win or OSX have to offer, low latency, freely routable etc. - it's just great. There's only a small amount of native linux plugins (discoDSP Discovery, discoDSP HighLife, the awesome Loomer range, especially Aspect, the mda plugin collection...), but I suppose it's still much better than what people had to deal with ten years ago. Plus rock solid OS, makes linux a great choice if you don't need to run any of the more popular plugins.

While the software that portableapps.com provides is opensource, their releases are only for Windows, so I'm not sure what this has to do with Linux.

Regardless, from what I understand, the music production suite is just a few of the standard portable apps, just in one package -- and the only one that looks properly music related is Audacity, which sucks big time, IMO. Looks entirely pointless to me; nothing more than a bit of advertising for opensourcehiphop.org.