KXStudio is a good distro. I’m running Windows at present because my sound hardware (Allen & Heath ICE-16) is relatively new and Linux drivers tend to take a few years.

What I don’t like about Windows is the restrictive technology- for example I’d like to be able to back up and restore my whole hard disk without being hindered by all the copy-protection systems. In the past I’ve chosen pirate software even if I’ve got a licence for that package, because there’s no faffing about re-installing and so forth.

I’m very interested in trying Ardour 4, my experience with 3.5 was very positive, it actually sounds better at the same bit depth and sample rate than a Windows Pro Tools 11 equivalent IMHO. The only thing really lacking was decent MIDI editing and that looks like it’s been fixed.

For some reason I’ve had a lot of difficulty running Audacity on both Linux and Windows, it doesn’t seem to like my hardware in both setups.

With a bit of luck, there should be some drivers soon if not already, the hardware being about 2 years old, and I’ll try a dual boot. One odd problem has been the removal of PCI slots from modern boards, which meant replacing perfectly adequate audio hardware.

A forum here dedicated to open source software would be very useful, especially now Linux is providing workable pro-audio applications.