Hello, fellow Linux user here of 6 years off and on (Mepis - Xandros)
Take a peek at
Studio To Go. I have not had the chance to grab the download, but this distro looks interesting. And I don't have any problems paying for a Linux distro that has been put together and tweaked for me, I am getting to the point I just want to sit down and write/record some tunes. I have done all the make/ root stuff I care to at this point.
Ardour is really a strange one to get your head around, but it is a usable DAW with a lot of features. I have used Rosegarden off and on since it was knee high to a penguin, but it seems more towards the "composer" type. I am a drummer - bass - guitar solo band.
Hydrogen with the
ns_kit sounds is a nice setup. Audacity is very workable up to 6 or 8 tracks, then it starts having "issues" for me on my 1.2 AMD with 640mb memory, a G-Force 64mb AGP card, and a Darla20 PCI card. Jack is THE piece of software that is going to make Linux the one to use for audio, this is a nice piece of software.
Here are some other links I check out once a week to see if anything is cooking.....
http://sound.condorow.net/ (this one kicks I think...)
http://protux.sourceforge.net/index.php
http://loss.access-space.net/
http://jacklab.net/
Also, tho unrelated, I just ran across this little distro 2 weeks ago called
GeeXboX. It is a 8mb ISO download. You burn it to CD and reboot your system. It loads into memory, ejects the disk, and you have the Linux equivalent of the windows media OS, only this one works 100%, at least so far. It has played everything that I have thrown at it, including DVD's with most of the menus available, and all of my Quicktime clips (they play better on GeeXboX than they do on Quicktime on my system mentioned above).
Hope this helps in some way, and Enjoy The Journey!