Things have come leaps and bounds on Linux in the past 5-ish years. Linux is now viable (if not recommendable) for professional audio production. It wasn't be

Things have come leaps and bounds on Linux in the past 5-ish years. Linux is now viable (if not recommendable) for professional audio production. It wasn't before. Not only has Ardour gotten better, but also Bitwig is available, and Reaper too. Bitwig has the most polished UI, but Reaper has a particularly dedicated user base and is very extensible, if a little hard on the eyes. Routing MIDI is mostly a matter of using QJackCtl, which isn't pretty, but it gets the job done (and really, MIDI routing isn't pretty on any platform). Again, I wouldn't recommend someone building a system from the ground up for music production to go for Linux, but for someone who's already a long-time Linux user, it is now finally possible to do music production at a non-toyish level without switching OSes. As a side note, loads of audio "devices" (synths, grooveboxes, etc.) these days are just ARM devices running a modified Linux audio stack.