FL Studio is a very, very different sort of DAW than, well, just about every other DAW (including Ardour). If you were moving from Cubase, Logic, Studio One, ProTools, Digital Performer etc., then I'd say you would miss very little by switching to Ardour other than some of the builtin plugins for those DAWs.
But if you have become used to the FL Studio workflow, Ardour (and the list of DAWs above) are likely to feel clunky and unproductive.
Good to know, I didn't mind Cubase's workflow per se, it's just that Cubase was 1) super buggy and unstable, and 2) ridiculously expensive, and updates cost a lot. That also factored into leaving.
I'll give Ardour a try, thanks for the response and congrats on the release!
FWIW, I would absolutely recommend learning a regular linear DAW in addition to FL Studio. I'm not an FL user, I'm a heavy Ableton Live user (entirely because of Max for Live), and it is also "non-standard". There are a lot of things that are much, much faster in DAWs from the pro-tools oriented lineage and it is well worth the few seconds it takes to copy audio from one to the other at times.
I'm aware, I've used Cubase long-term, as well as a number of other ones in the past. FL Studio still gives me the fastest iteration speed out of all of them so far.
However, I don't think that's due to FL Studio somehow being architected better or worse. I just think its score ("piano roll") editing controls are much better than most other DAWs I've used and it gets out of my way for the most part when trying to get things from brain to screen ASAP.
As someone who isn't very well versed in DAWs can someone give a breakdown of how FL Studio is different than others? I see references to "regular linear" below so what makes FL Studio not that? Sorry for the basic questions.
FL Studio groups everything into patterns, and then the patterns are arranged to form a song. Traditional DAWS just place audio/MIDI data directly into the song, without abstracting those pieces away.
If you're making something like hip hop or EDM, where there's a lot of repetition, then this functionality in FL Studio can be helpful. But it also has a lot of weak areas compared to other DAWs.
But if you have become used to the FL Studio workflow, Ardour (and the list of DAWs above) are likely to feel clunky and unproductive.