Personally, I'm a huge fan of ardour and I'd rather see that on the front page of hn opposed to reaper myself. It's been updated fairly regularly over the years i've used it and it's an awesome DAW to use. The open source audio software community doesn't really get the credit it deserves. Most of the software has come a long way over the last ten years and getting a professional level setup using only open source software is doable without insane amounts of effort.

One of the things on my TODO list that I never get around to is getting back up to speed with the Audacity codebase and making its PCM waveforms look like the actual wave rather than join-the-dots.

So many random people use Audacity because it's zero cost, and every one of those people is an opportunity to implicitly teach what's actually going.

Yes, they could all go watch Monty's excellent video showing what's going on, but they needn't do that if the tools we give them show everything properly in the first place, they'd just assume "Right I guess it's magic somehow" and only need Monty's video if they needed to actually understand (or argue with people who are wrong on the Internet).

Everything else about Audacity is pitched just right for an audience that doesn't need a full-blown DAW anyway.

You're right. I edited my comment. I'm very new to this space and have a lot to learn.