Renoise, on the other hand, is a DAW with a tracker interface. It's a very different workflow.
I paid $75 for Renoise about 6 years ago and it's been great using it on Linux via Jack. It works flawlessly and is highly polished.. it's as good as any other commercial audio application that I've used, but it's very different from anything that's not a tracker. I use it in conjunction with a lot of VST plugins that I run through Wine and some native Linux plugins from u-he, which also work great.
My impression is that most people use Renoise for making electronic music (which is how I use it too), for which it's very well suited.
In my own experience, however, using the usual tracker workflow is not that great for manual exploration, however Renoise has lots of free third-party Lua scripts that can help with that, and it's also great for manipulating and sequencing samples.
Here's a video on doing some advanced reverb processing with it: [1]
Lots of ways to use it.
The other thing I've heard that at least in older versions of Renoise (not sure how it is in the newest versions) it wasn't great for recording really long samples. So if you want to do something like record a live band's jam session or something you'll probably want to use something else. Renoise is best for working with shorter samples (or with synths or other VSTs or generating its own music).