[dec0dedab0de]

technically Ardour is free as in free speech, but not as in free beer. They do not have official binary downloads for free. If I remember correcyly its more involved than ./configure && make && make install Though Ubuntu Studio has a version ready to go.

[Joeboy]

Lots of software that's considered free-as-in-speech-and-beer doesn't have official binary downloads at all. Ardour additionally provides the option of paying to download an official binary. Building from source is pretty much the same as anything else, although there are quite a lot of dependencies. If you're used to installing from source there's no reason Ardour should give you any great difficulty (unless you're unlucky and your distro doesn't supply the required dependencies or something).

[jononor]

It is waf configure/build/install.

Ardour is also available as binary packages on every Linux distribution.