It is cheaper, supports Linux and I start to think it is also the better DAW.
It's on flathub so you can try it on any distro and see if you like it.
There are even projects like this that let you restore the missing parts and use it elsewhere, but it's kinda buggy: https://github.com/velkajelka/linux-native-ableton
For open source, Ardour but yeah...
https://github.com/shibco/ableton-linux
They have a custom wine version that is built specifically to fix ableton issues on linux. I haven't tried this myself but I have heard good things about it on their discord.
If you mean device drivers, it can be a bit hit or miss, generally stuff works but for example I have an SSL audio interface and while the audio works, it's missing a lot of the configuration options that the Windows drivers give you around customisable audio routing.
Maybe timing is the wrong word. Latency is definitely a related concern.
If something needs to fire every 1209 ms then it can't get fired in 1232 ms this time and then 1198 ms next time. Maybe a better term would be clock jitter or drift?
As I understand it, a DAW needs something close to a RTOS.
You might need to tweak kernel settings for better latency https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Professional_audio#Optimizi...
all plugins in Ardour run in the app's process, so if one crashed - you might lose the project.
But UX for MIDI editing in Ardour is so much nicer than Reaper's to my taste.