User interface and ease of use
It’s the nerve centre, so it’d better be good.
S ometimes, particularly in the case of open source software, developers are better at solving the technical problems than the user interface/experience problem. Even designing a colour theme that works in every situation can be surprisingly difficult to achieve in the case of DAWs.
As with all applications, the GUI of DAW software has evolved over the years, and at a glance you can tell that all five of these DAWs adhere to a similar UI paradigm. The hub, if you will, of the user interface experience is the arrangement view. This shows the overall layout of the piece of music. Upon this, there are a series of oblong boxes (with various names in the different software) that contain the actual note data or audio data, and double-clicking this typically opens an editor. Which implementation of this approach is the best?