On my Mac and PC all I have to do is install the program (Reason, Cubase, etc), a few VST instruments, and it's ready to go. Is there a program for Linux that is as straight forward as this? Or does everything rely on that Jack Server? Jack Server doesn't want to work on either of my computers, and I'm getting really REALLY tired of trying to make it work.

Forgive my frustration. It's been a long day...

Your help would be greatly appreciated.

I hear you, and no but...
There are a couple of ways you can make your life easier.
Jack might refuse to start if other applications use the soundcard. - A simple flash video in firefox can be problematic. So close everything that might conflict if it doesn't start.
Use qjackctl to manage it.
I think ubuntustudio provides you with a package that allows you to save your program setup - it should start jack + synths/daw/sequencer or whatever in the right order. If you installed the ubuntu-studio package you migth already have it in the sound/video section.
If you haven't, beware - the ubuntustudio-audio meta-package installs a lot of crap.

I personally use REAPER in wine - for a couple of months now reaper officially claims wine-compatibility. You can symlink wineasio to jack so you won't have to start it manually. I don't know how you do that with ardour or the like though.
Anyway - I suggest you try reaper. I've been using Cubase since VST-32, and I started using REAPER professionally 2 years ago. I wouldn't give it up for any other daw. It also works as a VST host for linux.

http://reaper.fm/

Here's a nice, but arguably too detailed howto:
http://www.cockos.com/forum/showthre...highlight=wine

It works if you just install it with wine, so you can see if you like it. You can follow the howto later to optimize it.

Thank you for the reply, oskar. I'm going to try out Reaper right now!

But guess what I found... LMMS!
http://lmms.sourceforge.net

It works without Jack! I'm so happy.

Yes it is possible to use Rosegarden without Jackd, but only if you want to use Pure MIDI composition you can disable Jack startup by configuring the menu option:

Settings -> Configure Rosegarden... -> Audio -> Jack Startup

and disable Jack Daemon from there.

Also you could compile Rosegarden without Jack support if you wish. But you need to get the source code for that.

You could then add sounds using a different application after using Jackd for MIDI composition (because I believe Rosegarden is the best MIDI creation tool out there and I've tried plenty of others)

I am sure that Rosegarden doesn't need Jack for normal usage. But if you need audio as well as MIDI, then you need Jackd.