For me is less about changing the code myself and more into being able to talk with other people to solve it’s issues, in my case I’ve had reported some bugs for my distro maintainers that they not only responded but fixed it in a good matter of time, something that I can’t be sure will happen with other proprietary OS.

Ardour is a DAW, kinda harder and imo overkill to use for simple tasks like cutting audio

falkTX from KXStudios is forking audacity and will be publishing a non-telemetry version somewhere in the future