I have been using FL Studio for years. It was easy to pirate when I was younger and broke, and it’s still flexible enough for anything I want to do now without hassle. (The license these days is “meh” for clips and plugins. However, I am designing and beginning to record most of my own instruments now with a core set of plugins.)
I would like to experiment with an open source DAW, but not sure which routes to take there.
Ardour is the most popular (and probably most robust) option for Linux, and also available for Windows and MacOS. I don’t think Reaper is open source, but it’s “free” and by all accounts from people I know who use it, it’s a great DAW.