I tried to get Ardour working on Deb Bookworm a couple of years ago when it was still the Testing version. Various things went wrong despite help from kind people on this forum, and in the end I didn't have time to muck about and have been using Ubuntu Studio ever since. However, Deb 12 was recently released, which happens to coincide with getting a new(ish) laptop, so I'm trying out Deb 12 on the old one.
My audio requirements are very simple. I use Ardour and I have a Behringer UMC22 that handles mic/headphones input/output. This all works well with Ubuntu Studio, but was the setup that caused difficulties with Deb Testing.
I have a completely clean installation of Deb 12 on laptop. I installed the jackd2 package. I then tried installing Studio Controls (see https://ovenwerks.github.io/studio-controls/ because it seems to work well and be easy to use on Ubuntu). No problem with the installation but when it runs it gives an error saying "No module named jack". I tried qjackctl instead but it also gave an error message about failing to find jack. I removed both of them and installed Ardour on its own. And it works! When I start it, the UMC22 is listed as both an input and an output device and I chose it. I vaguely remember that this completely failed to do anything in the past, but now it works without any problem as far as I can tell. The version of Ardour is more recent than the one in Ubuntu Studio LTS.
I have no idea what is going on in the background here. I presume it might be that Deb 12 has firewire sound? This, I gather, is supposed to "solve all audio problems" in Linux - just like many of its predecessors were supposed to. I've read some fairly negative comments about it here and there, but maybe it solves enough of the problems for what I want.
Given the old adages of "if it aint broke..." and "kiss" it seems that everything works ootb and there is nothing else to be done. Am I missing something? Or has audio on Linux actually improved?