On the begining of this post i could tell You: my English can be not so good.
Ok. Lets write…
I working on ardour 2.8.
Yesterday i finished records of drums, piano and bass for my new song. I make dub-style effects on drums and I record drums with fx’s to new track, because my computer is not so fast, and i need to free some Memory/CPU resources.
Next, for 2 hours I worked on bass-guitar line. Bass was recorder not in time, so I split it into small pieces and move this pieces to the rhythm of drums. This is very tiring work, but effect are great. Additionaly, i add low pass filter with automation of cutoff frequency. All sounds great.
Then… Ardour crashes… After 10 minuters of not responding Ardour window i killed them and re-open ardour. My bass-guitar pieces are #$%^&* broken. Each piece have the same fade to next piece, and some pieces cover other pieces All work is broken.
My automation are broken too. I wrote lines like U letter, but now there are like V letter. All liquid changes of filter param, are now jumping changes.
My project is happy reaggae song, but when I get angry because of this crash and broken work, my reggae mood are lost
There is point when i think about leave ardour, and making music on linux When i record or make simple things all is ok. But when my project has many regions on several tracks with automation, then ardour makes very bad thing.
When musicans/producers/… using daw, then they want to use it for several hours and don’t think: “Please dont crash”. We need to think about music, not about computer science. After my yesterday experience i know that ardour currently is unreliable. Before, I think about ardour good. This is truely functional application. But i need this funcionality in small and in big projects.
re: VST support - i apologize but we cannot offer any support for VST builds. Running plugins written for windows on a Linux system is such an incredibly wierd thing to do. Although we are glad it is possible to do with some plugins, it is simply impossible for us to claim or promise that any VST plugin will run correctly in this environment. Success depends just as much on another huge project (Wine) as it does on Ardour, and while we are trying to improve Ardour’s contribution to the success rate, we can’t do anything about what Wine does.
I use fresh installed Debian Lenny. For longer work i use fluxbox, because of they lightweight. Jack is from repository. Now i don’t remember exactly version of Jack, becasuse i’m not in home.
When ardour crash…
I know several situations when ardour crashes:
when trying to “freeze” track with many regions. dont know how many exactly, but this crash happens on 2 minutes track splitted on distance every 1 -3 seconds
when using vst - I currently leave ardourvst, because with vst this crashes many times (when adding plugin to pre- or post- fader or when project playing)
i dont know this are repaired in ardour 2.8 but previously in 2.7 ardour crashes when i writing automation close to right end of tracks screen.
I hope, my informations are helpful. I’m programmer too and i know meaning of users tests.
There seems to be some serious issues here A crash doesn’t have to be too bad, but when it breaks your audio it is! Maybe it’s good to analyze what went wrong if that’s possible?
I’m not an dev so I can’t help you, but I hope and expect that the Ardour devs will takes this serious. This is more important then having Ardour3 with MIDI out imho…
and re-open ardour. My bass-guitar pieces are #$%^&* broken. Each piece have the same fade to next piece, and some pieces cover other pieces 
All work is broken.