As someone who recently started dabbling in this area, can someone explain how Arduor is different from Audacity in its features. I know the telemetry issue in Audacity, I'm interested to understand feature differences and ease of usage.
Audacity is primarily an audo file editor: you load (or record) a file into it, carry out destructive edits (i.e. the data on disk is modified), and then save the result.
Ardour is a digital audio workstation, which mostly implies that it is a non-destructive, non-linear system. Edits in Ardour do not change any of the media data on disk (everything is done with meta-data). Ardour is designed to handle track counts that Audacity could not dream of (100+), does realtime FX processing (coming to Audacity in the next version) rather than having to process the data and write a new file on disk, and is generally much more capable for handling multi-track audio.
Each one has its place. If you are really just editing an audio file, Audacity is likely to have less of a learning curve. If you involved in music creation or composition or recording, Ardour is much more likely to be the appropriate tool.
Audacity is a lot simpler from what I can tell. It is meant to record and edit audio without doing anything fancy. Ardour on the other hand has lots of additional functionality, such as a fully featured mixer with plug in support and the recently added clip launcher. There is probably a lot more to say, but if you are serious about making music, definitely choose Ardour. If you just want to record something quick, or something simple like a voice recording, Audacity can get the job done.
Both Audacity and Ardour ping the server to ask whether a new version is available. Both applications allow disabling it. The difference between them in that sense is that Ardour does not (yet?) provide a way to easily submit a crash report — another common feature in software these days. How much of telemetry that is, is anyone's personal decision, I think.
Ardour does not require JACK and has not for many years. Unfortunately the internet is riddled with out-of-date and inaccurate information which makes many people believe that it does.
