It's light years beyond it, it's a full fledged digital audio workstation capable of high quality studio recordings and mixing. A good analogy would be Paint vs. Photoshop.

EDIT: Not to downplay Audacity which is also awesome, it's just not meant for the same use case.

Nice, and free. I think my podcasting friends may like this.

Ardour is an NLE(Non-linear editing) Audacity is not. Also, Ardour's plugins act in realtime. Ardour is used for recording and mixing music, film, and other things. Audacity is mainly an audio editing program.

Audacity never required me to save over existing files or magnetic tape. Why do you say it's a linear editor?