Ardour is indeed pretty good. I’m a Reaper guy, which is incidentally available on Linux as well nowadays, so on the DAW and audio interface front, I’m all covered. If anything, my older 2i4 runs slightly more stable over Linux/Pipewire than it does on Windows with the official driver. I’m more on the composition/production side of things (amateur, although I do have a very small amount of professional experience), it’s mostly the amp sim and virtual instruments landscapes that left me on my appetite a bit last time I tried. There just weren’t many option and they all frankly sounded like crap. Maybe that got better since then, I don’t know hehe.
Didn’t the last Apple model with FW ship about that long ago? Last of their computers with said port I can think about is the 2012 Macbook.