[The Weed]

Reaper, while not free, is very inexpensive starting at $60, and among other things is skinable, the coders respond quickly, you can run it from a USB stick, it will run on almost any computer and on Mac, Windows and Linux, and the download is ridiculously small, 15 MB on Windows, 21 to 25 MB on Mac, 11 MB on Linux versus 2.56 GB on Windows and 1.83 GB on Mac, and then there are the other installers for plug-ins and others. And Reaper is backwards compatible to Windows XP and OS X 10.5 - there's a 32 bit version.

I've been a Pro Tools user since 2001 and will be for the foreseeable future, with no plans whatsoever to look elsewhere, but if I was looking for my first DAW, I'm not sure I would be looking at Pro Tools.

As always, YMMV.