The only way to handle JACK I've found which wasn't PITA is by using Cadence and Catarina from KXStudio which are nice GUIs to manage JACK server. However, there is "but": because I use Debian, it was a lot of tinkering with apt-pinning and getting one very old lib (can't remember which one though) which is used in Ubuntu since 12.04 to build Ardour with.