Depending on your workflow, sharing audio sessions with other people can be as simple as exporting relevant tracks making sure they are easily resynced together (for example exporting the whole audio interval for each track), or as difficult as "You gotta have same audio program and plugins and same versions". If your sharing problem involves sw programs or versions, your problem is worse than sharing, it's archiving.
There is no guarantee that today's most used audio will be viable tomorrow, so I suggest to keep plain audio and midi of your stuff always and pick the sw that you prefer.
There are multimedia distros with live DVD: avlinux, dream studio, artistx, ubuntu studio...
Check out their offerings, it's not like you can't download a fully functional copy. Audacity is great for simple retouches, you want a DAW or a sequencer with audio editing functions for anything more complex.