I'm a musician/organist so most of what I use a computer for is related to that in most ways,I have invested much time learning as much as possible concerning recording software and virtual instruments since first using soundfonts and digital orchestrator in windows 3.1 and various dos synth's and recording/midi.
I fell in love with puppy upon first use,my present testing machine is a dumster dive dell dimension 4500 which is a fairly common machine(the dell craze)has 512 meg ram and is 1.4 ghz processor,soundcard is the common as dirt sblive emu10k1.
Until recently I had been using the sblive running the kx drivers in windoz which provide full low latency asio via the 10k1(thanks eugene you are the man
But I've always loved the linux credo and have switched for good.I've spent the last few months in spare time testing what works best in lucid 5.2 and no surprise that nearly half of it runs better and faster in puppy via wine and winetricks.
Latency via wineasio is the same as it was on kx for me,256 samples 5.8 millisec via jack,nearly all the software I tested does run in puppy but there are a few key ones that anybody wanting to do recording and synth stuff should not be without.
I've noticed on this forum many use reaper as a host,reaper is not to bad but it's unpredictable gui(reminds me of that pinup board at work,you know the one that has like 10 layers of post it's from the last 2 years)I advise anyone interested to give energyxt a go because out of all asio apps I tested it runs the cleanest and smoothest without a hitch,and it's so productive having all the nessesary tools to get the job and is free to use(you just can't export audio)but a license is only $59.
another one of my alltime faves and many will agree one of the best softsynths to ever hit the scenne is the vaz modular,I am refering to 1.7(the one with the default orange and black sceme,this ran great in win95 but had problems in xp,yes there have been many newer versions of vaz but the first is the baddest,the sound engine in it is really convincing at producing true analogue fattness,this too runs better in puppy than it even did on win 95,I've tested so much to list all of it would be redundant as if this long post isn't already,instead of listing everything if anyone is curious as to what will work and what will run like crap please just ask so to save yourself a lot of headache and so you can start thinking about music and not teething problems with bloatware and excessive overdone programs.
Their are definatley some very popular softwares to steer clear of,steinberg being just one of the fish in the barrel,I want to make all my files available so someone else can get use out of them,but it's going to take some time to get everything in a distro,I will say this it will have no eye candy nor anything else that can hinder audio and midi,thanks barry you've done such an incredible job all these years,what you have made is sooo much better than windoz can ever be.