i guess in my experience i’ve mostly used the pisound and patchOS as a system where i wanted to run “whatever” - mostly supercollider and custom Jack programs. (norns stack runs fine, but haven’t found much of a need for it in that context - viz., not having norns-compatible screen / knobs / &c.)
in this context i found it necessary to e.g. disable lots of stuff related to bluetooth, puredata &c, to make bootup time acceptable, and in general was fighting (a little) against the expectations of the patchOS script collection.
so yeah, agreed: depends entirely what you want to do!
anyway my initial and continued impressions are of a super solid and useful system that i would totally recommend as a good audio addon to vanilla raspbi. (big caveat about line level input still applies. in fact i had quite a bad experience actually around this with an important commercial client, and ended up having to fly in to a trade show to make hardware modifications to reduce input gain. that was not ideal.)
