Thanks for the replies; I had to go out in minutes and didn't have much time to be more specific about the intentions. My goal actually is to see if it's feasible to use a small PC to fill the gap between a MIDI/USB master keyboard and one (or more) ready made synthesizer(s) in a way that there are no distractions or other software slowing things down, exposing points of failure and generally wasting resources. Ideally, if I turn on a mini PC with that Linux distro, it should boot straight into either a DAW or a plugin host, possibly remembering the last known state, so that boot time is kept to a minimum and I can safely turn it off, then back on to find the same configuration (plugins loaded, presets recalled, etc), just like what I would expect from a physical keyboard instrument and possibly more.
Such a task could probably be accomplished by taking the bare minimum bootable system, then adding packages one by one until audio, WINE, basic windowing and networking would work, then some scripts could automate loading the DAW or plugin host. Ideally the user doesn't even know there's an operating system under the hood; they switch on the appliance and after a few seconds it shows one or more synthesizer panels and it's ready to play.
I recall over 10 years ago there was Muse Receptor, a very well known hardware appliance that did exactly this, and almost nobody knew there was Linux under the hood running all those Windows plugins (there were almost no native Linux plugins back then); price wasn't low because at that time some serious CPU power was needed for live FX and synthesizers, but today I'm sure it could be done a lot more cheaply.
