I've been gigging with laptop exclusively for 4 years now. Started with MainStage and a late 2011 MacBook. I never used much integrated sounds/instruments but instead used different 3rd party synths/sample libraries.
As my setup grew I wanted to optimize it as much as possible, so that one sample library / synth is loaded only once, thus reducing load time. With MainStage this proved to be quite cumbersome as you need to add a layout control for every plugin parameter you want to change across patches. And with MS upgrades a lot of this broke.
So I tried GigPerformer but it only provided low running cpu and simple usage and I still couldn't do what I wanted regarding loading one library only once.
Now I'm a happy user of Cantabile 3 Performer.
But I must warn that in order to make a reliable setup there is a lot of learning and work involved including a lot of trial and error before fully understand how things work. But if you accept it you get rewarded with the best sound possible in a compact form, not possible to achieve with only one hardware keyboard.
It's not for everyone but I'm very happy with the end result. It's just not an easy path.
Regards
