Yeah, the only really good bet is to get an sblive card, I got an oem for only $24 and the onboard synth works great with alsa. You get the benefit of 0 latency for playing back sound fonts, but you also lose out, with software synths like fluidsynth its possible to send the soundfonts through ladspa plugins, while in hardware this isn't possible. But you can mix both togther, so I usually use the hardware for my percussion sounds, which screw up the music if they glitch out, and then I can use software for stuff I want to put effects on.
