IMO, does not matter all that much.

Especially if you don't have an extremely decked out system (with several soundcards, various controllers and you can safely disable things like COM/LPT ports)

PnP cards might require some extra steps (like manually defining resources in Windows Device Manager or CTCM), but that's it.

That's like saying "what is better? a car or a truck?"

Depends on the situation. If you want to tra

For pure DOS, PnP used to be awful, but since Unisound it has become pretty painless if supported.
For pure Windows, PnP was perfect (assuming both motherboard and Windows handled PnP correctly), although non-PnP works fine too so long as you know which resources your card uses (so you can tell Windows when manually adding hardware) and you marked those resources as unavailable for PnP in BIOS.
For DOS-in-Windows PnP was and is a huge pain and I'd strongly recommend non-PnP, as you need to be able to tell DOS programs where to find the hardware, but PnP means it could be different at every boot. Then again, DOS-in-Windows is an allround pain as far as I'm concerned; I'd strongly recommend dual-boot instead (i.e. DOS boot menu before Windows starts), with pure DOS and Windows without DOS headaches - in which case PnP is fine again.

Personally I like the control of non-PnP with physical jumpers or dipswitches on the card (and printed reference for what the settings do as well), but I'm warming to the convenience of Unisound.

Yep totally dependent on your setup really , for example I've got a DOS 6.22 pc with way too many cards and I have no way of getting my main sound blaster to work in games that use high dma unless its a jumpered model like the CT1740 (ct2230 wont cut it) that can brute force the other cards and steal the resources it needs for its self. Meanwhile when I boot into win95 the card is disabled and I use the awe64 which has good PnP support.

unisound.com completely changed the game for pnp. now, a few non-pnp (without jumpers) cards are the biggest headache for me.

one aspect that i don't commonly see mentioned is that the isa pnp initialization in bios was a practically pointless addition, at least for sound cards, because if you take AWE cards for instance, it only initializes the sb16 part but not the AWE synth. there is no reference of what resources are assigned either, so the user is just left guessing for most games.

a newer game like descent won't get confused by a differing SET BLASTER and will autodetect the card though, but still no music. i guess if they had actually implemented the proper routines in the DOS game audio drivers, a completely config-less environment could have been possible in DOS, but as it stands you have to run CTCM all the same even on the newer boards that advertise plug'n'play. on the positive side the AWE driver installation for win95 puts CTCM into dosstart.bat automatically, so for reboot-to-DOS use, the only extra effort needed is aweutil /s if intending to use FM synthesis on those cards.