As a Brazilian who grew up in a not too remote area, modchipped PS2s were everywhere growing up, as it was the only realistic option to game for the vast majority. Things have shifted a bit these days, but it did use to be like that.

As a result, I don't think I've ever seen a legit PS2 game or an og Xbox/GameCube for that matter lol.

Valve only makes the deck available in a handful of countries while Xbox hardware is available pretty much everywhere, so I'd say it's natural to assume a hypothetical dexbox would too

Pretty much the tl;dr here, yeah 🤣

In case anyone else was wondering, here's the sauce

Since you want a just works deal, I'd go with a ublue based immutable distro, my favorite is Bazzite. You can pick between KDE and Gnome, and change between them cleanly at any point. User apps auto update in the background, your system also updates while it's running and you only need to reboot to apply. If anything ever goes wrong, you have painless rollbacks. All that with up-to-date fedora packages and kernel.

I've been running it on my deck for a while now and it's never let me down so far, really pleasant experience. It generally keeps out of your way and takes care of the chores while still allowing you to mess around if you want.

The way companies try and upsell retro games rarely ever wins me over, so I just stick to emulation on my Deck, whatever pocketable emulation device I own at the moment and PC 99% of the time. I'm a technical user and I have no qualms with pirating unrealistically priced or hard to access content, so the barrier of entry is basically zero to me. The only collections and such that catch my eye are the ones with additional QoL features, good supplementary material, stuff like that. I don't even mean basic features like filters, scaling options, save states or rewinding, RetroArch probably does it better anyway, I mean things I wouldn't be able to get otherwise like added difficulty settings or expanded content.

The perfect examples of what I'm looking for are things like Atari 50 and The Making of Karateka. Unrealistic to expect of most, granted, but the gold standard as far as I'm concerned. A good, more vanilla example is the Mega Man Battle Network collections, since they have proper online play and content that was previously Japan only.

Perfect, thanks! They all look potentially fun one way or another tbh, I'll try and check them all out.

Actually seeing the titles now, I remember the last one threw mods in at least some other instance for a loop. Kinda feels like that time the best bathing scenes of the year post or something got r/anime banned from r/all back on reddit lol.

I don't mess with Lego nearly as much these days but yup, I used to lol. Same for grooves on technic pieces and whatnot, everything must be neat and symmetrical!

Moments like this make me miss suddenlycaralho lol

Anyway, I dig the look! The slightly different wallpapers are a nice touch, don't see that too often. Bonus points for providing your dotfiles and everything.

I recommend Bazzite, been daily driving it on my Steam Deck and it's been great. It's not that far off from being Nobara's immutable cousin so you get a pretty up to date Fedora base with user friendly but powerful gaming specific tweaks and can pick (and switch between at any time) either Gnome or KDE Plasma variants.

Due to its immutable nature, you get pretty much risk free updates and if something does break, rolling back is as easy as picking a different item at boot time. It keeps everything updated with minimal interaction, OS updates happen in the background and apply the next time you reboot, user apps just keep themselves updated. Oh and it has a NVIDIA iso with the drivers baked in so you don't need to do anything special to enable them.

The one question mark is Optimus support, not sure if it's actually in but I'd guess it works since it's got some laptop specific builds. Might be worth a try.

Edit: I just remembered they do have Asus specific builds as well

Thanks for sharing, sounds like a really well executed project! I've been meaning to come up with one of those of my own to understand the whole thing better so I'll definitely take a look.

I second this, Prowlarr is way smoother to use in my experience