If this was the “Year of the Linux Desktop”… next year will be the “Year of the ARM PC’s”.

Both retroarch and the standalone versions has the exact same features, so yes.

Uh…what? I’m typing this on my orange pi 5 max and it took me like a single “sudo apt install” to download everything I needed. Where the finishing touch was a single bash script that I’ve got. Then, everything “just werked”. Judging from your experience however, seems like you haven’t properly enabled hardware acceleration on it – therefore the (un)necessary hassle you’ve been having.

“Now with more telemetry and spyware!”. Nah, I’d rather play xcloud on my browser instead.