Steam Deck OLED as a couch emulation box
After a few months with the OLED model I finally settled on a setup that boots straight into a frontend, keeps saves in sync and never needs a keyboard.
The short version: one frontend for everything, standalone emulators where they are clearly better than the RetroArch cores, and RetroArch for everything 16-bit and older.
The part that took the longest was the folder layout. Every device in the house now uses the same structure: roms/<system> with lowercase system names, a shared bios folder and a separate folder for saves. Copying a collection between devices became a single drag and drop.
Battery life is the other surprise. With a frame cap of 60 and the screen at 70% brightness, most 32-bit systems run for well over five hours. The fan stays quiet unless I push upscaling.
Things I would do differently: label the microSD cards from day one, and keep a plain text list of which BIOS files each system needs. Hunting for a missing file at midnight is no fun.