RG35XX‐H
The RG35XX-H is a very fascinating piece of technology. It's very affordable and available everywhere, and it has surprisingly great IO, including dual USB-C ports and mini-HDMI. A major point of this flake is to provide support for this device, given that it is not fully supported upstream. We use patches and panels from the ROCKNIX project, and then use a customized Retroarch/portmaster configuration so it looks and plays great!
Here is what it looks like:
As you can see, i've taken up the opportunity to rice this system as well.
One thing that's always made me curious about other handheld distros is their choice of Emulationstation or their own custom frontend. They all bundle Retroarch, which already has a frontend. You're basically putting a frontend on top of a frontend, which is very confusing, slow, and frankly a bloated way of going about the UX.
The coolest part about this rice is that it has custom entries that allow you to launch other non-Retroarch games or programs (through Portmaster) snappily, right through Retroarch. You can launch your emulated and Steam games and device settings (like network or bluetooth devices) without ever having to leave the same customized UI. I honestly don't know why more handheld distros adopt this approach!
That being said, the configuration in this flake is very opinionated. Changing settings will be overwritten on reboot, so its not really meant to be used by an non-techie user who wants customization. That being said, you can still customize Retroarch and then save its configuration file and port its changes to this flake (so you can still customize it) but it is a hassle. That's one of the biggest drawbacks here, but for my purposes, this is acceptable.
I already did a writeup about this on my journal site (which is available here). Follow those instructions and you're set!
DISCLAIMER
The majority of the backend work of this host contains AI-generated code. Most of it has not been fully vetted or reviewed by myself, and I will admit that it is a little buggy. Unfortunately I don't have enough knowledge of these low-level Linux systems to understand the code very well. If you take a look at the host and see blocks of spaghetti vibecode, now you know why!