RetroArch is a pain to configure, as anyone who has ever used it will tell you.

However, once you're done usually you have to tolerate the fact that this is a one-time install and now that it's perfectly set up you're gonna inevitably lose those config files eventually because things happen, people reinstall operating systems all the time, swap distros, whatever. Maybe, though, with Steam cloud support, you'll be able to reap what you've sown for a little while at least.

Anyway, RetroArch DOES fortunately work, once you've settled into using it. But I think it is a shame that it is so overbloated with settings for every little thing (I am a GNOME user, not KDE, for a reason) and actually finding what you want can be difficult, and some settings are so poorly described that they don't exactly help you determine what they are.

For example if you are trying to set a folder location for your ahem, homebrew software files for use with emulation software, you're going to head into the 'directory' submenu and see nothing that even mentions this. Instead all I found was 'file browser' which sets the start directory for the file browser (this at least was kind of what I wanted), and 'Playlists'. And if you read the helpful tooltip for what setting the playlist folder does, it says, "Playlists are stored in this directory." Which would be great, if I knew what a Playlist was or even what it does for me. But I don't. And the program itself, will not tell me.

By the way, there is a Playlists menu in the Options menu. Nothing in there gives me any hint as to what a Playlist actually is, how I use one, how to even MAKE one, or anything silly like that. I am still not sure what the point of a Playlist is or what it does. RetroArch will not tell me.

Shoutouts to whomever it was that thought, for an end-user, that the 'Menu Driver' aka the thing that makes the RetroArch menu look like an ugly Android app by default, should be in 'drivers' and NOT inside the 'user interface' sub-menu under an option like 'Menu Appearance'. I managed to find it okay because I love poring through options menus - but guess what! Not EVERYONE wants to do that!

I settled on XMB because it looks okay on a computer, and dividing up the menus the way it does makes sense to me. Two of the other 'menu drivers' appear to be made for phones or something and the other one that looks like an 8bit indie game was completely unappealing to look at. So I recommend XMB.

Anyway, all that aside. I love the cores system. It's simple and relatively intuitive. You don't have to go to a github and download some weird .tar.gz file that extracts a command-line installer. You just say, 'download this core' and it does it and installs it for you. I like that simplicity. Sure some aren't present here, I don't care. I have those downloaded through my package manager, but there's others like mesen and such that don't have such great GUIs on their own and I'll happily use RetroArch to manage all those, and then I'll use 'the other ones' as their own thing elsewhere on my system. I am okay with that.

Oh, and all of this menu misery and occasional video games joy is free and open source. There are some things out there that are free, and yet are a waste of your time. This is a waste of your time, and it's free - but it's a good waste of time. There's plenty of old 'homebrew software' that you might want to play. So yeah, I recommend RetroArch.

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