I have a laptop that I want to turn into a dedicated retro console and arcade emulation rig. I know there are things like RetroPie for raspi, are there any similar flavors for amd64? I’m basically looking for a similar “one stop shop” UI experience.
Oh my friend, let me introduce you to Batocera
As far as I know RetroPie also has x64 images.
It could be (pretty much) any distro you want – considering scripts like armbian-gaming exists and can give you a “one stop shop” experience.
Why running scripts like these instead of downloading the “real thing”? When you have “obscure”/unsupported sbcs and you need to “make your own” version of it.
What about Bazzite? It comes with tons of stuff for gaming out of the box including tools to install and manage emulators and roms.
Recalbox is an option