12-18-2021, 12:16 PM
This week, I went through a side project of seeing just how hard it would be to get Retroarch up and running on Manjaro+Plasma Mobile. Turns out it actually doesn't crash anymore! Huzzah! ...But there is still a lot of work to be done! 
Issues as of right now:
Issues as of right now:
- Retroarch did not recognize my Razer Kishi out of the box. YMMV with other controllers, but I was able to make a pull request with my controller's info so that will hopefully be fixed soon.
- Retroarch is for some reason crippled out of the box on Manjaro/Arch. Retroarch by default tries to store information and config files in a directory that it does not have access to in Manjaro. You have to manually switch the settings to Retroarch's backup location, ~/.config/retroarch/*, then use the Online Updater to replace the missing UI assets. CoreInfo files need to be downloaded manually from here, and imported into Retroarch.
- The Online Updater for Cores does not have any linux builds for the Pinephone's architecture yet (aarch64/armv8). This may yet be fixed in the future, but for now that means you have to manually download, compile, and import your own cores. This is surprisingly easy, but still a miserable undertaking if you don't have a keyboard plugged in.
- KDE/Plasma Mobile's hibernation settings don't look for controllers whatsoever, so the phone display will dim then turn off within seconds even though retroarch is running. This is by far the biggest dealbreaker atm.