Sounds like you’ve got some classics lined up but I’d suggest throwing in some more casual stuff too, especially if you’re losing interest in the long-form, story-based games. Something like excite bike or crazy taxi or road rash (I’m partial to old racers) or anything where you just pick it up, play a few rounds and move on. Think arcade style.

I made a favorites list in retroarch and cycle through it. I’ll play the story-based classics too but sometimes it’s difficult to get invested with dated graphics and sound. The pick-up-and-go games I find more accessible as I’m getting older.

-hops on nix soapbox- As someone currently trying to set up a NixOS server, your bullet point descriptions of it are incorrect except maybe the last 2. You’re just describing Arch.

In fact Nix tolerates user error extremely well and arguably makes every effort to be error-proof. A wrong user config means it flat out won’t compile and just revert to the past working config.

I agree it’s a pain - at first - and requires a strong base knowledge of how Linux in general works. -hops off-