Most emulators have just been built/developed with what people are used to, or what they like, which has become more similar over the years. Your questions confuses me a bit, but if you are actually looking for a good front-end for your standalone emulators, try emudeck: https://www.emudeck.com/

Lots of xfce distros. My favorite is Zorin Lite

Worthikids. Bigtop Burger is great.

AdNauseam is based on uBlock and does some extra stuff as well, in case anybody was curious. Link

The cheap fix would be to get the color-matching stretchable filler, but those are more used for holes; I think it might introduce more problems when the floor shifts.

If your NAS can handle virtual machines, that might be easier, and then set up your client device as a thin client. Check this video out. This guy's whole channel is awesome.

Is this to replace your /home/$USER ? I've never done it with a symlink, but you could actually mount a samba share to the home directory with cifs-utils. A quick search will find you instructions, such as This one.

I think the only way to do this with better performance would be to use iSCSI, which requires a little more setup but would be the best in terms of reliability and speed.

Dang it! So close to what I want. Just needed a micro SD card slot.

Also, if you use it with purpose as a motivation to complete a task, they have a term for it; Body Doubling.

You can buy them online if you just wanna try them. This seller has a YouTube channel too.

Scan through some YouTube videos of each of these recommended distros and see which one you like the look of best; They are all good recommendations.

I'd like to throw Zorin in the pot, I use it on all my devices (and servers) since it's just smooth and works without fuss or tinkering. There's a Gnome version and an XFCE version, both are very nice. XFCE is a little lighter in weight of course, which you may like or need.

By Samsung?? That's interesting, thanks for the link 👍