Yeah, sometimes I’m just standing in the shower in the morning planning out my day and I think to myself, “I should attack Ukraine.” /s

Not quite, but this did lead me to my answer, thank you.

Very confusingly, EmulationStation and ES-DE are more distinct now than you might suspect, this is a problem I keep running up against. I found my answer in the ES-DE documentation for Steam Deck/SteamOS, https://emudeck.github.io/tools/steamos/es-de/#es-de-folder-locations (note that EmulationStation uses .cfg in the format of XML I guess whereas ES-DE uses .xml files directly)

The solution was to take my currently working /usr/share/es-de/resources/systems/linux/es_systems.xml file and copy it to ~/ES-DE/custom_systems and now it looks like the AppImage has fully picked up all my systems and configurations from the AUR install so I can safely switch over. I’d still like to resolve the AUR issues, but we’ll treat that separately, I’m just happy to have a working solution right now 😊

Sorry, to clarify, the AppImage resolves the original audio/video stuttering and crashing issue. However I’m unable to modify the es_systems.xml configuration file to point to my pre-configured ROM directories.

It appears as if the original issue is present with the AUR package when using both X11 and Wayland, though I primarily use Wayland.

Good call, AppImage works (https://www.es-de.org/) although I have a few reservations before switching over to this solution. I’ve updated the post with more information.

I have an ultrawide so I like splitting the panels WAY up. It’s just so much wasted space, otherwise. Lumping it all together in the center makes it intrusive again, but pushing everything out to the side and along the bottom are the areas that are most out of focus but still at-a-glance.

The App Launcher is set to autohide. In order to get this to work, make sure you set the Visibility for the floating panels to “Windows go below”, otherwise it stacks them out on separate rows and looks awful.