This is a bit of an updated post for some hardware that sort of fell into my lap that I’m trying to decide what to do with. I found a rig on the trash that has a GTX 970 and after taking off the cooler I learned it has an i7 4790 CPU. For the time it came out, this was pretty top tier hardware, but obviously today it’s dated.
So I was thinking of doing a living room emulation build with this, for games up to wii/PS2, and maybe some older PC games as well. I was originally thinking of going with batocera, but considering I would like to do retro PC gaming as well, I’m not sure this is the best option. I don’t know if bazzite would be the best option either, since that usually focuses on modern pc gaming.
So any thoughts on the best software for this rig, for the uses I’m thinking?


Your PC that you found in the trash has better specs than the first one I installed Linux on a few months ago as a newbie: 770, maybe an i5.
Pop OS was super user friendly for a new user and handled drivers and everything really well for me. I’ve only played some less intense games from my steam library, but I’m not noticing any severe lag. I bet it could handle retro gaming/emulation easily.