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.

He’s got 8 fingers on each hand. 🤣

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

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.

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

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