I might be able to provide some pointers with that, feel free to send a message or start a thread!I'm building a retro arcade cabinet and sweating for a week now because ES-DS doesn't see my arcade buttons kit that I ordered from China and I'm doing backflips all over the place to make this work. I might open a topic about that if there are linux folks around here that might want to help a possibly desperate man, once I might reach that stage (hopefully not).
I've gone back to running most of my systems on Windows for some ease of setup, since I'm building so many with different components, but I've set up quite a few on Debian with RetroPie.