I’ve had good luck with RetroDeck both docked and on the deck with multiple controllers. Not saying it is always smooth. But at least got it working in some emulators pretty steadily. They have put more effort into controls than I have seen from any other emulator aggregator.
Not along your current methods, but cheap steam docks are cheap. Get one with ethernet.
Also if you have games installed to another steam host on your LAN you can download from there rather than the internet.
Looks like there is an LDAP auth plugin: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-plugin-ldapauth
If you ran such a beast.
Jellyfin has a (plugin) opds server for ebooks that use the same accounts as the rest of jellyfin. I use calibre to deal with organization/metadata.
If you have a bunch of plex users, switching to jellyfin might be a bridge too far.
I never considered one of the windows-based portables. In fact when I saw that the steamdeck was linux based and was well received, I jumped.
Once I saw how well it worked, I stopped dual-booting my laptop and get to live in linux all the time.
If the article is correct and the market is starting to push this way, that is great news for linux, linux-gaming, and everyone.
Retrodeck for me too. I found the devs very helpful and approachable. The work they are doing with the EmulationStation DE devs is making both better and really taking controller support to the next level.
I wrote this: https://github.com/josefwells/nft_tool
Almost exactly your same situation, I got mad and took control of my firewall.
Finding a good client is hard. Folks recommend the Nvidia Shield Pro. Finding something that plays all the formats and can pass audio through hdmi to a AV receiver. Umcompressed HD audio, HDR/10/DolbyVision. Etc.
If I can just pop a debian machine down, that is great, but a hardware guide would be nice to see.