I'm currently setting mine up to use emudeck, paid the patreon membership.
So far pretty smooth experience, the thing that caught me out, and many others is the way the ally switches its control mode with armory crate due to it being a windows device. It's simple two clicks to change with the shortcut button on the device.
It basically changes the input mode to desktop or gamepad and it also has a auto mode, if its on auto (default) some emulators don't work properly and you have to manually set it to gamepad.
The good thing with emudeck patreon is they are actively developing this and supporting the ally, they have literally just noted the above on their patreon page and said they will address it in the next update.
In terms of the overall experience so far, it's relatively easy, and integration with steam looks lovely. I've never owned a steam deck so don't know how it compares to emudeck on that in terms of ease of setup etc.
issues so far were any game that loaded through retroarch had no sound, that was a driver issue and had to set it to dsound in retroarch settings and believe from my Googling is a Windows 11 issue.
Took me a while figure out ps3 game shortcuts for emulation station to pick up, and still trying to figure out the same for xbox 360.
There's 2 other front ends people are using from what I've seen on reddit. Launchbox, and retrobat.
I have both of those too, and used them extensively before. But I wanted emudeck as wanted the steam integration, one launcher does all for a handheld if that makes sense.
