I think Mint is better out of the box than it used to be. I was on it maybe 5 or 6 years ago and had to troubleshoot a few issues, but I just came back to it a few months ago and everything worked flawlessly out of the box.

I’m relatively new to Mint, but I thought that sudo apt update just checked for updates and sudo apt upgrade -y was for actually installing the updates. I don’t see why that would break it though.

They were just the default settings when I setup Emudeck a week or two ago. I did setup RetroDeck too as I liked the more containerized nature of it, but it seems to run an older version of Yuzu (has a different, lower number in the window name) and even when I mirrored the settings of my Emudeck version it was pretty stuttery and crashed at least once.

But I can look at my settings and share later today.

Not sure what the FR is, but Tears of the Kingdom runs flawlessly for me on the OLED Deck.

In my experience Google is a bit better than DDG. I tried it out a few years ago and often found myself going back to Google for certain searches. Been using DDG again for a few weeks and having a somewhat similar experience.