I’ve tried to keep an eye on posts over the years, but the last amount of effort on the Gameshell was probably the DEOT community build. It was more stable than the outdated official OS, but it’s also quite old now and I’m not sure how well it works today.
I’d always meant to check out the Arch OS build for Gameshell. It seemed like mostly Arch enthusiasts used it, and I’m not familiar with the tools in that OS, but it also sounded like the most stable and maintainable OS for Gameshell. It appears to still be alive and working today, but i haven’t tried it myself. I’m seriously considering dusting off my old Gameshell and giving it a try. I remember back in the day users claimed it was also signficantkLy faster than the official OS or the DEOT build (which was mostly just some settings tweaks and better app builds).
The obvious issue for Gameshell seemed to be the launcher. While the UI design was alright, it’s dependence on python caused it to be slow in startup.and navigation. There was at least one other community launcher being worked on and mentioned on the forums somewhere that was native C or C++ and was faster, but I remember it used a different organization scheme for hooking up to apps so it required a lot of manual customization to get set up.
Even though the hardware is outdated now and was custom and not Pi-based, the Gameshell didn’t have as many driver differences and hardware compatibility issues as the Devterm/uConsole. The main thing i remember was the video driver being actively developed and never totally stable. Towards the end of my time using it, it seemed pretty solid though, but there was always confusion on the forums about whether hardware acceleration was on (it may have been off by default?) and which version of the accelerated driver was being used. I have vague memories of.building that driver from source, which may have been the only way to ensure the latest and best version was installed.