[Feature suggestion] Pop-up to download assets if they are missing

[auxym]

Description

I recently had a pretty bad first experience when installing RA on openSUSE. I first though it was completely broken, but turns out I was missing the assets, and I had obtain them using the online updater. I understand that assets cannot be included in the package, because they are installed in the users' home directory. If they were in a system directory, then they can't be updated by a user.

But overall, like I said it's really bad UX. Just navigating to the online update menu is difficult, because navigation icons don't show up! And it's really not obvious that you're supposed to do that.

See my reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroArch/comments/1ci17iv/opensuse_linux_missing_font_andor_icons/

And I also filed a bug with the distro: https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1223618

Expected behavior

My suggestion is the following: upon startup, check if assets are present. If not, show a pop-up telling the user that they will now by downloaded, and in the future they can by updated using the "online updater" menu. Something like

We couldn't find assets. If you just installed Retroarch, this is normal. Assets will now be downloaded from the Retroarch repositories.

Note: in the future, assets may be updated through the Online Updater menu in Retroarch.

(Proceed / cancel buttons)

Also, maybe use a more friendly fallback font, like the system default "sans-serif" or "system-ui".

[matheuswillder]

Actually this is happening on other systems/builds too and there is an open PR that could solve it, but apparently some of the devs don't like the approach, so I don't know if it will be merged, see here: #16088

Anyway, for Linux distros I think using the Flatpak build might be better, I have no experience with OpenSUSE since I'm a Debian user, but for some reason the Debian build seems to be a bit slower than the Flatpak build (I tested it with several cores and games/roms), so I suggest you test to see if both have the same performance for you. But there are negative sides to Flatpak build too, the assets are all bundled, but they are in a directory that is not user-writeable, so some settings (e.g., custom control profiles) cannot be saved.

I agree that the best way to resolve all this mess would be to define all directories where the user has write permissions and download all the assets there on the first start, but I don't see that happening, unfortunately.