I have done exactly that myself because for some reason I couldn't get retropie to run on top the Lite OS. Long story short, I like it. You can set boot order to run Retropie first and you got a desktop environment as a bonus when you exit RP. I have yet to find any disadvantages to that... Space efficiency maybe, if you have a smaller SD card?

@mitu Heh, well. At least it works, right?

It's basically the same thing, but a different OS and some dependency installs.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/bookworm-the-new-version-of-raspberry-pi-os/

Bookworm PiOS came out in October