So I wanted to follow up on this with what I did, and think I found the solution. This way if someone like me trawls the internet looking for something that is the same problem, they might have resolution.

Basically I isolated the problem to podman. What it looks like is I had an existing podman directory pre-3.5.1 update and it had issues with distrobox. So what I did;

Went to .local\podman - deleted the contents of that folder.

Then followed the emudeck distrobox guide to reinstall podman to .local\bin\

Made sure to rename the podman launcher to simply “podman”.

I also edited the .bashrc in home\deck which looks like it had leftovers from the previous podman to have the following (per guide)

Uncomment the xhost line below if you know that you are using xhost

#xhost +si:localuser:$USER export PATH=$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH

I only re-installed podman, and left distrobox alone. You may also have to use the following commands, as I did;

sudo touch /etc/subuid /etc/subgid sudo usermod --add-subuid 100000-165535 --add-subgid 100000-165535 $USER

For reference, this is the guide - emudeck.github.io/…/third-party-emulation/?h=dist…

Hope this helps some stranger out there figure things out