I had the opposite problem which is why I gifted my Steam Deck and got an Ally. The Deck was solid for games that ran right off Steam but a tiresome drag whenever a third party launcher was involved or I just wanted to reclaim some memory from shader caches for games that weren’t even installed anymore (thank the gods for Cryobyt33). If you’re new to Pc I guess windows can be rough but all I do is run Steam and when it goes into big picture mode everything’s cake from there.
I mean its more than Windows just ‘being rough’. Its windows being a toxic bane, and its the unique smoothness that the steamdeck native experience allows for.
Honesty, if Valve can focus on their driver game, I’d way rather have a the ROC hardware: its objectively far superior.
There just isn’t a planet on which I would run Windows on… on frankly anything at this point. I really hope valve goes this way because I truly think they’ve solved maybe the #1 issue of linux which is ‘it just works’.
If they can extend that to other hardware; it just makes so much sense. Its not like they are really making money on the deck. Their business is still selling games. Its a loss leader to sell more game and grow the PC gaming market. Why not set people up to put it on other hardware?
I look forward to a day where a handheld is basically a drop in form factor replacement for a laptop. Maybe we can get some ARM chips similar to the M series that can really pump the performance. The future just seems so bright.
For SteamOS to become the defacto OS for this form factor, they’ll need much more driver support across hardware configurations is my thinking. SteamOS has focused explicitly on the deck and they’ve done a great job with it. If they can extend this to other hardware configurations and convince other hardware manufacturers to go with SteamOS, I see an opportunity here for Valve, which frankly the size of which hasn’t existed since the earliest days of smart phones*. The windows experience that I’ve seen in this form factor is a joke (on top of how bad windows is just out of the box). Its night and day with SteamOS. However, what windows does have going for it is the driver support for all the wacky and wild hardware combinations companies are sticking in these handhelds. Its very much the wild west, which maybe puts Valve in a weaker position.
I would be interested to know how/if people are trying SteamOS on these other handhelds.
*In terms of the opportunity, I’m looking at ARM based chips like the M4, and seeing a direct path towards an actual, top tier or at least upper mid tier / next gen gaming experience coming from a handheld. The steamdeck sure AF ain’t that. But I see a technical path towards ‘something’ like that, where you have one of these hyper efficient ARM based chipsets in a handheld, and its performance competitive with some of the current (as in the meme this post is about) hardware like the mid to high tier (comparable to say a 4080). Like, before the deck, the only meaningful handheld with any market penetration was the switch, and that things so anemic, I think my toaster has a higher FPS. And the deck really isn’t even that great. The ROG ally is way better in terms of raw horse power, but the problem comes back to Windows. If you have to run windows on these things, its basically a non-starter, at least in terms of penetrability.
Oh, I get what you mean now. In an ideal world, hardware manufacturers would all contribute and write them like they do for Windows. We should strive for this type of first party support, and popularity might do the trick. Meawhile, I think it’s good enough that we have pretty wide support and growing.
I think it’s about convincing them Linux is not Valve’s the same way Windows is Microsoft’s, and most of the work is already done. Since we are talking about x86 hardware they can always support Windows too if the customer desires, not like we haven’t been doing this for years on laptops.
You should try looking into Bazzite then. I have it setup for dual boot on my desktop but they have dedicated distros for a the Ally and Legion Go as well
I got a couple extra drives in my desktop so I installed onto one of those. It works great as an alternative desktop, anybody that just uses their pc to browse the web, email and play a decent chunk of games wouldn’t know the difference from Windows. The problem is of course compatibility, proton gets you a nice chunk of the way just like it does on the deck but easy anti cheat as an issue like always and a few games just seem to run choppy (at least with an nvidia card). I did try it on my ROG Ally as well and the controller setup worked great, they set the system to recognize the ally’s buttons as a play station controller which was super cleaver. By doing it that way gyro is supported and the back buttons can be mapped to the touch pad presses so it all works without Asus’s software. In the end though the Ally wasn’t as fast and simple to swap between OS’s so the handheld is just running windows.
While I’m extremely envious of you, if I had the opportunity to choose one superpower, there are probably a million others I’d choose before that one haha
like a superpower that gives me exactly as much money as I need at any given moment anytime I need it.
I love how everyone is trying make up some ‘logical system’ or magical thinking about the completely arbitrary and random nature of the problem.
It’s not like there’s a big hairy USB god in the clouds who is going listen to all your jibber-jabber or that there’s some hidden alchemical formula that will turn the wrongly oriented USB connection into the golden correct orientation everytime.
It’s all bullshit. I don’t care if you are offended. It’s not the Bronze Age anymore. Just grow up and look at your damn USB connector, and then the socket.
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