The Steam Deck has finally been surpassed — by a fork of Valve’s own experience

When I first installed Bazzite on my Windows gaming handheld, I laughed. look like Such A blatant copy of Valve’s Steam Deck interface. Its many faults put me off.

Now, a ASUS ROG Ally X running hectorite It has pretty much replaced the Steam Deck in my life. Right now, it’s probably the best handheld device your time and money can buy – as it brings 90% of the ease of use of Ally’s more powerful hardware, a larger 80Wh battery, and a variable refresh rate screen. Usability. Depending on the game, it may even offer better Performance and battery life are better than Windows handheld devices. I’ve been testing it for five months and rarely look back.

This combination isn’t for everyone, as the $800 Ally X is significantly more expensive than the Steam Deck, and Bazzite still has some annoying quirks. But because Bazzite is able to turn a Windows handheld into a true Steam Deck competitor so convincingly, I believe it single-handedly proves that handheld makers are making the wrong choice if they stubbornly stick to Windows. Others should do the same Hedge that bet with Lenovo As soon as possible. Bazzite is one way – another may come As soon as next monthas we look forward to Valve opening up its SteamOS to more partners.

exist review back review Let me try to explain this when it comes to handheld gaming PCs: Windows is not a good portable gaming experience. It’s bloated, filled with sharing data with Microsoft, subscribing to Microsoft services, and Use Microsoft apps. It’s not designed to let you use a gaming controller for navigation, or even simple keyboard input on a 7-inch touch screen. It doesn’t do a good job of ensuring that games start full screen, and worst of all, I can’t always trust my Windows handheld to sleep and resume properly when I put it in my bag.

Steam Deck and its Linux-based counterpart, SteamOS, don’t have this problem. it is far away Closer to the “it just works” experience of a Nintendo Switch or PS5. I know my games are almost always playable as long as I press the power button and have a keyboard ready to use with a gaming controller. But SteamOS is not yet widely used other The company’s handheld device – which brings us to the Bazzite.

this Open Source Bazzite It’s a way to bring the benefits of SteamOS to hardware that hasn’t yet been approved by Valve. it is not Technically SteamOS is based on Fedora Linux rather than Arch Linux, and therefore contains many different and/or newer components as well as many custom tweaks. But it plays the same game in the same way, and the parts you touch are sometimes even the same, ridiculously so. Bazzite contains an exact copy of the Steam Deck UI, and even includes Valve’s own tutorial on how to use the Steam Deck buttons – all of which should theoretically be suitable for Valve, since it explicitly allows anyone to distribute an unlimited number of copies of the software under limited license.

Despite what you may have heard, Windows handheld devices don’t offer more games than SteamOS. Valve’s Proton compatibility layer can not only run many Windows games better Many games that were broken and abandoned on Windows have been fixed by the Linux community compared to their Windows handheld equivalents. While Linux-based SteamOS does have fewer popular multiplayer shooters, the publisher Unwilling or unable to provide the same anti-cheat solutionwhich I found to be a small price to pay.

To me, the surprising thing is that Bazzite doesn’t feel like a hack. To me, it’s so much more reliable than Windows that it makes Windows feel alien on a handheld device, even though I use Windows every day on my desktop. And it’s pretty easy to set up, with its own installer that guides you through it. You can even dual-boot between Windows and Bazzite by holding down the handheld’s boot menu shortcut button while restarting to switch between the two.

When I do this with an Asus ROG Ally X, directly comparing Bazzite and Windows, I often find that the game runs hurry upsmoother, and Bazzite’s Linux-based operating system consumes slightly less power.

It’s not night and day. Although I found a 13% improvement in performance Cyberpunk 2077 and Deus Ex: Mankind Dividedsometimes the performance is the same in other games. exist returna particularly demanding game where you crash-land on an alien planet full of destructible objects and swarming enemies, my framerate was initially poor, though recent updates have brought it up to par; in Shadow of the Tomb Raidermy framerate was initially better, but now the update has made it worse.

Even if a game is 13% faster, we’re usually only talking about a fraction of the frames; I’ve never seen enough of a speed boost that a game could be played on Bazzite only by a faster frame rate on Windows Unable to play.

But they do generally feel smoother and have fewer glitches! Like Steam Deck, I noticed that Bazzite’s framerate generally didn’t drop as low as it did on Windows. Many people feel faster and look better on the Ally X than on the Steam Deck OLED because of the faster chip, especially the variable refresh rate screen, which allows the Ally to display every frame its processor can produce. Instead of limiting it to an arbitrary number which might feel unstable. (This is a killer feature for GPU-limited handheld devices, and it’s a big deal that Bazzite supports it today.)

Again, I see no battery life savings every game. When I set the chips to the same power level, I sometimes found that the Ally X’s battery drain was a watt, two, or even three watts slower on Bazzite than on Windows, but that wasn’t always the case. exist dirt rallyI saw the same 3 hours and 8 minutes in both operating systems and both Armored Core 6 and Persona 3 Reloaded Allies are depleted at the same rate, providing three hours of gameplay each. But in diver daveI was able to get the Bazzite to last nearly an hour longer, at 4 hours and 14 minutes, closer to the 4 hours and 42 minutes I got with the Steam Deck OLED.

That’s because, like SteamOS, Bazzite makes it easy to adjust how much power and performance you’re using. Not only does Bazzite feature the same built-in Gamescope monitoring tool that Valve uses on the Steam Deck, you can also double-click Ally X’s quick access button to bring up an integrated version of Handheld Daemon, an advanced user tool that lets you change your The die’s precise TDP allows for quick switching of Turbo or battery saving (or RGB lighting, or rumble, etc.).

Frankly, the interface is more responsive and reliable than Asus’ own Armory Crate UI overlay, although it can’t quite do everything Asus does with its own hardware. Two key examples: The Ally X’s rear macro buttons don’t work unless you instruct the Handheld Daemon to emulate a Sony DualSense Edge controller, which is simple but may mean the button prompts don’t match up in some games. And you can’t hold down the power button to quickly access Linux desktop mode or shutdown menu.

But with these chip wattage adjustments, I could easily improve battery life even beyond Windows in some of the least demanding games I tested, where the Steam Deck has typically outperformed its competitors in the past. . in both Balatero and slay the towerI was able to reduce the total battery consumption of the handheld device to 6.4 watts by setting the chip to 5 watts and turning the screen brightness to minimum, which theoretically allows up to 12.5 hours of use from the 80 watt-hour battery pack. That’s class-leading battery life, folks, even longer than the Steam Deck OLED.

When you need more power, the Ally X’s battery delivers where Deck OLED can’t easily compete. When I set Ally X to 25W “Turbo” mode, I can use it for more than two hours Hellraiser 2and nearly two hours of Baldur’s Gate 3with a very playable 900p resolution and “balanced” rendering zoom levels. (If you can tolerate the lower-resolution pictures, you can get nearly three hours BG3 17W TDP.

In short, I’m less worried about the battery with Bazzite’s Ally X than with the Steam Deck OLED, especially since Bazzite has added support for the ROG Ally X extreme standby mode, and I found I only lost 4 of them overnight % of battery.

But there are some things I do miss about the Steam Deck OLED and its native SteamOS. While Bazzite does include Steam’s excellent controller remapping and support for the ROG Ally X’s gyroscopes for precise aiming, it doesn’t magically give it a pair of dual trackpads to use with generations of older mice and trackballs. The game runs. You don’t get the Deck OLED’s slightly larger screen, more vivid colors, and bright HDR light. I personally still think the Deck has better ergonomics as well, although the Ally X is easily my second favorite of today’s leading handhelds.

Even without extreme standby enabled, gamepad controls sometimes take longer to return to normal after resuming from sleep. Bluetooth microphone support seems to be completely unavailable in Bazzite. Sometimes when I try to uninstall a game I get a long delay before the system responds. Whenever there is a Bazzite update, I useless see Valve’s last update message instead of Bazzite’s message and have no idea what I’m going to get. Sometimes I find that performance gets worse after updating, e.g. Shadow of the Tomb Raider Suddenly giving me a lower frame rate than Windows. And it’s hard to tell how long it will take to install system updates.

Also, there’s a weird problem, if I drain the battery almost completely, down to 1% or 0%, the whole system slows to a painful crawl and it can take up to 10 minutes to save the game and shut down Ally X. I need to turn it off because even charging to 100% won’t speed it up again. This can be easily prevented by simply plugging the system in at the five or three percent mark, as you would do with most other handheld devices.

I’ve told Bazzite’s maintainers about these things, and they said they’re working on them – including a hibernation mode that should specifically alleviate the 0% charging quirk, as well as more intuitive updates. “We’ve also been improving support for other manufacturers, especially OneXPlayer and the next update of GPD,” added Bazzite contributor Antheas Kapenekakis, lead developer of Handheld Daemon.

I personally don’t think I’ll buy the Asus ROG Ally X on the Steam Deck, at least not yet. It costs $800, which is nearly twice the price of a basic Steam Deck and hundreds of dollars more than a regular Steam Deck. I personally recommend the OLED version. For value for money, I want to know that the ROG Ally X is not only the best handheld device today, but also the best handheld device tomorrow. I personally will be waiting to see a new batch of handheld devices at CES in January and hear What Valve, Microsoft, AMD and Lenovo had to say at the January 7 event.

But if I already had an Asus ROG Ally X, regular Ally, or Lenovo Legion Go, I would definitely install Bazzite on it immediately, maybe Use a dual-boot configuration To make sure I can switch back easily. You might be surprised how little you miss Windows. You might be surprised by how much your portable experience improves.

Photo by Sean Hollister/The Verge