Steam Deck has finally surpassed Valve’s experience.

The first time I installed Bazzite on my Windows gaming handheld, I laughed. It looked like this: that It’s a blatant copy of Valve’s Steam Deck interface. Those many bugs bothered me.

Now the Asus ROG Ally X running Bazzite has pretty much replaced the Steam Deck in my life. For now, this may be the best handheld you can buy with your time and money. Because it adds 90% of Deck’s ease of use to Ally’s more powerful hardware, larger 80-watt-hour battery, and variable refresh rate screen. Depending on the game, we may also offer: better Better performance and battery life than Windows equivalent portable devices. I’ve been testing it out for 5 months and have barely looked back.

This combination isn’t for everyone, as the $800 Ally But Bazzite can convincingly transform Windows handheld devices into true Steam Deck competitors, so handheld manufacturers are making the wrong choice if they stick with Windows, and we exclusively point out that others should join Lenovo and take this risk. I believe this proves it. possible. Bazzite is one way. Another way may come next month, when Valve is expected to open SteamOS to more partners.

After reviewing portable gaming PCs, I tried to explain them as follows: Windows is not a good portable gaming environment. It’s full of self-service prompts to share data with Microsoft, sign up for Microsoft services, and use Microsoft apps. It is not designed for navigation using gamepad controls or simple keyboard input on a 7-inch touchscreen display. It’s not a good idea to have a game start up in full screen, and worst of all, you can’t trust your Windows portable to resume properly from sleep when you put it in your bag.

Steam Deck with Linux-based SteamOS does not have this problem. that far It’s closer to the “just works” experience of a Nintendo Switch or PS5. I’m almost always ready to play a game as soon as I press the power button, and I know I have a gamepad-accessible keyboard at my fingertips whenever I want. However, SteamOS was not widely used. different The company’s handheld — which brings us to Bazzite.

Open source Bazzite is a way to bring the strengths of SteamOS to hardware not yet supported by Valve. not so technically Because SteamOS is based on Fedora Linux rather than Arch Linux, it includes a variety of updated components and many custom tweaks. But you play the same game the same way, and the parts you touch are sometimes comically identical. Bazzite includes an exact copy of the Steam Deck UI, right down to Valve’s own tutorial on how to use Steam Deck’s buttons. All of this explicitly allows anyone to distribute unlimited copies of that software, so theoretically there’s no problem with Valve. Under a limited license.

Despite what you may have heard, it’s not true that Windows portables offer more games than SteamOS. Valve’s Proton compatibility layer not only runs many Windows games; better Many titles that are broken or abandoned on Windows compared to equivalent Windows handhelds have already been fixed by the Linux community. Linux-based SteamOS has fewer popular multiplayer shooters because publishers are unwilling or unable to provide the same anti-cheat solutions, but I find that’s a small price to pay.

The surprising part to me is that Bazzite doesn’t feel like a hack. To me, it’s so much more stable than Windows that even though I use it on my desktop every day, Windows feels foreign on my portable devices. And it’s very easy to install, as it has its own installer that guides you through the installation process. You can also proficiently dual-boot Bazzite with Windows. You can switch between the two by holding down the boot menu shortcut button on the handheld when restarting.

And when I did a direct comparison between Bazzite and Windows with the Asus ROG Ally fastermore smoothly, and Bazzite’s Linux-based operating system uses slightly less power.

It’s not day or night. We found that performance was up to 13% faster. cyberpunk 2077 and Deus Ex: Mankind DividedSometimes performance was the same in other games as well. in returnsIt’s a particularly tricky game where you crash-land on an alien planet full of destructible objects and enemies. Frame rates were on par in recent updates, but initially the frame rates were worse. to Shadow of the Tomb RaiderMy frame rate was better at first, but with the update it’s worse now.

Even in games that are 13% faster, we’re typically only talking about a handful of frames. I’ve never seen the speed increase enough to make Bazzite play games that wouldn’t be playable on Windows with just the faster frame rate.

But I often notice less snags and it feels smoother! As with Steam Deck, Bazzite generally does not lower frame rates as it does on Windows. Many people feel that the Ally X is faster and looks better than the Steam Deck OLED. That’s because faster chips and especially variable refresh rate screens allow Ally to display every frame the processor can produce, rather than limiting it to an arbitrary number. It may feel uneven. (This is a killer feature for GPU-limited handhelds, and it means a lot that Bazzite supports it today.)

Likewise, I didn’t see any savings in battery life. every game. When the chips are set to the same power level, I’ve occasionally seen the Ally in dirt rallyI saw the same 3 hours and 8 minutes on both operating systems. Armored Core 6 and Persona 3 Reload They exhausted their allies at the same rate and each gave them 3 hours of playtime. but diver daveWe were able to extend the Bazzite’s duration by almost an hour to 4 hours and 14 minutes, which is much closer to the 4 hours and 42 minutes result using the Steam Deck OLED.

That’s because, like SteamOS, Bazzite lets you easily adjust how much power and performance you’re using on the fly. Not only does Bazzite have the same Gamescope monitoring tool built in that Valve uses in its Steam Deck, but it can also bring up an integrated version of Handheld Daemon, a power user tool that can be changed with a double tap of Ally X’s quick access button. You can switch between Turbo or Battery Saver (or RGB lighting, rumble, etc.) on the fly using the exact TDP of your chip.

Frankly, the interface feels more responsive and stable than Asus’ Armory Crate UI overlay. But it can’t do everything Asus does with its own hardware. Two key examples: The Ally X’s rear macro buttons won’t work unless you tell Handheld Daemon to emulate the Sony DualSense Edge controller. This is easy, but can mean inconsistent button prompts in some games. And you can’t quickly access Linux desktop mode or the shutdown menu by holding down the power button.

However, using these chip wattage tweaks, I was able to easily improve battery life significantly better than Windows in some of the most demanding games I tested. In the past, Steam Decks were usually the games that hovered around the competition. in both Balatro and Slay the SpireBy setting the chip to 5 watts and dimming the screen brightness to minimum, we reduced the handheld’s total battery consumption to 6.4 watts. In theory, you can get up to 12.5 hours of use from an 80 watt-hour pack. This is best-in-class battery life. Much better than the Steam Deck OLED.

And when you need more performance, the Ally X has the battery to take over where Deck OLED can’t comfortably compete. If you set the Ally Helldiver 2And for almost 2 hours Baldur’s Gate 3Delivers a very playable 900p resolution with a “balanced” level of render scaling. (If you can tolerate low-resolution photos, you can get almost 3 hours of video. BG3 at 17W TDP.)

Simply put, I’m no more worried about the Ally X’s battery when using Bazzite than I am when using the Steam Deck OLED. Especially since Bazzite has added support for the ROG Ally X’s Extreme Standby mode, which only loses 4% of the battery overnight.

But there are things I miss about Steam Deck OLED and native SteamOS. Bazzite includes Steam’s excellent controller remapping features and supports the ROG Ally You don’t get the Deck OLED’s slightly larger screen with more vibrant colors and gorgeous HDR lighting. Personally, I still think the ergonomics of the Deck are better. But the Ally X is definitely my second favorite among today’s best portables.

Additionally, gamepad controls may take slightly longer to work again after resuming from sleep mode, even if hibernate mode is not turned on. Bluetooth microphone support seems to be completely boring in Bazzite. Sometimes, you will experience long delays when trying to uninstall a game before the system responds. Every time there’s a Bazzite update, it useless displays Valve’s last update message instead of the Bazzite message and I have no idea what I’m going to get. Sometimes you may see performance worsening after an update. Shadow of the Tomb Raider Suddenly the frame rate was lower than on Windows. And it’s hard to know how long it will take to install system updates.

Additionally, there’s a strange issue where if you drain the battery almost completely (to 1% or even 0%) the entire system slows to a painful crawl, to the point where it takes 10 minutes to save the game and quit Ally X. And even if you charge it to 100%, it won’t speed up again, so you have to turn it off. This can be easily prevented by simply plugging the system into the 5% or 3% point, as you should do with most other portable devices.

I spoke to the maintainers at Bazzite about these things and they said they were working on them, including a hibernate mode and more intuitive updates, which would alleviate the 0% charging issue, among other things. “We have also been improving support for other manufacturers, especially OneXPlayer and the next update GPD,” adds Antheas Kapenekakis, Bazzite contributor and lead developer of Handheld Daemon.

I personally don’t think I’ll be purchasing the Asus ROG Ally X via Steam Deck, at least not now. At $800, it’s almost twice the price of the basic Steam Deck, and hundreds of times more expensive than the OLED version I personally recommend. I want to know if the ROG Ally I personally can’t wait to see some new portables at CES in January and hear what Valve, Microsoft, AMD, and Lenovo have to say at the January 7th event.

However, if you already own an Asus ROG Ally You might be surprised to learn that you rarely miss Windows. You might be surprised how much better your portable experience can be.

Photo: Sean Hollister / The Verge