TL;DR: Antec is going to be selling a Steam Deck competitive device, based on the Ayaneo Slide. The device has a slide up screen that reveals a keyboard, which is good because using desktop windows is much easier with a keyboard. However the device’s lowest estimated power draw at low/no load is 15w, meaning it will use comparable power to the deck running at max power. This means the battery life will probably be pretty rough when compared to the Deck. It will also likely have a much higher price point.
I’m following Bazzite’s development closely because I feel like that’ll be the saving grace for all the gaming handhelds that are windows-only at the moment. If Bazzite matches or supplants SteamOS then I might consider a device like an ROG Ally.
I would definitely consider Bazzite as a good upgrade for those devices, but until Asus fixes their warranty issue, hardware issues, and adds track pads, I’m not really interested in their hardware.
I really appreciate knowing that valve will fix any issues that come up.
I used bazzite on my ROG Ally for a couple of days before I went back to windows because it didn’t reliably work. Crashes abound and some games that work fine on my Steam Deck just refused to open.
Hopefully one day it gets ironed out.
How long ago did you try this?
I’ve been keeping up with Bazzite and Chimera, and it looks like they’ve made some progress.
The ROG Ally is listed at gold level compatibility, denoting it requires a few workarounds and has some caveats. I would not be able to get over having no control over the LEDs, so I’ll keep an eye out for a bit later as well.
Like less than a month ago.
Yeah I tried it last night just to fuck around and so much stuff doesn’t work properly.
When you flip into desktop mode it just immediately crashes.
I just tried installing Bazzite on a desktop, and its installer is a hot mess. The most I could get out of it was an error screen at the end, and an unbootable OS. Grub’s config file was just an error message. I couldn’t make heads or tails of how its ostree mess was ever supposed to boot, so I moved on to Debian.
I run Bazzite on my laptop, and have no complains other than getting confused sometimes on the terminal, but that’s on me for forgetting it’s not Fedora per se. The installer, while a bit slower than Fedora (and only by a couple of minutes, if that) worked as intended for me.