Dual boot is still on the menu, too.

Recent patch notes sounded like they might be hinting at upcoming ROG Ally support, but it’s now confirmed.

  • smoothbrain coldtakesEnglish
    13•3 months ago

    Bazzite is fine. It’s serviceable enough to get the job done. The hardware is supported through a bunch of different emulation tools and bespoke applications like HandHeld Daemon for hooking into power draw and managing extra buttons.

    Bazzite is based on the Holographic base that SteamOS uses, but opts for a Fedora-based immutable back-end over Arch. Running SteamOS itself is going to be better once Valve implements native support for all of these things that are covered by HandHeld Daemon, at least in theory.

    Due to the non-optimal nature of both Windows and Linux at this stage, they tend to perform about equally.

    I get that the Fediverse is disproportionately made up of Linux users, but the reality right now is just that no operating system is fine-tuned for the hardware its running on besides SteamOS and the Deck itself. It’s not better yet, but it’s getting better at a massive clip - which is above and beyond whatever Microsoft is doing (looks like nothing) to improve their software for the form factor.

      • smoothbrain coldtakesEnglish
        3•3 months ago

        Well, the problem is honestly just Windows. It’s not designed for mobile or touch interfaces at all, and all the telemetry and crap bloatware degrades the battery performance. If you get rid of all of that stuff it’s actually on par with the Linux equivalent.

        I dual boot my Ally and I actually spent time messing around with different OSes. ChimeraOS was not ready when I had initially given it a shot (around March) and it crashed constantly and didn’t have full support for things like RGB. I also tried Bazzite at that time and it was a similarly strange experience. It’s gotten much better in the last few months. I’ve been running Bazzlite on my Ally since early July. HHD has progressed immensely and offers a lot of good control over the device.

        If you start off with the IoT version of Windows, it comes with essentially nothing. The store app isn’t installed, but neither is Teams or Paint. You don’t actually have to spend time “debloating” it, since it comes more or less bloat-free. You actually have to spend more time installing dependencies and drivers than removing things. Run the telemetry disabling script and then you have a version of Windows that still sucks to use in general, but is much less awful on battery life.