I really wish more PC handheld devices would come out with SteamOS instead of Windows. It’d make them a lot more appealing to me over the Steam Deck. The Windows experience on handhelds is a bloated and kludgy mess.
They haven’t released the installable ISO, but there’s no reason why hardware vendors and Valve couldn’t work together to build a Steam OS image for specific devices.
The steam deck controls are honestly too important for me to consider anything else. The fact that I can play mouse and keyboard games with no issues is huge.
Every single one of the so called “Steam Deck Killers” drops the ball on the controls, it’s impressive.
Yeah that’s my thing, too. Touchpads are important in this regard I would say.
Why would you run Windows on this?
Maximum compatibility? Windows is the de-facto gaming OS, whether you personally like it or not.
It makes sense as a creator of such a device that if you have the knowledge in your team to do it, running Windows on it is a good proposition to buyers. It’s not like they couldn’t install Linux on it if they want to, but to off-the-shelf buyers Windows is much better sales pitch.
The user experience is atrocious though.
There are a few games I can’t play on my steam deck yet but I’d much rather have its great, functional ui over those few games that I could just play on pc instead.
Oh definitely. I would not say atrocious (seen far worse, like every time I have to interact with the weird stuff SAP or Oracle put out as software), but it’s not good for a semi-controller-semi-touchscreen device.
Definitely usable OTOH.
Personally I would still go for a Steam Deck right now if I had to pick one, but more competition is good, and right now I’m personally not looking for a portable gaming PC anyways as my Switch has enough games I still need to play.
The off the shelf user experience is so much worse though, it doesn’t feel like a finished user ready product if you’re having to navigate windows UI on a tiny screen with a thumbstick mouse.
Not to mention that running windows ruins the ability to play low power games at low power draws. A game like Stardew on the steam deck draws 5-7w, while the ROG Ally pulls about 15-17w to run it with the same settings. Disabling everything you can through task manager can reduce that power usage difference by maybe half, but there’s still a lot of unnecessary power draw just from it running windows.
@echoplex21 Why the hell would anyone want a Windows PC gaming handheld - Steam Deck through Proton is the future. Sure, innovate on hardware but building something for windows systems is just paying license fees for shitty experiences. #brokenwindows #proton #steamdeck
Gamepass and anticheat I’ll give you, though the latter situation is improving greatly, but using a handheld for a PC VR headset seems… impractical. Not to mention a cluster fuck of a liability
@null @echoplex21 for me personally I got the ROG Ally because of GamePass which I already had with my Xbox. Being able to play a bunch of PC games native has been great especially if they sync saves. Also the sheer amount of free games I got with Epic Game Store was also nice. Sure the UI isn’t the best (we really need a big picture mode for the Xbox app) but being able to play all these games without additional purchases was a no brainer.
Personally I just got a big SD card for my steam deck and now I can duel boot super easily between windows and SteamOS. Probably the best idea I’ve ever had.
Completely different topic, but if you put a hashtag on a Lemmy post or comment does it appear on Mastodon?
Gonna test it out, #testingthefuckoutofthis
@thepineapplejumped doesn’t seem to render as a clickable hashtag on my (mastodon using Tusky) end. Seems like a bug imo.
I have an Aya Neo, and honestly running Windows on it (after doing a reinstall without all the bloat), is pretty enjoyable. I get to run all my PC games no problem, emulators, and use it as a portable computer for other things (managing flipper zero files, that sort of thing)
Steam Deck os is pretty nifty too though, that’s for sure.
Why buy a console when you can play the same games but at worse graphics for 45 minutes on a windows PC handheld?
I actually had a clamshell GPDWin2 that I used to play out of park baseball on in bed and it was perfect for that but I can’t image wanting it for real games. Inhome streaming is not worse than that unless you’ve cheaped out on your Wi-Fi and don’t wire in your main Pc/console.
The notion that “Steam Deck through Proton is the future” just showcases that you wouldn’t be in a position to judge how to configure such a device in the planning phases of a multi-million company project.
It’s a nice enthusiast attitude, sure. And don’t get me wrong, us enthusiasts are important. But it’s also entirely delusional to think that you can have true mass-market appeal of these handhelds without them running Windows on them.
Just stick with the Thinkpads, Lenovo. Or make a Linux handheld console
