Right! SteamOS with sleep/resume, gyro, touchpads and back paddles are my absolute baseline for handhelds now.
I can't wait to see some REAL competition.
I’ve said it before, but what makes the Deck unique is the holistic experience it brings. Like a really good chili, it’s a culmination of all the ingredients, particularly the below;
- SteamOS out of the box
- Steam Input in combination with the extensive inputs on the Deck itself
- The ability to easily change core hardware settings via the options menu to influence performance or battery life
- The extensive third party support via software and peripherals (cases, skins, accessories)
- Price point
- Well documented upgradability (SSD replacement, thumbsticks, etc)
I’m all for better screens and hardware, but they always come at a cost to battery life. Not that the Deck has a huge battery life to begin with, but the reason it is passable is due in large part to the hardware it comes with.
The Ally may be beefier spec wise, but at detriment to battery life. Not to mention the Windows OS and lack of inputs (both trackpads and two extra back buttons).
The Legion Go at least accounts for the input selection and has a unique controller setup, but I’m curious to see the battery life to performance ratio. Again, Windows will still be a detriment overall.
Really what it comes down to in the handheld space is finding something that has no compromises from the Steam Deck and an overall increase to performance without affecting battery life so negatively that it becomes a glorified docked laptop.
If I never got a Deck to start, I may have jumped to the Legion Go on account of not having realized what SteamOS brings to the table, and being enticed the beefier specs and control scheme.
However - after having a dual boot setup on the Deck with both SteamOS and Windows, I find myself more and more trying to get games working on the SteamOS side versus the Windows side. This is due to the overall “streamlined” experience of just booting up Game Mode, selecting a game and going off to the races.
Conversely, when I’m on Windows, I can get games operational and semi streamlined via playnite and Glosi, but it still feels clunkier and more obtuse. I pretty much only use Windows for games that I have a single player server running on for some emulated MMOs and that’s about it. If I could get the servers running properly on SteamOS, I’d make the switch in a heartbeat. It’s just trying to find a way to get them running on it with the associated databases/libraries that won’t get it wiped upon update to newer versions.
I’m all for better screens and hardware, but they always come at a cost to battery life. Not that the Deck has a huge battery life to begin with, but the reason it is passable is due in large part to the hardware it comes with.
I honestly think the low-res display is the Deck's "killer feature". Everyone else trying to achieve 1080p or better on such a small display is ruining any potential battery life optimizations for something which is not really all that painful to lose anyway.
Exactly. I'd be more interested in that Lenovo console if it ran Linux or if someone gets it running SteamOS.
This is the smallest obstacle, IMO. You could get rid of (or leave a small dual boot partition of) Windows, and use one of the good Linux distros tailored to a Steam OS-like experience, like Chimera or Bazzite, and just keep ticking along without missing a beat.
I love my Deck, but I'm already researching the process of eventually transitioning off of it simply because the screen is too tiny for my 40s eyes, and I don't get to use it handheld as much as I'd like. This upcoming wave of Deck-like handhelds with 9 and 10 inch screens will be looking very good in this upcoming year.
Unfortunately it doesn't really work that way. Those distros need to be adjusted to work properly with the hardware. For instance, if you got a ROG Ally and slapped Chimera on there you would have no sound, no WiFi, and you have to manually adjust the resolution for each game.
This would be a fairly trivial task for Asus or Lenovo, so I don't really understand why they don't do it, but they don't.
If they actually put trackpads on them then Windows wouldn't be as much of an idiotic decision.
Windows with only sticks is absolutely insane, Windows with trackpads is just less smart.suspend will always be broken on windows.
even distro like Ubuntu can't s0 properly because of hardware issues.
valve specifically fixed this for the steam deck and no one else has bothered.
If they actually put trackpads on them then Windows wouldn’t be as much of an idiotic decision.
Lenovo does this with theirs and Windows is still an idiotic decision. It's not a console-like experience when Windows throws the user out of the custom launcher to nag about Windows stuff. Windows handhelds exist way longer than Steam Deck and even among the better-earning people, very few actually bought them. It's just no fun to use them.
So I might be the only one who does this (never seen anyone else mention this setup), but I like to do mouse navigation with stick+gyro. So no track pad wouldn't bug me in this respect, but I would still like to have a track pad for virtual menus and scrolling.
Windows is a choice. Vendors don't have to choose it.
I don't get it
They all run Windows fsr and it isn't even optimized for handhelds
Windows plays every PC game in existence and plays them better though. It also allows you to use the device as a pc replacement via displaying the screen on a tv/monitor. It’s the best OS to go with imo.
Windows plays every PC game in existence
There's a surprising amount of older PC games that don't work on Windows anymore, but work fine on Linux. I remember trying to play New Vegas a few years ago on Windows 10 and needing four separate mods just to get it to play properly, and even after all that it would still crash every 15-20 minutes. I've since played it all the way through on Fedora and SteamOS with zero tinkering and no crashes.
It also allows you to use the device as a pc replacement via displaying the screen on a tv/monitor
you can do this on steamos
you can do this on steamos
Not with windows you can't, which is the OS the overwhelmingly large majority of people want to use.
There’s a surprising amount of older PC games that don’t work on Windows anymore, but work fine on Linux.
There's more that work and work better on Windows than Linux than there are the other way around though.
Windows makes deck more like a laptop. No comfortable ui/sleep, so it's like steam deck with everything good taken away but with compatibility.
If you're building a high-powered machine, maybe, but one of the points of these handhelds is that they don't have a chunky GPU, a case full of fans, and an always-available power supply. Ignoring the points others have made about suspend/resume, Windows is a bit bulky and bloated, and running it on hardware that wants to be performant and power-efficient is apparently not that practical.
plays them better, tho
My eyebrow is now in my hair.
Explain yourself.
Windows plays Windows games better than Linux plays Windows games.
I can do that without Windows and most of my games run better on Linux. Best is very subjective.
I want that spicy, chunky chili. but windows brings bugs and ads. windows is like getting eat up by mosquitos while the chili is thin and tepid.
