Given many new handhelds coming on the scene and general disinterest of Microsoft to support the market, do you think SteamOS will take place of default OS the same way Android did on phones some time ago?
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Steam Deck
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Every negative review of the Ally emphasized windows (and Asus armory crate) as some of the main negatives of the device. Windows gives a worse UI experience, has much higher passive power usage (which prevents you from getting actually good battery life times on low power games like Stardew), and makes things like the deck's suspend mid game impossible to implement reliability.
You also mentioned that Big Picture mode having most of the features, but it's missing the QAM and all the nice tools included with that. Asus Armory Crate is supposed to cover some of those, but has had a lot of negative feedback online for not working correctly or having significant downsides like massive deadzones. There's also a ton of nice features available through decky plugins that are very convenient to use mid game through steamOS.
Not to mention that having windows at all adds to the cost of the device. Average windows license cost for hardware manufacturers is around $50 if I remember right, and they charge more for more powerful hardware. That would be a huge price increase for something like the $400 Steam Deck.
I think SteamOS has a lot to offer, and the only downside (anticheat compatibility) will become a non-issue if steamOS becomes popular enough and companies start targeting it. I really hope to see it available on other devices.
Windows has terrible sleep issues (on every platform, because of shitty drivers) and has had this problem ever since S3 sleep was getting deprecated.
The Ally has shitty software but the AYANEO has a much better overlay. Asus and software just doesn't seem to go well together.
However, all of the proper features SteamOS provides rely heavily on good drivers. Power consumption and sleep issues have plagued the Deck as well, Valve just fixed them in time before most people ran into them.
Do you expect Asus to put as much effort into patching their AMD drivers if they can't even get their device to sleep properly on Linux? I'm willing to bet that if they went with SteamOS, they'd release with terrible drivers, an outdated kernel, very few kernel updates if any at all, and of course some minor modifications that will never be upstreamed to the Linux kernel.
Asus sells devices running Linux and they're not exactly known for running the latest and greatest Linux kernel. The Zenphone 9 runs on Linux 5.10 and will probably never get an update to 5.15, let alone 6.1. I can't find much about their routers, but from what I can tell they're running a version of Linux 4. They also make liberal use of proprietary modules and kernel forks, of course, making life much harder for themselves if they care about upgrading the kernel in the long time.
The Steam Deck is great mostly because Valve is working hard at making the kernel and underlying OS work right. If a vendor can't do that on Windows, they're definitely not going to pull it off on Linux.
Rog Ally is a good portable space heater.