5 reasons Linux is better than Windows for gaming handhelds

Precisely.

I switched to Linux before Steam on Linux was a thing. When it came to Linux, I made a Steam account and bought games. When they made Proton, I bought more games.

I'm not moving away from Linux, so all I need is for games to work well and I'll buy them. That's true on my desktop, and it's true on Steam Deck (even more true since many games are preconfigured).

I don't think it's good because of Linux, I think it's good because Valve invested a lot into it.

Their take aways are crap:

1. Windows offers complete compatibility with all games. I get what they are driving at, but I am amused that I have older games running on Linux that do not run on windows. They should have said most games run on windows, and if you dont mind root kits installed on your computer anti cheat ones do too.

2. Xbox PC Game Pass provides access to a wide range of games. If you want a subscription. And a Microsoft account. Or in their case friends. And if you are going to share your pass with a friend, why not just sail the seas and call it a day?

3. Windows is more versatile than Linux, allowing your gaming handheld to also serve as a primary desktop PC with the ability to connect peripherals and a monitor, providing a full-fledged computing experience. This adds value to a Windows-based handheld. This one pissed me off. No it is not more versatile. I use the steamdeck as my work computer when I am out of town and I use Linux on the desktop exclusively. I have a full fledged computing experience, thank you very much.

XDA’s article is quite a bit of garbage too. Outside of game compatibility their other reasons are reaching.

Linux has a desktop and can be used as a desktop PC as well and works with a ton of peripherals driver free. That being said Linux has an issue with too many hands in the cookie jar for window managers so you get 2 really bulky fleshed out ones and a whole bunch of others that just don’t hold up without considerable customization by the user which tends to add more bulk and a steep learning curve.

Xbox Gamepass, as great as it is, has a ton of issues with installing/uninstalling software in Windows and the cloud gaming part of Gamepass Ultimate works quite well on the Steam Deck too. Technically you can also dual boot Windows but it’s no at all worth it and has much worse performance.

And then they just kind of silently say that many people don’t know Linux and are familiar with Windows. I feel like anyone coming to Windows 11 from 10 or even 7 might have some idea but they’re going to be just as confused considering the obfuscation Microsoft included in 11. And Steam OS has an easy to use and understand interface that just about anyone can figure out in a few minutes.

I’m just not seeing the huge benefit that XDA claims. Worse performance and battery life, generally a higher cost (Windows licensing), and support is going to be a grab bag for all these Windows based handhelds.

Compatibility is always touted as the primary reason why Windows trumps Linux for PC handheld gaming, but I'd say that the Steam Deck is probably more compatible with the types of games that I play than handhelds like the ROG Ally. Sure, more games may run outright on the Ally, but how many of those are genuinely playable if they rely on a mouse for control? These are supposed to be handheld PCs but for most of them you'd need to plug an external mouse in and sit at a desk to get the most out of a large number of PC games. Touchscreen control is often awkward at best for management games and games with similar mouse-driven interfaces.

I think the Lenovo handheld has a touchpad from the looks of a few photos, so at least they've understood the problem. If you play the sort of games where you'd mostly use a controller anyway you've got a lot of good handhelds to choose from. If your game library looks a lot like mine though, your choice is limited.

Permanently Deleted

1. Seems kinda hand-wavy to me, so I’ll boil this down to lower bloat (i.e. lower disk and mem usage by the OS)

They pretty clearly say what they mean by that though, unless you only read the headers and not the actual text

2. This is very much YMMV, and for Steam Deck specifically, it’s comparing a tuned the system to an OOTB experience; surely other handhelds tune their systems too

They absolutely don't, is the thing, and the Windows ones largely can't in the same way that the Deck can, because they can't change how Windows works beyond the surface, meanwhile Valve is able to write software for Linux like Gamescope, an entire lightweight compositor that lets them have full control over how games are displayed and means they don't need to have a full desktop environment running, and they directly contribute to and fund development for open source system components (like the KDE Plasma desktop environment that's used in Desktop Mode) in a way that would be impossible for similar things on Windows

Valve even has their own custom patched version of the Linux kernel in SteamOS, you can't do anything remotely like that on Windows

3. I’m pretty sure this is true for other handhelds, but I haven’t used them personally so I don’t know

You can't avoid having using the desktop eventually on Windows on a handheld, and it's always running the background, even if you boot into Big Picture

Even if you're always running games from Big Picture or whatever, you still need to use the desktop for updates, as well as any settings and functionality that can't be accessed from Big Picture on Windows (like dealing with Bluetooth devices), as opposed to SteamOS where all of it can be handled directly in gaming mode without a desktop even running

4. This seems very solvable, and not an inherent Windows issue; large enterprises manage drivers and whatnot centrally, surely a handheld can too

ASUS already has a solution, like the article mentions, but it can't be nearly as seamless as SteamOS where they can just push a single system update image that includes everything, and it's applied all in one go directly from gaming mode

There's also additional benefits SteamOS can have with its update system that Windows can't have, like how it has an A/B partition system similar to Android so that a broken update only breaks one partition and it can switch to the other one when that happens, which especially helps if something like a power interruption happens during an update and it doesn't complete properly (meanwhile on Windows it can be pretty hard to recover from something like that)

5. Surely this is true for Windows devices, no? I’m guessing more people are comfortable customizing Windows handheld PCs vs the Steam Deck simply because more people are familiar with customizing Windows than Linux

You absolutely cannot modify Windows nearly as deeply as you can with Linux, and attempting to make any serious changes requires hacky solutions that Microsoft can just break in the next update anyway

Like, you can change almost every single component of a Linux distro, you can rewrite components directly since they're open source, and there are usually multiple options to pick from for any given piece of system software, such as the entire desktop environment, or the audio system, or even the kernel itself

You do realize it's not that simple, right? That's arm, not x86 so it would be a different architecture from consoles and pcs. It necessitates using some sort of translation layer like rosetta for mac and that tanks performance. So no, in the short term that wouldn't be neat.

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these new Qualcomm chips

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