The Asus ROG Xbox Ally X might be expensive, but it's a real delight to use and for that reason many might be looking towards it for their next handheld gaming PC. One blocker to that might be hesitation over the new bespoke version of Windows running on the handheld. However, it turns out the handheld can run Bazzite—a Linux OS extremely similar to SteamOS—and doing so actually improves performance.
The end result is an ROG Xbox Ally X that seems to offer a better handheld gaming experience, though only in the games that actually work on Linux, of course. Bazzite isn't SteamOS, but it runs Steam's Big Picture Mode on top of a custom Fedora Linux distribution, and looks and runs essentially the same as SteamOS, with some extra options and so on.
That in itself is a point in its favour, by my books, because SteamOS is very simple to use—it's one of the reasons I rate the Lenovo Legion Go S SteamOS so highly. You also get performance improvements that are nice to have with a handheld, such as with sleep/wake functionality.
Our Dave found for his ROG Xbox Ally X review that the handheld does better than other regular Windows handhelds with sleep and resume thanks to this bespoke version of Windows. But, if judging from Cyber Dopamine's comparison, it doesn't come close to the speed and ease of sleeping and waking the handheld in Bazzite.
And then we come to the actual gaming performance. While Microsoft has taken steps to debloat the background processes in the new version of Windows for its 'Xbox full screen experience', it's still Windows, and it looks like that means it's still more resource-intensive than Linux. That's because in Cyber Dopamine's quick and dirty frame rate tests, the handheld performed much better in Bazzite.
This, crucially, looks to be the case at around the 17 W TDP mark. I say 'crucially' because this is not only the kind of TDP that many gamers will be looking to run the handheld at to get a good balance between battery life and performance, but also because it's the kind of wattage that the AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme chip at the heart of the handheld is most impressive at, offering the biggest jump over the Z1 Extreme at this kind of moderate wattage.
The YouTuber found switching over to Bazzite increased fps from 47 to 62 (+32%) at this wattage in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and from 50 to 62 (+24%) in Hogwarts Legacy. There was little meaningful difference at 13 W and at 35 W. They also found that frame rates seemed to be more consistent and stable on Bazzite, though I suppose there's a chance this could be due to the different frame recording programs on the two different operating systems.
These are of course just two games that have been tested, and the testing isn't the most scientific or rigorous. But the difference is surely big enough at 17 W to be more than random variation.
There are still good reasons why you might want to keep Windows installed on the handheld regardless, of course. Linux still doesn't offer anywhere near the same breadth of game support as Windows, and ditto some other apps.
The good news here, though, and the icing on the cake, is that you don't have to pick and choose. Cyber Dopamine has got the two operating systems dual booted, and that seems to work just fine: they just pick which one to boot into at startup. Though there's always some risk of things going wrong when dual booting, so try at your own risk.
1. Best overall:
Lenovo Legion Go S SteamOS ed.
2. Best budget:
Steam Deck
3. Best Windows:
MSI Claw 8 AI+
4. Best big screen:
Lenovo Legion Go
5. Best compact:
Ayaneo Flip DS
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
