There are plenty of supposed Steam Deck killers available in the portable gaming space, from the Asus ROG Ally to the Lenovo Legion Go and all the Ayaneo and ONEXPLAYER devices in between. But none of them have managed to outright slay the dragon that is the mighty Steam Deck yet.
The Steam Deck is the full package that not only integrates the hardware and software, but is also an open system. Slapping a some inputs together onto a windows PC just isn’t the same thing.
Bingo, I saw an ROG Ally(?) on display at Best Buy the other day and it was sitting on the Windows 11 desktop with a couple applications open like any demo laptop out on the floor - what dumbstruck me is that the scaling was set so the interface was absolutely tiny. Of course someone could have messed with DPI settings but it just looked like an interface for ants!
Windows 8 or 10’s tablet mode would have probably gone a ways towards making it more suited for a handheld but that function is gone.
At least the bottom edge swipe opens the start menu which I found by mistake. Maybe Big Picture mode would help.
Install playnite and have it set to open on startup, sorted
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted, you’re just being helpful
I get that it technically is true but it’s dismissive and misses the issue that a device you drop several hundred dollars on, made by a massive company, and with successful competitors to benchmark against doesn’t have a cohesive UI option out of the box and I expect that it shouldn’t be up to the customer to need to figure out how to fix such a glaring omission out of the box.
(I haven’t heard of Playnite until that comment mentioned it so I can’t comment on its effectiveness)
I totally get that it’s a glass half full/empty difference though. (“why should I need to compensate for a massive company’s lack of care?” vs. “oh this fix is quick and good enough for me!”)
This. I can’t wait to test bazzite, a community alternative of steamos 3, which would never have been possible if the deck wasn’t so open.
Bazzite’s great! I’ve been following it closely for about a year now and it’s crazy how good it’s gotten. I currently run the Desktop version on my PC, and have tried the Deck version in the past. It’s great, a lot more capable than SteamOS imo.
I’ll probably jump in if they upgrade the hardware. I would probably use the OS most of the time and an updated screen would go a long way.