Soooo yeah, I sold my Steam Deck (which I love) in preparation to get an OLED but I was very curious about the ROG Ally, mostly for the performance and VRR, so I bought one.
Here’s a quick rundown of my experience:
- Took 2h or 3h just to get set up. Between Windows setup, windows updates, etc. it was very frustrating not being able to use the machine right away.
- After I thought I was mostly ready to install games, the machine was incredibly slow. Like, opening Explorer or Steam would take 30s+. Activity Monitor didn’t really show any high cpu processes. Just intermittent blips of 20% or 30% on some tasks but would go back down. Machine was unusable though.
- Googled for a bit and found there were lots of updates on MyASUS and Armory Crate. Two distinct pieces of software I had never used. Why two???
- After I updated everything and did a firmware update everything was speedy again, so I installed a few games.
- Started Sekiro as my first game since I had trouble hitting decent FPS on the Deck. The game would not respond to button inputs. And yes, I was in “game controller mode”. Quit out of the game and start it again: same thing.
- Decided to reboot Windows and voila, now it received button inputs. (sigh)
- The performance is indeed incredible. I was very impressed with VRR in particular.
- I then tried Guardians of the Galaxy. Crashed on the first run with no error.
- When I was finally in the game I was playing around with the power profiles / game modes / keyboard shortcuts using the Armory overlay or whatever it’s called. After changing a few settings the overlay froze. I was able to toggle it on/off but tapping the buttons did nothing.
- Force quitting Armory crate didn’t seem to work. Had to reboot. Maybe I had to force quit some other dependent service?
Anyway, I could go on but it was just frustration after frustration. I never thought I’d see the day Linux would be simpler and friendlier than Windows but here we are.
I returned it even though I liked the form factor, performance, screen, VRR, the quiet fans, etc. The hardware is great. Windows is a non-starter for a handheld console.
Let’s go OLED STEAM DECK!!!
I got an ally and barely touch my steamdeck now. I fucking hate Linux, dealing with compatibility issues, having to double check that all my games are going to actually launch offline before a trip due to shader download spam preventing launches, the thing randomly not responding out of sleep mode and refusing to turn on, and just generally having to write off 80% of all multiplayer games.
The ally has its quirks but actually playing games on it is far better experience, which is what matters.
The steamdeck battery life increase is great, and really emphasizes it’s main strength over it’s competitors but I’m not paying for a new system for it when the damn thing should have SHIPPED with a properly replaceable battery, not having the fucking thing glued in there so hard that it’s dangerous to attempt to remove.
Not sure how much of a better experience is playing games on a windows handheld. The random wake ups, stutter and lag caused by a background app doing an update (or windows itself), driver issues and so on.
Kind of the opposite here. I love linux and run arch btw on my desktop. Got a Steam Deck late summer 2022, got an Ally a little while ago. Despite running Windows, the Ally is a much better overall experience to me to the point where my Deck has been shelved.