The first time I installed Bazzite on a Windows gaming handheld, I laughed. It looked like such a blatant clone of Valve’s Steam Deck interface. Its many bugs kept me at bay.

Now, an Asus ROG Ally X running Bazzite has all but replaced the Steam Deck in my life. For the moment, it may be the best handheld your time and money can buy — because it brings 90 percent of the Deck’s ease of use to the Ally’s more powerful hardware, larger 80 watt-hour battery, and variable refresh rate screen. Depending on the game, it can even offer better performance and battery life than the very same handheld with Windows. I’ve been testing it for five months, and I’ve rarely looked back.

This combination won’t be for everyone, because the $800 Ally X costs far more than a Steam Deck, and Bazzite still has annoying quirks. But because Bazzite can so convincingly transform a Windows handheld into a true Steam Deck rival, I believe it singlehandedly proves that handheld manufacturers are making the wrong choice if they doggedly stick with Windows, and that others should join Lenovo in hedging that bet as soon as possible. Bazzite is one way — another may come as soon as next month, when we’re expecting Valve to open up its SteamOS to more partners. 

In review after review of handheld gaming PC, I’ve tried to explain: Windows isn’t a good portable gaming experience. It’s bloated, full of self-serving prompts to share your data with Microsoft, subscribe to Microsoft’s services, and use Microsoft’s apps. It’s not designed to let you navigate with gamepad controls or even do simple keyboarding on a 7-inch touchscreen display. It’s not good at making sure games launch full-screen, and worst of all, I’ve never been able to trust a Windows handheld to sleep and resume properly when I drop it into a bag.

The Steam Deck, with its Linux-based SteamOS, has no such problems. It’s far closer to the “it just works” experience of a Nintendo Switch or PS5. I know my game will almost always be ready to play as soon as I hit the power button, and there’s a gamepad-accessible keyboard ready to go whenever I like. But SteamOS hasn’t been broadly available for other company’s handhelds — which brings us to Bazzite. 

The open-source Bazzite is a way to bring SteamOS’s strengths to hardware that doesn’t yet have Valve’s blessing. It’s not technically SteamOS, as it’s based on Fedora Linux rather than Arch Linux, contains many different and/or updated components and a lot of custom tweaks. But it plays the same games the same exact way, and the parts you touch are sometimes even laughably the same. Bazzite includes an exact copy of the Steam Deck’s UI right down to Valve’s own tutorial on how to use the Steam Deck’s buttons — all of which should theoretically be OK with Valve, as it expressly allows anyone to distribute an unlimited number of copies of that software under a limited license.

Despite what you may have heard, it’s not true that Windows handhelds offer more games than SteamOS. Not only does Valve’s Proton compatibility layer run many Windows games better than on an equivalent Windows handheld, many titles that are broken and abandoned on Windows have already been fixed by the Linux community. While the Linux-based SteamOS does have fewer popular multiplayer shooting games because publishers aren’t willing or able to offer the same anti-cheat solutions, I’ve found it’s a small price to pay.

To me, the surprising part is that Bazzite doesn’t feel like a hack. For me, it’s been so much more reliable than Windows that it makes Windows feel foreign on handhelds, even though I use Windows on my desktop every single day. And it’s fairly easy to set up, with its own installer that walks you through setup. You can even competently dual-boot Bazzite alongside Windows, holding down your handheld’s boot menu shortcut button(s) when you restart to swap between the two.

And when I did that with the Asus ROG Ally X, directly comparing Bazzite and Windows, I often found games ran faster, smoother, and used slightly less power with Bazzite’s Linux-based operating system.

It’s not night and day. While I saw up to 13 percent faster performance in Cyberpunk 2077 and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, sometimes performance was identical in other games. In Returnal, the particularly demanding game where you crash-land on an alien planet full of destructible objects and swarming enemies, my framerate was initially worse, though a recent update put it on par; in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, my framerate was initially better but an update has now made it worse. 

Even with games that are 13 percent faster, we’re generally just talking about a small handful of frames; I never saw enough speed increase that a game became playable on Bazzite that wasn’t playable on Windows through faster framerate alone.

But they do often feel smoother, with fewer hitches! Like the Steam Deck, I notice that framerate doesn’t typically dip as low with Bazzite as it does with Windows. Many feel faster and look better on the Ally X than on the Steam Deck OLED, too, because of the faster chip and especially the variable refresh rate screen, which lets the Ally display every frame its processors can generate instead of capping at an arbitrary number that might feel choppy. (It’s a killer feature for GPU-limited handhelds, and it’s a big deal that Bazzite supports it today.)

Similarly, I didn’t see battery life savings in every game. I sometimes watch the Ally X drain its battery one, two, even three watts slower on Bazzite than on Windows when I set the chips to identical power levels, but that’s not always the case. In Dirt Rally, I saw an identical 3 hours, 8 minutes from both operating systems, and both Armored Core 6 and Persona 3 Reload drained the Ally at the same speed, each offering three hours of play. But in Dave the Diver, I was able to make Bazzite last nearly an extra hour at 4 hours, 14 minutes, far closer to my 4 hour, 42-minute result with the Steam Deck OLED.

That’s because like SteamOS, Bazzite makes it easy to tweak how much power and performance you’re using on the fly. Not only does Bazzite have the same built-in Gamescope monitoring tool Valve uses on the Steam Deck, you can also double-tap the Ally X’s quick access button to pull up an integrated version of Handheld Daemon, a power user tool that lets you change your chip’s exact TDP to toggle turbo or battery savings (or RGB lighting, or rumble, or many more) in a snap.

Frankly, the interface is more responsive and reliable than Asus’ own Armory Crate UI overlay, though it can’t quite do everything that Asus does with its own hardware. Two key examples: the Ally X’s rear macro buttons don’t work unless you instruct Handheld Daemon to emulate a Sony DualSense Edge controller, which is easy but can mean mismatched button prompts in some games. And you can’t hold down the power button to quickly access the Linux desktop mode or a shutdown menu. 

But using those chip wattage adjustments, I easily managed to improve battery life even further than Windows in some of the least demanding games I test, ones where the Steam Deck has generally run circles around the competition in the past. In both Balatro and Slay the Spire, I got the handheld’s total battery drain down to just 6.4 watts by setting the chip to 5 watts and dimming screen brightness to minimum, which theoretically gives you a maximum of 12.5 hours from the 80 watt-hour pack. That is class-leading battery life, folks — even better than the Steam Deck OLED.

And when you need more performance, the Ally X has the battery to take it places the Deck OLED can’t comfortably compete. When I set the Ally X to its 25W “Turbo” mode, I get over two hours of Helldivers 2, and nearly two hours of Baldur’s Gate 3, at a very playable 900p resolution with a “Balanced” level of render scaling. (If you can tolerate a lower-res picture, you can get nearly three hours of BG3 at 17W TDP.)

In short, I don’t worry about the Ally X’s battery with Bazzite any more than I do with the Steam Deck OLED, particularly since Bazzite added support for the ROG Ally X’s extreme standby mode where I find I only lose four percent battery overnight.

But there are things I do miss about the Steam Deck OLED and its native SteamOS. While Bazzite does include Steam’s wonderful controller remapping and support the ROG Ally X’s gyroscope for precision aiming, it doesn’t magically give it a pair of twin touchpads to make generations of older mouse-and-trackball games work. You don’t get the Deck OLED’s slightly larger screen with more vibrant colors and brilliant HDR light. I personally still think the Deck has better ergonomics, too, though the Ally X is certainly my second favorite among today’s leading handhelds.

The gamepad controls also sometimes take a little bit longer to come back to life after resuming from sleep, even without extreme standby turned on. Bluetooth microphone support seems entirely borked in Bazzite. Sometimes there’s a long delay when I’m trying to uninstall a game before the system responds. Whenever there’s a Bazzite update, I’ll uselessly see Valve’s last update message instead of Bazzite’s and have no idea what I’m about to get. Occasionally I see performance take a turn for the worse after an update, like how Shadow of the Tomb Raider is suddenly giving me lower framerate than with Windows. And it’s difficult to tell how long a system update will take to install.

Also, there’s a weird issue where if I almost fully drain the battery, down to 1 percent or 0 percent, the whole system will slow to such a painful crawl it can take 10 minutes just to save your game and shut the Ally X down. And I need to shut it down, because even charging to 100 percent doesn’t speed things up again. This is easy enough to prevent by simply plugging in the system at the five percent or three percent mark, like you’d need to do anyway with most other handhelds.

I’ve told Bazzite’s maintainers about these things, and they say they’re working on them — including a hibernation mode that should alleviate the 0-percent charging quirk in particular, and more intuitive updates. “We have also been improving support for other manufacturers, especially OneXPlayer, and for the next update GPD,” adds Antheas Kapenekakis, a Bazzite contributor who’s also the lead developer of Handheld Daemon. 

I don’t think I would personally buy an Asus ROG Ally X over a Steam Deck, at least not now. At $800, it costs nearly twice the price of a base Steam Deck, and hundreds more than the OLED version I personally recommend. To be worth all that extra money, I’d want to know the ROG Ally X isn’t just the best handheld today, but also the best handheld tomorrow. I would personally wait to see a new crop of handhelds at CES in January, and hear what Valve, Microsoft, AMD and Lenovo have to say at their January 7th event.

But if I already owned an Asus ROG Ally X, or regular Ally, or the Lenovo Legion Go, I would absolutely install Bazzite on it right away, perhaps using a dual-boot configuration to make sure I can easily swap back. You might be surprised by how little you’ll miss Windows. You might be surprised by just how much better the portable experience can get. 

Photos by Sean Hollister / The Verge