Agreed. It's hard to believe anyone still recommends Asus after the whole GN debacle.

Steam Deck has the OLED display, better efficiency/battery life, is hundreds of dollars cheaper, is supported by a company that actually cares about it's customers, and doesn't need to mess around with installing a different OS.

Agree. Asus never really put much of an effort to support Linux, for example, for the big companies, fwupd, we only see Dell and Lenovo support.

That's why I loved the steam controllers...

The Ally and Ally X are very different products, but yes.....Asus is scum.

And Asus is still going strong with the shitty prebuilt GN reviewed yesterday that was the worst prebuilt GN had ever reviewed.

People have the wrong ideas. Steam Deck LCD was a pure test object anyway, where they saw that there was a market, which is why Valve also released the Oled version. Valve has left the hardware open so that you can also install other OS. Valve may also see competition there, even if the competition releases more powerful hardware. Valve's hardware is still secondary and steam, which is installed everywhere, is still their core product. The better hardware the competition brings, the more power-hungry games people will buy.

Steam Deck vs .... is just nonsense.

I'm running bazzite on my steam deck and I love it, it gives me more compatibility with uh... alternatively sourced games. It may be a community project, but it's brilliantly done

I see this type of comment somewhat often and I’m always left a little confused about what I’m missing. The only time I ever use the touch pads is in desktop mode, which is not that often. What games use the touch pads?

There's nothing stopping epic or GOG from distributing a flatpak for their experiences/stores, the question is where are they?

Thing is, unlike other vendor lockins, it's on GOG and Epic for not providing a launcher. It's super easy to install alternate launchers on the Steam Deck, it's just Epic and GOG haven't released official ones yet...

Agreed but that's just life in Linux in general. If epic and gog don't want to do the work to have a legitimate option in Linux (makes sense given market share), we'll keep doing the best we can with the hacky options while supporting the platform that is putting in the work.

No one is locked into the Steam store. Any of the others could release a Linux handheld if they wanted to.

First they would have to make an interface that works in a console like way, and then actually make the launchers work on Linux. But this would require effort, and neither care about actually supporting customers.

Epic is far happier being customer hostile.

Yup. I got my Steam Deck for $530 or something at launch and I'm still loving it. If it breaks and I can't cheaply fix it, I'll buy their OLED model for $550 and still be less than Asus' device. Yeah it's less powerful, but it's not half as powerful.

If Valve releases a faster Deck, I'll probably get it because the first has worked so well and was priced well. I'm happy competitors exist, but I don't need a top of the line handheld, because I can always play more intensive games on my desktop.