Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:46 Sponsor: TuxCare Radar
02:23 Windows 11 is failing right now
05:20 What’s the job of an OS?
06:51 Updates break systems. Often.
10:53 You have to adapt to it
15:14 It’s highly intrusive
17:44 Debloating tools don’t make it good
20:19 Windows fails at being an OS
21:33 Alternatives are better, but not perfect
27:23 Windows is a sales platform, not an OS
I recently dumped W11 off my wife’s ROG Ally handheld and replaced it with SteamOS. It’s a day and night difference in performance. ASUS is absolutely fucking themselves by shipping it with this vibe-coded trash OS. W11 is total dog shit. The only good thing it does is drive a lot of people into the arms of Linux.
I have an Ally as well and I doubt the night and day difference claims there. Unless something drastic has changed Linux is at best on parity with windows if you change the ACPI settings manually.
https://www.phoronix.com/review/rog-ally-windows-linux/
It’s not a steam deck that was designed around linux.
Maybe I oversold it but I definitely noticed a difference in both performance and battery life. Windows has no profile for handheld devices and assumes they’re a laptop. With SteamOS it seems to have better battery management, with the added bonus of not being spyware vibe-coded garbage. My wife encountered a handful of “yep that’s Windows for you” type issues and now those are reduced to zero.
The ally has its own set of utilities for controlling power that works pretty well. It’s not windows native but then again it’s not native for vanilla Linux either.
I looked at installing Linux on my ally z1 when I first got it. It’s just not a performance boost and you do lose some device specific items as well. It makes some sense with niche specific devices like that.
All that said, if it works for you then great!