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Debate: Does Windows Suck On Handhelds

Debate: Does Windows Suck On Handhelds

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Rating: 4.0; Vote: 1
Jeff Grubb from GiantBomb thinks Windows sucks on handhelds, but do Adam and Will agree In this video they debate all the finer points of how Windows works on handheld gaming PCs like the Asus ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go in order to figure out if they have a place in this world. Follow PCWorld for all things PC! ---------------------------------- SUBSCRIBE: https://www.youtube.com/pcworldsub_confirmation=1 TWITTER: https://www.twitter.com/pcworld WEBSITE: http://www.pcworld.com 00:00 - Intro 01:44 - Will's Initial Thoughts 03:46 - Game Compatibility 05:15 - Benefits Of Windows 07:38 - Battery Life 09:45 - Tinkering 12:29 - Windows Installation 14:03 - Launchers/Software 18:34 - Suspend/Resume 22:22 - PC vs Console 24:57 - Final Thoughts #windows #handheld #steamdeck
Date: 2024-03-22

Comments and reviews: 20


I like Windows, and my first gaming handheld was a GPD Win 3. I got my first Steam Deck about 6 months after launch, and have never used the GPD Win 3 since, and it's not because the Win 3 / Windows experience was bad, it was that with the majority of my games on Steam, the Steam Deck and its console experience is really easy to use. I have a few games via GoG and EPIC, but I found myself repurchasing the ones I really liked on Steam when they had been on sale, because I preferred how the how the whole Steam wrapper and support works. When I got my OLED Steam Deck also tinkered a little and installed EMUDeck and some plugins and that worked great, but my emphasis has always been the use the Steam Deck to play games, and only play games in gaming mode. I only use desktop mode when I need to do some special set-up, like installing Genshin Impact using the standard windows installer with proton experimental but setting it up to play in gaming mode and then using the Stream Grid DB plugin to add the artwork while in gaming mode. I even use the auto flatpak plugin, so I can now update my flatpak apps while in gaming mode. I recently, installed a fresh Steam OS image of my LCD Deck to use it in stock mode, Steam games only, and I was surprised at how easy and quick it was to do compared with re-imaging one of my Windows PC's which I do from time to time when the registry becomes too fragmented and cluttered, and /or performance takes a dive. I did come close to buying an ASUS ROG Ally, but I am not a great fan of their proprietary eGPU port and have some concerns about their build quality. I like that the Steam Deck has a magnesium alloy subframe, whereas most of the Windows gaming handhelds are plastic shells with some plastic reinforcing. PS: I always shutdown my PCs and Steam Decks at of close of play each day. It avoids any potential issues with memory leaks / fragmentation accumulating and triggering downstream OS problems.
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For me, I turn off my desktop PC when I go to bed but everything else is just in standby forever. Even my Switch which has been sitting behind the TV unused for years at this point is in standby. My Steam Deck sits next to my bed in standby, my Surface Pro sits next to my bed in standby even though I haven't used it in forever. Even the PC that's connected to the TV as a console replacement is in suspend unless I'm certain I won't be playing anything for an extended period of time.
And honestly, I'd put my desktop PC into suspend as well but I'm having some technical issues with Fedora not behaving properly when woken up from suspend which causes random programs to act like they're running on a Pentium 2 and the entire system to freeze randomly when playing a game and alt-tabing out so I just keep it on throughout the day and turn off the screens and turn it off at night.
Regarding operating system... I don't even want Windows on my desktop so yea, for me Windows sucks on handhelds for sure. I can't really see a point for having it on a handheld gaming device with a small screen. Using it without a mouse is just awful. The only place where I think Windows is good is on tablets with a decently sized screen, which is where it's quite nice as all the software is available and there's no big compatability issues with anything.

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It all comes down to what your used to and your needs. I'm used to windows so you can never recommend me to use a Linux device and limit me to what I'm used to doing on windows same for games that I play in I don't want to be limited in my games where I need games to be verified to be able to play that is why I'm very happy with my ROG Ally because all my games just works and smooth at the same time it is 1080p which is what I'm looking for a handheld. I play with all my games in 1080p with no problem and everything that I downloaded just works and smooth with 1080p playing Kingdome Hearts 3, Genshin, Free Gamepass for 3 months and my steam games like FF15, FF 7 Remake, Ractchet and Clank Rift Apart, Forza Horizon 5, Yakuza Like a Dragon, GTA 5, Fortnight, Hi Fi Rush, Horizon Dawn is great on this device. I don't have to worry about verifications and if upcoming games or upcoming PS4 and PS5 ported to PC games will come to steam, epic, or gamepass because it is windows and all games just works in windows and the processor is powerful enough for this Gen games. My 2017 gaming laptop is already 7 years old and it can no longer handle modern games today so I bought the ROG Ally and I am very happy and satisfied with my purchase because all games just works and smooth.
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While I'm mostly in the PC tinkering camp as used to defend the Windows handhelds, I have fully switched to Linux for half a decade and am more comfortable with even obscure and quirky Linux systems.
Of which SteamOS is one, my deck being used as a Linux tablet in desktop mode half of the time that I use it, having changed some defaults like the web-browser.
For me even SteamOS is more comfortable and tinker-friendly than a normal Windows installation at this point, if I were to pick up some handheld I'd be installing some Linux distro and using Steam Big Picture.
And as mentioned elsewhere in this comment sections, the games that don't play on SD are the games I wouldn't want to play anyway, so that makes the choice even easier still.
I also use it as my main controller, with the Steam Link Flatpak as a non-Steam app as the integrated streaming is buggy on the Preview OS version I run but the Flatpak is not.
The combined functionality being what justifies the price for me, if it only gamed I would not have pre-ordered my Deck.

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Windows is needed but hated. I have to run windows just to play modern warfare and a few Xbox game pass games. The biggest issue is idle ram usage and ram usage in general is out of hand. We need a stripped down handheld version debloated. I manually debloat all my windows installs and do tons of tweaks to get them down less than half stock usage. The msi claw was using 63% of the ram sitting idle on boot. I got it down to 23% making massive improvements on the fps feeling much smoother and everything feeling way snappier and not running out of ram means you don’t borrow from the page file. Loading in open world games is smoother and so many things just work better and feel better. We need 32gb as a bare minimum when your sharing vram and running windows! Handheld companies are doing us a massive disservice by not giving us 32gb. I’d pay an extra 200$ for 32gb rather than extra storage. I can upgrade my own storage but not my own ram.
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I have the Legion Go, Rog Ally and steam deck. About the sleep/resume in my opinion is not the main reason to get the steam deck anymore. On windows If you use hibernate instead of sleep you will have the same sleep/quick resume experience as the steam deck (only downside is that it takes a bit longer to turn on than the steam deck). I understand that defaults are important etc but I think anyone that doesn't like to fiddle with settings or knows and enjoys how to work well with windows should not get a Windows handheld. That being said, I haven't picked my steam deck in a while because I play a lot of FIFA (which has an Anti-cheat which is not compatible with the steam deck) and the performance on the deck is just too lacking for the games I enjoy... I loved the steam deck when it released and during the first 1,5 year but now I'm thinking about selling it although I'll probably not because I'm nostalgic about it.
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I don't know why people build up this picture that Windows is SO compatible and hassle-free... My experience with the Steam Deck is that Proton actually fixes a lot of games that are hard to run on Windows these days, and I literally never stumble upon games that don't work on the Steam Deck. For me, the real kicker is REALLY how insanely effective the Steam Deck is. at 6-12W the ROG Ally has FAR worse performance than the Steam Deck. And if you want any sort of battery life that's where you want to be. Even in Cyberpunk I lock my TDP to 10W, otherwise the engine will make sure the CPU use the last 5W unnecessarily (the engine was built around performance and not energy efficiency)... Currently no device comes close to the Steam Deck as a complete handheld package
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Bought the family a Steam Deck for Christmas 2022. Upgraded the ssd to a 512GB. Have a lot of causal games like rogue likes/lites, survivor likes, and puzzle games installed. Also have a few larger games like Forza 5, Farm Sim 22, and RE1rm. Probably about 20 games installed. I started playing FF7rm a couple weeks ago on PC. While I technically had enough space for it without uninstalling anything, I didn't want to have the ssd around 10% free space so I tried streaming it. I have the same PC that he was talking about streaming from. 13900k and rtx 4090 and I was surprised at how well it worked. Now idk if I'd play a racing games or shooters that are more latency sensitive that way. But maybe I'd be surprised there too.
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As someone who owns all 3 of those units, this discussion nails everything. I use them for different things, but the SD is the ultimate handheld gaming machine. Ergonomics, suspend/resume, battery life.it’s just great at just about everything. The Ally and Legion Go are certainly better at one or two things, but you have to sacrifice everything else. There are times when I want that. AAA game that requires more power and screen real estate, I grab the Legion Go. Power and portability and the ability to use the external graphics card, I grab the ROG Ally. But 90% of the time the SD does everything else better. It’s really a testament to Valve as to how well the SD has stood up in this burgeoning field.
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What I’ve come to realize with the deck. Simple install is better. I’ve tinkered, I’ve installed decky cryobyte emudeck all the enhancements. I launch desktop mode more than most. I have an external hub Velcroed to my case for transfers and pc stuff. After all that, one update will eff it all up and what was seamlessly working now has hiccups. I’d imagine this is the case with all pc handhelds.
Now i just leave the thing stock with stable updates. It just works. I’m tired of patching the things that break. A Simplified experience wins and thats why the deck wins in my book.
The only negatives I see are game support and those are developer issues.

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The APUs can handle running Windows 11just fine. The problem with Windows 11 is really the User Interface. Windows should be able to scale from a large 60inch TV screen, to a 32 inch desktop monitor, to a 14inch laptop screen to a 7inch handheld screen. Windows should be made more touch friendly and also controller friendly. Instant On and Resume also needs to be addressed. Once this UI and UX issues are fixed it will just a matter of getting better SOCs. I think 2025 will be the year we see a huge improvement especially on the iGPU side.
I also wait to see what Qualcomm will offer for Handhelds running Windows on ARM.

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I understand the sentiment behind 'defaults', but to be clear, the Steam Deck is already a niche product. All of my casual gaming peers have never heard of a Steam Deck before.
With that being said, I think it's safe to assume that everyone who chooses to buy a Windows handheld are better informed and knows exactly what to expect; a literal PC in handheld form.
In the world of PC gaming, I would assume that 'default' is sorta taboo. Meaning, I can't think of a single PC player who doesn't tinker with any of their software and/or settings. I thought that was kind of the point of gaming on a PC.

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PC - turn off all the time
PS5 - Mostly I save and exit the game and put the console to sleep because the PS5 mostly just loads the last (mostly hidden) quicksave and games don't always support this. I don't think the Playstation can actually suspend a game (in cases where it works, this looks like a suspend though but I hate if I can't trust it)
XBX - just standby, this works almost perfectly except for some older (XBO / 360) titles. Unlike the Playstation this actually suspends the game.
Switch - you can turn the switch off standby, always, never exit any game

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Most of my games run just fine using Proton on Steam OS 3.5 on my steam deck lcd that I upgraded with a 2TB NVMe SSD &it was simple enough to add the hall effect joysticks I actually preffer the UI of Steam OS 3 over windows. If I got1 of the other windows handhelds I'd just probably put Nobara OS Steam Deck edition on it & windows wouldn't even get the chance the startup however from all the reviews I've seen none of the currently availabe handhelds actually out perform the steam deck enough to make the purchase worth it for me at least.
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It's not that these other devices shouldn't exist (variety of hardware), but ideally they'd have SteamOS or something similar on them. Windows is not a great experience for these in its current form. And the arguments for the Windows devices being a PC with all the tinkering benefits doesn't apply. SteamOS is Linux. It is a PC. You can tinker with it as much as you want. The key though is you don't have to.
Linux is also worth supporting solely to escape our dependency on Windows. It's already more than viable as a desktop OS replacement too.

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I love MY SD OLED but I prefer my Ally. The performance difference, compatibility, and VRR are the deciding factor for me. Battery is an issue if you go full blast but you can limit the watts and have similar performance and battery to the SD. Also no one talks about the fast charging on the Ally, less downtime.
Also not everyone owns their games in steam. If you want to install games outside of Steam is becomes more complicated. At the end of the day I enjoy them both but the Windows hate is blown out of proportion.

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Everyone blows this way out of proportion. Yes it takes 10 seconds longer to enter steam big picture mode. So what From there you fire up the game exactly like you do in steamOS and you sit there and enjoy the game the same way as on steam deck. Resume does work fine on MOST games even on windows(at least they do on my ally).
I’d welcome steamOS if it was released for the ally but windows isn’t that bad. Just set it up to boot into steam big picture.

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Owner of 3 devices here, I use the Steam Deck OLED as my travel handheld because of the amazing battery life, ROG ally as my multiplayer handheld because of VRR, and Legion Go as my single player handheld for the bigger screen. Not interested in the MSI Claw as intel graphics can’t compete with AMD at the moment so I have no input on that device. I’m also the type of person to completely shut down my devices except for the steam deck.
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I think the only people that enjoy Windows handhelds are people that really love Windows in general and are very tech savvy individuals who don’t mind fixing software problems because they have the knowledge to do so in the first place. This is why many people prefer Xbox,PlayStation, and Nintendo plug and play with little to no os problems and never having to worry if your console can handle the games.
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Yet windows can play any game and steam deck cant . Sounds like a hater to me while I still have a steam deck and recently bought a Rog ally I gotta say its definitely better than steam deck. Dude sounds salty because he doesn’t want to buy it so he will find any reason to say windows isn’t good while im pretty sure his PC runs windows anyone who says windows sucks you should get rid of your PC then
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