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 know this is a Steam deck subreddit, but I had the opposite experience. I sold my steam deck and really enjoyed the ROG ally. The only thing I absolutely miss is the awesome sleep and wake feature on the Steam Deck. It’s hit or miss in Windows, but other than that having 0 compatibility issues with games has been nice.
Me too, I sold my steam deck like a couple weeks after getting it, ran into sooo many problems trying to play non steam games, it’s kinda ridiculous to be honest since it’s supposed to be “plug and play” friendly. Also, I turned of windows hello and have not had a problem since with the sleep/wake on the ALLY, I think it because that button is also a fingerprint scanner so that effecting it.
Yeah, I don’t really get all the hate. The powerful windows handhelds are great if that’s what you’re looking for.
But like you said, nothing other than the Switch beats the Steam Deck’s sleep/resume reliability. I literally used it mid-cutscene in a japanese game (loooong, unpausable cutscenes) because my daughter cried out for help from the next room. Cutscene resumed just fine when waking it up a while later.
That’s really the only reason I haven’t considered some of the mower powerful handhelds. I need the flexibility and battery life more than I need the extra framerate or compatibility (I don’t play multiplayer games, for example, so lack of anti-cheat support is not an issue for me).
If I didn’t have such a huge Steam library with lots of good stuff in my backlog, I probably would have just stuck with the Switch as my main handheld, to be honest.
But the Deck is just sooo good as a middle ground between the things I love about PC gaming and the things I love about simple/Nintendo handheld gaming.
It’s nice to have both