The first time I installed Bazzite on a Windows gaming handheld, I laughed. It looked like such a blatant clone of Valves 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 Decks ease of use to the Allys 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. Ive been testing it for five months, and Ive rarely looked back.This combination wont 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 were expecting Valve to open up its SteamOS to more partners.RelatedIn review after review of handheld gaming PC, Ive tried to explain: Windows isnt a good portable gaming experience. Its bloated, full of self-serving prompts to share your data with Microsoft, subscribe to Microsofts services, and use Microsofts apps. Its not designed to let you navigate with gamepad controls or even do simple keyboarding on a 7-inch touchscreen display. Its not good at making sure games launch full-screen, and worst of all, Ive 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. Its 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 theres a gamepad-accessible keyboard ready to go whenever I like. But SteamOS hasnt been broadly available for other companys handhelds which brings us to Bazzite.The open-source Bazzite is a way to bring SteamOSs strengths to hardware that doesnt yet have Valves blessing. Its not technically SteamOS, as its 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 Decks UI right down to Valves own tutorial on how to use the Steam Decks 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, its not true that Windows handhelds offer more games than SteamOS. Not only does Valves 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 arent willing or able to offer the same anti-cheat solutions, Ive found its a small price to pay.Handheld Daemon, accessible with a double-tap of the Quick Access Menu key just below the Start button.To me, the surprising part is that Bazzite doesnt feel like a hack. For me, its 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 its 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 handhelds 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 Bazzites Linux-based operating system.Its 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, were generally just talking about a small handful of frames; I never saw enough speed increase that a game became playable on Bazzite that wasnt playable on Windows through faster framerate alone.Bazzite vs. Windows, 720p lowGame and power modeAlly X WindowsAlly X BazziteFaster by:Assassin's Creed Valhalla, 15-watt TDP52567.69%17-watt TDP67727.46%25-watt TDP 83852.41%30-watt TDP (plugged in)83897.23%Cyberpunk 2077, 15-watt TDP42457.14%17-watt TDP51569.80%25-watt TDP 687713.24%30-watt TDP (plugged in)707912.86%Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, 15-watt TDP59625.08%17-watt TDP71755.63%25-watt TDP 859612.94%30-watt TDP (plugged in)899911.24%Returnal, 15-watt TDP30313.33%17-watt TDP37370.00%25-watt TDP 40425.00%30-watt TDP (plugged in)42420.00%Shadow of the Tomb Raider, 15-watt TDP5248-7.69%17-watt TDP6458-9.38%25-watt TDP 75761.33%30-watt TDP (plugged in)79790.00%All games tested at 720p low. But they do often feel smoother, with fewer hitches! Like the Steam Deck, I notice that framerate doesnt 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. (Its a killer feature for GPU-limited handhelds, and its a big deal that Bazzite supports it today.)Similarly, I didnt 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 thats 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.Thats because like SteamOS, Bazzite makes it easy to tweak how much power and performance youre 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 Xs quick access button to pull up an integrated version of Handheld Daemon, a power user tool that lets you change your chips 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 cant quite do everything that Asus does with its own hardware. Two key examples: the Ally Xs rear macro buttons dont 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 cant hold down the power button to quickly access the Linux desktop mode or a shutdown menu.Steam can recognize the back buttons of Sonys fancy PS5 pad, so here Bazzite is telling it that the ROG Allys buttons are coming from that one.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 handhelds 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 cant 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 Baldurs 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 dont worry about the Ally Xs battery with Bazzite any more than I do with the Steam Deck OLED, particularly since Bazzite added support for the ROG Ally Xs 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 Steams wonderful controller remapping and support the ROG Ally Xs gyroscope for precision aiming, it doesnt magically give it a pair of twin touchpads to make generations of older mouse-and-trackball games work. You dont get the Deck OLEDs 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 todays 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 theres a long delay when Im trying to uninstall a game before the system responds. Whenever theres a Bazzite update, Ill uselessly see Valves last update message instead of Bazzites and have no idea what Im 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 its difficult to tell how long a system update will take to install.Also, theres 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 doesnt 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 youd need to do anyway with most other handhelds.Ive told Bazzites maintainers about these things, and they say theyre 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 whos also the lead developer of Handheld Daemon.I dont 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, Id want to know the ROG Ally X isnt 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 youll miss Windows. You might be surprised by just how much better the portable experience can get.Photos by Sean Hollister / The Verge