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[Crayon]

I dunno. These comparisons always feel kind of disingenuous.

The guy shows the instant resume on linux. Great. That's really good. I genuinely think that quick resume and suspend is a great feature. No notes.

It's the windows comparison that I have issue with. He demonstrates that it takes a very long time to "fully go to sleep" with the fans off and then OVER A MINUTE to sign back in. That's just outrageous and flat out not representative of a true experience; unless you're an idiot I guess.

He signs in with a PIN, which means he's signed in with a microsoft account, which means he's getting alllll of the related telemetry bloat and all that. ALL of that can be disabled. You DO NOT need to sign into windows with anything other than a local user with no password. You can disable all of the data collection. You can turn off background services etc that bog down windows. Also I see he's using sleep instead of hibernate, which is a mistake. Sleep takes longer to shut down and wake up, and drains more power, AND can cause connectivity issues with bluetooth, controllers, etc.

By my testing, on my Z1E Legion Go with W11 25H2 hibernating took 12.15 seconds to "fully turn off the fans" and all that; if you care about that. The screen goes black immediately. So if your goal is to turn it off and walk away, you can set the device down the moment you press the power button without cause for concern.

Wake up took 14.3 seconds from cold to back in game. It's a FAR cry from the instant suspend/resume of Bazzite, but a also a far cry from the 1:20+ this guy is showing in his video. This throws all of his testing into question.



Here is one of his tests on windows.

Here is his "same settings" test on Bazzite.

I can tell from this test that Windows' power plan is not set correctly. The GPU is being starved while the CPU is suggin up way more power than it needs. In Bazzite, that's probably managed automagically, thanks to the hard work of the people behind it, and gee look, his GPU is being clocked significantly higher and getting a much better framerate. Incredible. I can't believe it. Wow.

***

If Bazzite is super optimized by gamers, for gamers specifically to squeeze all of the performance possible out of a given system versus...
Windows 11 being completely unoptimized for this sort of use case out of the box with tons of bloat by default...

These are not fair comparisons. Also the tester in question might be a moran. Windows 11 demands that users take some responsibility to achieve the best performance on a device running it.

Of course relegating that responsibility to a third party like Valve or Bazzite to piggyback off their years of work is certainly an option; but it's not fair to treat this like some magic bullet for Windows' uncurable performance woes.

I have two windows handhelds, and two steam decks, and I have gone back and forth with steamOS and bazzite and windows many times, believe me, and in the end, all of my devices are running W11. I guarantee you that any meager performance penalty I might endure is vastly more preferable to the avalanche of compatibility issues and quirky problems you run into trying to shoehorn Linux into the situation.

Microsoft should really get all that shit set up right in the first place then, no?

 

[Comandr]

Microsoft should really get all that shit set up right in the first place then, no?

You are absolutely correct. The ball is 100% in their court. I think with 25H2's Full Screen Experience - where most UI elements are controller navigable, and most background processes are off by default, they are definitely heading that direction. But that's not where it's at NOW and we are making those comparisons NOW.

The fact of the matter is, Windows is just a general computing platform. Modern handhelds are pretty new, all things considered, and I think Microsoft is already pivoting pretty hard to support them. How many years did Valve have to develop SteamOS? I remember the Steam Box. It was messy. Hell, even SteamOS at the Steam Deck's launch was a massively different beast compared to today. They've put over a decade of work into making it into the great gaming platform that it is today. Microsoft has realistically only been reacting to the Steam Deck and this sudden fascination with gaming handhelds in general for about 3 years now.

It'll get there.

 

[SomeNorseGuy]

Yeah, MS has a long way to go with their Full Screen experience. It should've been it's own OS fork. Strip any and all bloat away, yeet all productivity apps into the sun, clean up the endless list of services and give users easily accessible options to customize their experience. They could offer all the AI/CoPilot/Telemetry they wanted, as long as it's was a clear and nagfree way to opt out.

Lol, I was kinda excited for this to release, I thought finally Windows would take gaming serious. When will I learn.

 

[Crayon]

You are absolutely correct. The ball is 100% in their court. I think with 25H2's Full Screen Experience - where most UI elements are controller navigable, and most background processes are off by default, they are definitely heading that direction. But that's not where it's at NOW and we are making those comparisons NOW.

The fact of the matter is, Windows is just a general computing platform. Modern handhelds are pretty new, all things considered, and I think Microsoft is already pivoting pretty hard to support them. How many years did Valve have to develop SteamOS? I remember the Steam Box. It was messy. Hell, even SteamOS at the Steam Deck's launch was a massively different beast compared to today. They've put over a decade of work into making it into the great gaming platform that it is today. Microsoft has realistically only been reacting to the Steam Deck and this sudden fascination with gaming handhelds in general for about 3 years now.

It'll get there.

Much of that is true. I think steamos was not terribly different when deck launched but that's not really important. Given the ootb experience now, I don't think you could really call these comparisons disingenuous. "Fiddling", "Tinkering" vs "It just works" comes up A LOT in these discussions, after all.

BTW The Steam Machines launch was fake and intricately connected to the assassination of JFK. Unpopular opinion, I know. So I'm an outlier to talk to when it comes to that particular thing.

 

[Nonehxc]

ROG Xbox Ally runs better on Linux than the Windows it ships with — new test shows up to 32% higher FPS, with more stable framerates and quicker sleep resume times

ROG Xbox Ally runs better on Linux than the Windows it ships with — new test shows up to 32% higher FPS, with more stable framerates and quicker sleep resume times

Jury's still out on Microsoft's optimization.

www.tomshardware.com

I has fix!

Wait for TOOLS.

 

[FIREKNIGHT2029]

This news bodes well for the next Windows based "Xbox" they plan to launch next gen.

Xbox's biggest problem is Microsoft, what a disaster lol.

 

[LiquidMetal14]

Of course it does.

Absolute destruction continues. Microsoft is going to lose more and more if this keeps up.

Linux, a translation layer or form of emulation, mops the floor with the native windows environment in lots of games.

 

[Zacfoldor]

Wow, lol.

I don't even know what to say.

M$ is just too big.

Left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing and they never will.

 

[The Mad Draklor]

And there are thousands of games that work perfectly out of the box without even being "verified", funny how that works. There are even older games that run flawlessly in Linux environments but yet you can't even get them to boot on a modern Windows system.

Multiplayers remain finicky with Linux since it's up to the developer to toggle the anti-cheat support for Linux. But if you are an oldie-but-goodie, singleplayer, and emulation type of gamer, then Linux is a pretty damn good platform to use.

Maybe with time, the Linux userbase will hit a high enough marketshare that it incentivizes multiplayer game developers to toggle on anti-cheat support.

 

[DarkShadowXI]

Wow, lol.

I don't even know what to say.

M$ is just too big.

Left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing and they never will.

Yep. I've worked at plenty of companies like this.

It's so frustrating for those that work there and really are trying to do the right thing.

 

[TheMan]

According to Jeff Gerstmann, the Rog is running regular ass windows and even shows options for MS Office when you first set it up. I don't see why they could make a bespoke, lightweight UI

 

[Unknown?]

Are we going to blame Mattrick on their blunder with Windows now?

 

[Azzurri]

I do wonder if MS will ever actually release an optimised branch of Windows that allows better performance on handhelds. Xbox wants that, but it would mean sacrificing all of the "lovely" additions MS enjoys throwing into mainline Win11.

I was gonna say the same thing. With the popularity of gaming handhelds increasing. Why doesn't MS have an OS just for this? Seems like a smart move.

 

[StereoVsn]

I dunno. These comparisons always feel kind of disingenuous.

The guy shows the instant resume on linux. Great. That's really good. I genuinely think that quick resume and suspend is a great feature. No notes.

It's the windows comparison that I have issue with. He demonstrates that it takes a very long time to "fully go to sleep" with the fans off and then OVER A MINUTE to sign back in. That's just outrageous and flat out not representative of a true experience; unless you're an idiot I guess.

He signs in with a PIN, which means he's signed in with a microsoft account, which means he's getting alllll of the related telemetry bloat and all that. ALL of that can be disabled. You DO NOT need to sign into windows with anything other than a local user with no password. You can disable all of the data collection. You can turn off background services etc that bog down windows. Also I see he's using sleep instead of hibernate, which is a mistake. Sleep takes longer to shut down and wake up, and drains more power, AND can cause connectivity issues with bluetooth, controllers, etc.

By my testing, on my Z1E Legion Go with W11 25H2 hibernating took 12.15 seconds to "fully turn off the fans" and all that; if you care about that. The screen goes black immediately. So if your goal is to turn it off and walk away, you can set the device down the moment you press the power button without cause for concern.

Wake up took 14.3 seconds from cold to back in game. It's a FAR cry from the instant suspend/resume of Bazzite, but a also a far cry from the 1:20+ this guy is showing in his video. This throws all of his testing into question.



Here is one of his tests on windows.

Here is his "same settings" test on Bazzite.

I can tell from this test that Windows' power plan is not set correctly. The GPU is being starved while the CPU is suggin up way more power than it needs. In Bazzite, that's probably managed automagically, thanks to the hard work of the people behind it, and gee look, his GPU is being clocked significantly higher and getting a much better framerate. Incredible. I can't believe it. Wow.

***

If Bazzite is super optimized by gamers, for gamers specifically to squeeze all of the performance possible out of a given system versus...
Windows 11 being completely unoptimized for this sort of use case out of the box with tons of bloat by default...

These are not fair comparisons. Also the tester in question might be a moran. Windows 11 demands that users take some responsibility to achieve the best performance on a device running it.

Of course relegating that responsibility to a third party like Valve or Bazzite to piggyback off their years of work is certainly an option; but it's not fair to treat this like some magic bullet for Windows' uncurable performance woes.

I have two windows handhelds, and two steam decks, and I have gone back and forth with steamOS and bazzite and windows many times, believe me, and in the end, all of my devices are running W11. I guarantee you that any meager performance penalty I might endure is vastly more preferable to the avalanche of compatibility issues and quirky problems you run into trying to shoehorn Linux into the situation.

And do you think that a regular ass customer who grabs XBOX Ally is going to get some utilities off GitHub, run some powershell scripts and go deep into tweaking performance!?

That's a very tiny proportion of regular users. It was on MS and Asus to optimize this shit, but instead MS thought what Xbox customers needed was MS Office, Teams and OneDrive!

 

[Soodanim]

Microsoft should really get all that shit set up right in the first place then, no?

That's not how business works silly billy.

You release a half baked product on the strength of marketing and blind hype

Then you slowly fix the half broken product into a quarter broken product

Then you wonder why you didn't do as well as you could have

 

[Crayon]

That's not how business works silly billy.

You release a half baked product on the strength of marketing and blind hype

Then you slowly fix the half broken product into a quarter broken product

Then you wonder why you didn't do as well as you could have

 

[hinch7]

Yeah, MS has a long way to go with their Full Screen experience. It should've been it's own OS fork. Strip any and all bloat away, yeet all productivity apps into the sun, clean up the endless list of services and give users easily accessible options to customize their experience. They could offer all the AI/CoPilot/Telemetry they wanted, as long as it's was a clear and nagfree way to opt out.

Lol, I was kinda excited for this to release, I thought finally Windows would take gaming serious. When will I learn.

Feels like a beta to get the foundations in check. I'm more disappointed that they can't even get quick resume right. That's one of THE things to nail down for a portable and console like experience.

It will improve over time but yeah kinda bleh from what I've seen, from the reviews.