In a not-so-scientific benchmark conducted by YouTuber Cyber Dopamine, the Rog Xbox Ally managed to perform better without Windows, the operating system it ships with out of the box. Cyber installed Bazzite, a popular Linux distro for handhelds built specifically to offer that console-esque, seamless experience. Visually, Bazzite looks identical to SteamOS because it uses Steam’s Big Picture Mode as its main launcher. It also behaves similarly, but has its own custom menus and settings for customizing things like power profiles (which override Asus’ built-in ones).
When testing Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, Cyber noticed a shockingly significant jump in FPS, with Linux generating ~32% more FPS compared to Windows. This trend follows at lower wattages, albeit with less noticeable differences, and the delta actually plateaus in Hogwarts Legacy to the point that both Bazzite and the Xbox FSE offer the same FPS at 13W. That being said, those frame rates are much more consistent on Linux, according to Cyber, who shows that the FPS graph on Windows fluctuates regularly, while staying mostly flat on Bazzite.
Honestly, I like Bazzite because it’s very controller and gaming friendly and you won’t be disappointed with it. That said, for a daily driver workstation computer you might want to try Fedora Kinoite which is very similar but focused towards desktop use.
Also it doesn’t hurt to try both as I said they’re very similar! Would love to hear a follow up on your experience.
Instead of Kinoite, I’d suggest either Bluefin or Aurora. They’re made by the same group as Bazzite.
One caveat. If you have racing wheels or HOTAS you should check if Bazzite supports them. I ran into that issue with my Thrustmaster T300 where the right kernel module isn’t packaged with Bazzite and adding the module to Bazzite… Well, let’s just say it’s easier to reinstall a different OS than it is to add a custom kernel module to Bazzite.
Looks like this is on their radar at least
I know. I found that issue when I was looking into how to get my T300 to work and it’s because of that issue that I’m raising the awareness because that issue has been open for over a year and the last maintainer activity there was months ago.
I get that they’re doing it out of their free time and they probably have more important things to do so I’m not faulting them for not being faster with it, but from the end user perspective you’re just going to fiddle your thumbs until something gets done because doing it yourself has the immutable OS getting in the way and it also defeats the purpose of having an immutable OS.
Meanwhile getting the wheel to work on Nobara went, relatively speaking, so smoothly I don’t even remember what I did to get it working.