• Count Regal Inkwell@pawb.socialEnglish
        7·
        11 hours ago

        Honey I am the Linux mafia. I’ve spent the past 15 years pushing Linux on my circle of gay nerd friends

        And it even stuck with 3 of them.

        • KalSeth@lemmy.caEnglish
          31·
          10 hours ago

          I mean, pushing was clearly your mistake. We gays like it to be pounded into us.

      • Count Regal Inkwell@pawb.socialEnglish
        25·
        21 hours ago

        Again

        COMPARED TO CONSOLES? That’s basically paradise.

        Modern, unhacked and unmodded Consoles are:

        1. Completely locked down, not only do they not let you install applications not approved by the manufacturer, in reality you can ONLY buy them from the manufacturer and you pay a hefty tax for that “privilege”.

        2. Feeding you ads and upsell attempts whenever you turn them on, as the UI has basically been redesigned to try to sell you more shit first and make getting to your actual games take a few extra steps

        3. Any undesired feature in a console’s OS is something you just have to accept and move on. Powerusers killing Windows bloat with third party tools is a time-honoured tradition that goes back to Windows 3.11

        I’m not saying Windows is good.

        I’m saying that for someone coming from a PlayStation or a traditional XBoXSeXxxx (I love making jokes out of this name), this whitelabelled ROG Ally machine would feel like finally being able to breathe. Just for the fact that you can use more than one storefront and install applications from wherever you want.

        Let me put it this way:

        Linux is an anarchist commune. True freedom.

        Windows is an American Style Capitalist Republic. Freedom*********** with a thousand asterisks more. BUT for someone coming from the North Korea that is playing on consoles (or using an iOS mobile device or…), it DOES feel like finally breathing free.

  • BigTrout75@lemmy.worldEnglish
    402·
    1 day ago

    “Freedom of Windows” “Power of Xbox” Good stuff. We should make some more. “From a brand you can trust” "Pro gamers choose … " “Powered by Copilot and Game pass”

  • Surp@lemmy.worldEnglish
    112·
    1 day ago

    I saw that it’s a trimmed down version of windows so I’m interested in giving it a chance. Who knows, maybe we will be able to install said trimmed down version on regular hardware which would be interesting.

    • BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      22 hours ago

      You can always use a debloat script to fix a lot of issues. Nothing will help with Windows broken, ancient architecture, but the scripts do help.

  • rdri@lemmy.worldEnglish
    40·
    2 days ago

    Players on either device will be able to tap into Gaming Copilot …

    …yeah

  • cron@feddit.orgEnglish
    903·
    2 days ago

    From what I saw, it’s more or less just a new app that starts when windows boots up. Plus some improvements like “the controller now works in UAC prompts” - which tells me that they didn’t really learn anything.

    • Luffy@lemmy.mlEnglish
      556·
      2 days ago

      it’s more or less just a new app

      You know a reason why Linux with Steam runs just way better than win? Because they use game scope, therefore not needing to render and run all of the desktop.

      So what does Microsoft do? They release a new app on top of the already bloated desktop.

      • Leaflet@lemmy.worldEnglish
        26·
        2 days ago

        Gamescope is a compositor. It has many useful gaming features, but it doesn’t have a major performance advantage over desktops like Gnome, KDE, or tilers.

        • Norah (pup/it/she)@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          121·
          1 day ago

          The performance advantage comes from the fact that there isn’t a full-fat desktop running concurrently with the game. You’re booting directly into Steam.

          • DaTingGoBrrr@lemm.eeEnglish
            17·
            1 day ago

            Performance isn’t noticably worse in desktop mode on the Steam Deck compared to gaming mode. Windows is just full of bloat and has a trash power scheduler.

      • cron@feddit.orgEnglish
        71·
        2 days ago

        Yeah apparently the desktop doesn’t even load when this launcher is used. But it’s still an option.

        I don’t think not loading the desktop will really help much. Maybe it will free up a few hundred MB of memory.

      • Lemmchen@feddit.orgEnglish
        54·
        2 days ago

        Funny how this is exactly the opposite of what they’re doing, but sure, keep on raging.

  • anaVal@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    58·
    2 days ago

    This got me thinking that Valve is the best competitor to Xbox. Instead of getting to release some walled garden, single store handheld they have to open it up to other stores because otherwise people would just buy a SteamDeck.

    But everyone who cares about handheld gaming already has a steam deck and this is going to be more expensive so I don’t see the point anyway.

    • OrganicMustard@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      2 days ago

      I guess they are trying to get people already paying for game pass to buy it, because you can play everything on it. But then people won’t be able to cancel their subscription or they’ll have a very expensive paperweight without games.

  • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.deEnglish
    81·
    1 day ago

    The one thing I took away from it was that the Xbox-button acts as alt tab. I WANT THE SAME FROM MY STEAM DECK IN DESKTOP MODE!

    But in Desktop mode the Steam button does absolutely nothing while a game is running.

    • Coleslaw4145@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      23 hours ago

      Can’t you map Alt-Tab to one of the back buttons? Or does that not work in desktop mode?

      EDIT: Or if that doesn’t work through steam then is there gamepad software in KDE or the Software Centre that lets the desktop map gamepad buttons?

      • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.deEnglish
        5·
        1 day ago

        I like to have other apps like a browser easily accessible with proper window management. And most of my games are non-Steam games which allow me to easily swap between desktop and gamepad bindings easily to alt tab out.

        And I’ve found that running KDE Plasma Wayland has no visible performance impact either. No idea why they use X11 in SteamOS.

        • JustARaccoon@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          1 day ago

          Steam os is pretty old now, compared to the Wayland readiness timeline, and proton doesn’t fully support Wayland yet

          • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.deEnglish
            3·
            1 day ago

            Ah, but the really funny thing is how Gaming Mode works.

            They start the gamescope wayland compositor which launches an XWayland session to run the Steam client in. Which will start gamescope to run the game, which will use a second XWayland session to actually run the game in.

            It’ll probably take at least two more years until they can get rid of X.

    • krdo@programming.devEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      I guess you could remap them in desktop mode? I haven’t tried but it should be possible.

      • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.deEnglish
        2·
        1 day ago

        No, you cannot change the mapping of the Steam and … buttons. They are only available to the Steam client. You cannot remap the Steam+other button combinations either.

        Funnily enough when no game is running the Steam button focuses the Steam window. But that functionality is gone as soon as a game is running. Really frustrating.

    • atrielienz@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      2 days ago

      Nah. The ROG Ally X they already make with windows 11 and 1 TB is $800+tax. The ROG Ally that came before it was $700 and currently sells for like $400 or so.

      The 2TB Rog Ally X is about $1k + tax. I honestly doubt they can get people to pay more than that for a handheld, regardless of the Z2 chip. They are having trouble selling the ones they currently make. Add to this that Lenovo just launched the steam os variant of their newest handheld and it’s significantly cheaper.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        4·
        1 day ago

        I appreciate the info and analysis!

        The reason I have no idea what the pricing will be… is that well, GPU prices are nonsense that stick nowhere near MSRP, we got tariffs, we got all game prices getting jacked up, we got massive layoffs at MSFT, they are hurting for money…

        And unless this handheld significantly outperforms other existing handhelds… I just don’t think many would buy it at basically any price…

        But I also think MSFT is delusional about that, and I don’t think they have the depth of coin in their pockets to try to do a loss leader approach, and I think they’re more likely to just price it the same way cars and houses and rent are ludicrously overpriced, a price based more on ‘we need to pay our debts’ than on ‘how do we have a sensible long term strategy in this market’.

      • Norah (pup/it/she)@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        51·
        1 day ago

        To be fair, the Legion S uses the Z2 Go chip, which is basically same benchmarks as a Z1 Extreme. If this uses the Z2, that’s gonna be faster.

        • Ulrich@feddit.orgEnglish
          3·
          16 hours ago

          That’s not correct. The Legion S is sold with both the Z2 Go chips and Z1 Extreme. The Z2 Go is similar in performance to the Steam Deck and the Z1E is much faster.

        • atrielienz@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          19 hours ago

          Yeah. But the ROG Ally X just got a price increase so it’s $100 more now than what I quoted in the first comment. And that’s for the 1TB version with the 2TB version costing $1000. This handheld will have less RAM and an new chip with unknown benchmarks? That’s gonna be a hard sell in markets constantly under threat from tariffs. Especially with other handhelds now available at cheaper price points. I’m not sure how much more they can sell this thing for and actually get people who already have a handheld to buy it (or entice people who have held off this long to buy it). Most people looking for a handheld are looking at buying a switch or a steam deck. The things they have going for them is mostly that they’re available for purchase in stores and Lenovo’s steam os variant is gonna be out in the wild and available by the time this thing hits shelves.

      • anaVal@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        6·
        2 days ago

        Don’t worry it’s going to launch with silksong. Don’t really know what’s the point of releasing a game along a cross-platform console but I guess the publicity is good.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        8·
        2 days ago

        I genuinely have no idea what either a cost-to-produce estimate would be, or what the fuck MSFT thinks their strategy is here.

        I am flummoxed.

        It basically uses the next version of the same kind of chips that are in the ROG Ally and ROG Ally X… no one has any idea what the actual performance of this thing will be, I’m seeing barely educated guess at … roughly 25% more powerful, basically?

        All the other specs seem identical or near identical.

        Then you’ve also got the insane tariff situation and MSFT being both based in the US, and I think they still have their largest share of Xbox users in the US, but I’m not sure.

        I guess I also wonder if they will pretend this thing is a console when it comes to software mods, and just lock down the bootloader and brick itself if you try to install linux on it.

        Because… if you can just flash like Bazzite or SteamOS onto it… you get a roughly 15% game performance boost.

        And then at that point MSFT will just have basically developed a product that non morons will use effectively as a competitor’s platform, mainly in the Steam gaming ecosystem… not MSFTs.

        I have a lot of questions about all of this.

    • enbiousenvy@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      9·
      2 days ago

      yea the full sentence makes more sense. “freedom of windows, power of xbox” implies it’s trying to compare to previous xbox experience, not other OS.

      Although still, never had a console, but I thought a gaming PC is usually more powerful than xbox though. Or I could get mad overthinking of what do they meam by power, what do they mean by freedom. This is why I often dont like marketing speak & just disregard it.