I think we have to give credit to Valve for making SteamOS as polished as it is. Even if you put a standard Linux OS on a handheld machine it's not going to be a giant success without software optimization
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Yup and proton. It's bonkers to think that I went from dual-booting windows ONLY for games, to being able to play almost anything on Manjaro.
Glad to see the Linux numbers are looking pretty good right out of the box. I briefly tested ChimeraOS on my Ally but because it can't boot from SD cards I was booting via a USB card reader and that was causing issues. Hopefully I can get a bigger SSD soon and dual boot, as there are still some reverse engineering things I want to get out of Windows and with WiFi support not working in Linux it'll be a kernel release or two before it's truly viable it seems.
Is controlling such a small device / screen complicated? Do you use an external mouse / keyboard? I'm quite interested in getting one.
It's definitely not as nice as the Steam Deck because the Deck has touchpads. The Ally has a mode where the controller can act as a mouse but it's not great, and it requires the ROG software to switch between mouse and gamepad modes. Otherwise you're stuck with the touchscreen. I would recommend mouse and keyboard if you're going to be doing anything other than running the SteamOS/Big Picture UI (or the ROG Ally UI, but it's not great).
On Linux, I made a program that can use a touchscreen as a mouse that should be able to work on any device with a touchscreen. I originally made it for the PinePhone so that I could click on things easier, but with a few tweaks it would probably work on the Ally for a pseudo-touchpad.