"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"
this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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"Relive past game moments with recall" "Totally not going to be dropped in 3 years"
Honestly
As compared to consoles? Windows is pretty free.
Other than the Windows tax, ads, bloatware, constant intrusive up-sell attempts…
Again
COMPARED TO CONSOLES? That's basically paradise.
Modern, unhacked and unmodded Consoles are:
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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".
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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
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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.
Also, compared to something like the Switch? I don't see MS remotely bricking these devices if you run "homebrew" on them.
That's a really good comparison
It the Zune for gaming.
I mean, the Zune is fucking amazing.
FM radio when you wanted it, big color screen that you could watch actual videos on at a solid playback that you could do video out to a TV with. WiFi song sharing. Great playback and no fingerprints in my semitransparent case that glows.
Zune was amazing.
explain
You can Google it. The zune was far superior to iPods but software was absolute dog shit
Exactly!
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That's a typo, it's supposed to be an R in the middle there, not an F
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.
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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.
Why do you use desktop mode for a game?
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.
Steam os is pretty old now, compared to the Wayland readiness timeline, and proton doesn't fully support Wayland yet
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.
Oh god, why have you cursed me with such knowledge
Remote play for whatever reason works far better in desktop mode
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?
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Oh, Paul Marketing, you crazy fellow.
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