Honestly
As compared to consoles? Windows is pretty free.
this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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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.
That's a really good comparison
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.
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.
"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"
Well gamepass on a cheap handheld doesn't sound so bad tbh
and copilot on a cheap handheld that cannot do anything except record you 24/7 and send it off to MS servers?
It the Zune for gaming.
I mean, the Zune is fucking amazing.
explain
You can Google it. The zune was far superior to iPods but software was absolute dog shit
Exactly!
The Zune was at-best an adequate copy of the iPod lacking a click wheel and having an awkward user interface.
The click wheel was one of the worst physical interfaces ever invented
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.
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?
That works. I'm just lazy and don't want to have to do it for every game.
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
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Players on either device will be able to tap into Gaming Copilot ...
...yeah
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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