When I first bought the Asus ROG Ally X, I thought it was an amazing piece of kit. It had a huge 80Wh battery, 24GB of LPDDR5X RAM, and an excellent chassis. On paper, it had all the physical ingredients. required to be a Steam Deck Killer. However, upon turning it on, I was met with an immediate friction abrasive software that makes it feel very far from the perfect gaming handheld.
While there are band-aid solutions like Asus Armory Crate, nothing feels as fluid as SteamOS. As I tried to adapt, no amount of startup speeches, custom button mapping, or shell optimization can transform a desktop operating system into a perfect console environment. Windows is fundamentally incapable of delivering a true portable console experience, which in turn appears to be sabotaging the hardware’s immense potential with desktop-first design choices, aggressive background processes, and a complete lack of system-level control or cohesion.
Windows on a handheld is annoying
It is not as smooth as SteamOS
When you use a Windows handheld like the Asus ROG Ally X, you don’t come across a perfect dedicated console environment. Instead, you’re greeted with a bloated desktop operating system that just doesn’t feel quite right on a 7-inch touchscreen.
Of course, there are attempted solutions like the Asus Armory Crate SE or even Microsoft’s specialized Xbox compact full-screen modes. No matter how polished the launcher overlay looks, it simply remains like a fragile skin stretched over a desktop operating system on a portable device. The moment a game launches, an update crashes, or a background window loses focus, the illusion is broken and you’re faced with the friction of the desktop environment.
Forcing a mouse and keyboard OS on a device with a gamepad will obviously lead to crashes. Handheld computers require absolute input determinism, meaning that each button press must be correlated with a predictable system action, but Windows, by design, treats controller inputs as a secondary emulation layer overlaid on the mouse’s central coordinates.
On top of this, an incredibly frustrating window focusing anomaly affecting portable gaming can also cause major friction. You tap play inside a dedicated launcher, but then a random background utility, Epic Games Store sync message, or user account control warning flashes invisibly behind the game environment. The system registers that the game window has lost active focus and then completely disables the physical joysticks and face buttons until you swipe a finger across the touchscreen to click on the hidden executable.
Because on-screen text input engines appear quite regularly, the virtual keyboard can seem a little erratic. Unlike the deeply integrated SteamOS keyboard that seamlessly overlays any running binary, Windows’ virtual keyboard often doesn’t automatically activate when selecting in-game text boxes. It may block critical UI fields or crash completely when invoked during a borderless full-screen application. Overall, the software experience on an Asus ROG Ally X, as well as other Windows portable devices, can feel completely unpolished.
Power states are another point of friction
You should be able to pause mid-game.
Something I love about my Steam Deck is being able to put the device into sleep mode even when I’m in the middle of a game. It gives you the ability to pause and resume immediately, connecting with your element in motion. The Steam Deck uses a dedicated sleep-to-RAM channel at the Linux kernel level, allowing you to click the power button in the middle of a boss fight, throw the device in your backpack for three days, and then tap the button again to resume the game in less than a couple of seconds.
Unfortunately, you don’t have the same luxury in a Windows gaming handheld. This is because Windows Modern Standby is slightly unpredictable on mobile APUs. Clicking the power button on the Ally X does not reliably freeze the game engine. Instead, it instructs the operating system to enter a low-power sleep state while remaining connected to background network threads. This means that the system will frequently wake up in a closed box to download a routine software update, causing the system to heat up inside a packaged bag and, in turn, completely draining the 80Wh battery.
On top of all this, you can’t even pick up where you left off in the game as it probably crashed or froze during your handheld’s sleep state. No matter what settings you adjust, you simply can’t get a Windows handheld to replicate the Steam Deck’s pause and play functionality.
SteamOS is superior
Windows can’t catch up
So why does the Steam Deck hold the portable gaming crown? The ultimate technical differentiator is Valve’s GameScope microcomposer. GameScope acts as an isolated layer between the game executable and the physical display panel.
It forces every game to see a clean, uncompromising console display, enabling seamless system-level AMD FSR upscaling, absolute refresh rate synchronization, and instant refresh rate modulation.
This goes far beyond an overlay like what can fix OS issues on Windows gaming handhelds. Steam Big Picture Mode or Asus Armory Crate SE simply do not do the same thing as SteamOS, they are simply overlays to try to hide the problem, but the problems will always reside beneath them.
The hardware is perfect.
Too bad the software lets you down.
The Asus ROG Ally Trying to patch the desktop operating system with software overlays is a temporary solution that doesn’t really solve anything. If anything, it ruins the plug-and-play spirit of portable gaming. Until Windows chooses to develop a mobile version of its operating system, these problems will constantly persist.
- Dimensions
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11.02 x 4.37 x 1.45 inches (280mm x 111mm x 36.9mm)
- Weight
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1.49 pounds (678 grams)
