Probably fits well with having game pass on handhelds; that’s one of the notable disadvantages of the Steam Deck, even with all the great emulation for other stores (I’ve been playing Odyssey off my UPlay account) it can’t handle WinStore games.
That’s MS being shitty, but hopefully they’ll change their tune soon. One of the artificial restrictions is needing to have the games installed on an NTFS file system. I actually formatted my ROG’s SD card with NTFS so I could install my MS games to it.
Made me sad, because doing that makes me have to commit entirely to keeping it Windows. Otherwise I would have probably dual-booted ChimaeraOS or something.
They still use EXEs but they’ve heavily obfuscated and restricted the file access. Games are definitely not UWP.
If you go and look into a directory you’ll see more or less the same thing you’d see in the Steamapps directory, but it requires admin access and other funky stuff to even view, let alone touch.
Functionally the difference is basically just MS has heavier DRM which causes problems for things like mods. Starfield on Gamepass is already worse than Starfield on Steam because it’s incompatible with a bunch of mods without weird shit like running Cheat Engine.
Sure it can. Install Windows on it. I don’t get why people consider the default OS of any of these handhelds to be a downside. They’re computers. Just install what you want.
On the installed OS, you can ask the device’s manufacturer for support, and there will be 20 articles out about what’s gone wrong. If you installed a secondary OS, you might find much much less, or there might be no fix at all. The manufacturer doesn’t have to help you, nor do they care.
It’s a bit like being an outlaw. Sure, the methods may be out there, but the protections aren’t. Even if 20 people on social media say the secondary OS works well, when something breaks none of those people are volunteering to be your tech support.
Plus, SteamOS as a whole has much better controller support than Windows. From what I understand, Lenovo has added some of its own software to account for that kind of thing on its handheld.
ASUS also has Armoury Crate which is their software for managing the console. Lets you do things like change the VRAM, processor voltage, LED settings, and it also works as a unified game launcher across all the different platforms.
They actually just updated it today and made a bunch of great changes, including some power optimizations with the processor boost mode.
Probably fits well with having game pass on handhelds; that’s one of the notable disadvantages of the Steam Deck, even with all the great emulation for other stores (I’ve been playing Odyssey off my UPlay account) it can’t handle WinStore games.
That’s MS being shitty, but hopefully they’ll change their tune soon. One of the artificial restrictions is needing to have the games installed on an NTFS file system. I actually formatted my ROG’s SD card with NTFS so I could install my MS games to it.
Made me sad, because doing that makes me have to commit entirely to keeping it Windows. Otherwise I would have probably dual-booted ChimaeraOS or something.
If you want to dual boot you should be able to mount the NTFS partition in Linux and run games off it using Lutris/Proton
Isn’t cause they use a different format (UWP) instead of an EXE?
They still use EXEs but they’ve heavily obfuscated and restricted the file access. Games are definitely not UWP.
If you go and look into a directory you’ll see more or less the same thing you’d see in the Steamapps directory, but it requires admin access and other funky stuff to even view, let alone touch.
Functionally the difference is basically just MS has heavier DRM which causes problems for things like mods. Starfield on Gamepass is already worse than Starfield on Steam because it’s incompatible with a bunch of mods without weird shit like running Cheat Engine.
not user admin access, their admin access
Sure it can. Install Windows on it. I don’t get why people consider the default OS of any of these handhelds to be a downside. They’re computers. Just install what you want.
Say your audio stops working.
On the installed OS, you can ask the device’s manufacturer for support, and there will be 20 articles out about what’s gone wrong. If you installed a secondary OS, you might find much much less, or there might be no fix at all. The manufacturer doesn’t have to help you, nor do they care.
It’s a bit like being an outlaw. Sure, the methods may be out there, but the protections aren’t. Even if 20 people on social media say the secondary OS works well, when something breaks none of those people are volunteering to be your tech support.
Plus, SteamOS as a whole has much better controller support than Windows. From what I understand, Lenovo has added some of its own software to account for that kind of thing on its handheld.
ASUS also has Armoury Crate which is their software for managing the console. Lets you do things like change the VRAM, processor voltage, LED settings, and it also works as a unified game launcher across all the different platforms.
They actually just updated it today and made a bunch of great changes, including some power optimizations with the processor boost mode.