Seeing so many advertisements for handheld gaming PCs from Asus and Lenovo. My understanding is all of these are running a windows 11 OS which surely adds a mountain of extra work to the device.
Why would anyone get one of these vs a steam deck with a dedicated, relatively lightweight OS? Is it purely to play games that have poor Linux support?
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Valve has been an advocate of Linux for a while now. They didn’t like the direction Windows was going in due to Microsoft’s personal interests in the gaming industry, and they’re using Linux as a way to distance themselves from it. They’ve probably done more for Linux gaming than any other single entity, once you count the impact on PR and adoption rates.
None of the other companies in handheld PCs share this interest in Linux. Valve’s bread and butter is software and game sales, but everyone else is primarily focused on hardware. They don’t have any reason to get you to use Linux and they have no incentive to develop and maintain their own version of it, so they just slap Windows on the device. Easier for them – less software to maintain – and “easier” for most users – no faffing about with Linux and Proton.
This obviously comes at the cost of the nice user interface that the Steam Deck ships with, but that’s not a worthwhile tradeoff in the eyes of the manufacturers.
As for why you would get one? Size and performance.
The Ally and Legion have a more powerful chip, but one that takes a lot more power to actually use that performance. Around 30-50% more performance in best case scenarios if you double the TDP (which means you’re getting less than an hour playing a game that actually needs that performance.)
Mind you, this is still with everything on low and upscaling from 720p to fit the higher res screen. Don’t bet on playing these super performance intensive AAA games at ultra settings with native resolution like you could with a full gaming PC.