Windows is the problem with Windows laptops

It’s been nearly two weeks since Microsoft, a multi-trillion dollar company, shipped A $600 portable Xbox console It couldn’t be relied upon to sleep, wake up, or hold a charge while sleeping in my tests. Neither Microsoft nor Asus will acknowledge there’s a problem with the white Xbox Ally or offer a timeline for a fix after repeated requests by Edge. (Asus told me it needs more time for testing.)

But if you want your white Asus laptop to start working reliably, you should He could Do what I did: You installed the latest version From bazettea SteamOS-like, Linux-based operating system that works properly with gamepad controls, and sleeps like a dream. I didn’t need to hibernate or shut down once last weekend as I put in hours of work Silksong He finally won a difficult battle between the leaders.

Did I mention that Bazzite runs most of my Windows games Significantly faster From Windows?

I criticized Xbox Ally on October 15 For many reasons, including: It runs slower than the two-year-old Steam Deck despite actually using the same chip. With Bazzite, the same hardware runs up to 30 percent faster than Windows, and outperforms the Steam Deck in all but one of my gaming benchmarks.

It’s not just the games that feel faster: Steam is a much more responsive interface without the bloat of Windows under the hood. It feels like a completely different mobile device. With Bazzite, I can use it like I use a Nintendo Switch, simply pressing the power button when I want to pause the game, then picking up right where I left off hours or days later.

It’s faster to launch games, faster to wake up from sleep; I also never need to touch the screen and leave fingerprints, something that’s still a long way from Microsoft’s latest attempts at gamepad-controlled Windows.

I won’t go into all the details because I don’t want to sound like a broken record — Last December, I already wrote how Bazzite transformed the previous ROG Ally (not to be confused with the Xbox Ally

But it is Such a disclaimer from Windows That Microsoft’s first “Xbox,” a device with a version of Windows that was supposed to reduce bloat and fix performance and sleep modes, created by a multi-trillion-dollar company, was easily overtaken by the efforts of a few Linux programmers standing on the shoulders of Valve’s roughly 300 people and the broader Linux community.

Bazzite had trouble getting the white Xbox Ally to sleep as well at first. When I installed it on October 19, pressing the power button put the system into a state where it could not be activated again; I needed a hard reset every time. But this is because of Bazzite developers He didn’t do that You still have an Xbox ally. Two days after programmer Antheas Kapenekakis obtained the hardware and consulted with two AMD contacts, the three fixed it — and got Xbox Ally’s programmable RGB joystick lights running on Linux, too.

To give you an idea of ​​how unreliable vanilla Xbox Ally is right now, I tested two of them last week, one with Recent Standby Assist and Extreme Standby turned on, and one with it off. I applied every available update, checked their batteries regularly, and monitored them when they woke up.

They both woke up on their own repeatedly at seemingly random intervals, sat down at my desk, and then went back to sleep again. The deeper model lost 10% of its battery life after 12 hours, while the other lost 23%. (The latter must be awakened twice in a row for the gamepad to continue working.)

But after another 12 hours, I found that both laptops only had 30 percent battery left. I’m not sure what happened to one, but apparently the other tried to apply Windows Update when it was supposed to be in sleep mode. Separately, I’ve also seen both Windows units refuse to wake from sleep, requiring a factory reset before they can come back to life. Some Redditors have Also mentioned That issue With both versions of Xbox Ally, plus Sudden battery drain.

Microsoft declined our request for an interview about the future of Xbox Ally or a timeline for fixes, but Vice President of Windows Product Management Anshul Rawat provided this statement to Edge:

The Windows and Xbox teams recognize the challenges faced by a limited number of players and are actively working to improve sleep and wake reliability. We’ve identified a small handful of issues and initial fixes will be rolling out soon. Optimizing Windows, the world’s most flexible operating system, for a range of devices and screen sizes across PCs and the cloud, is an ongoing journey. As we work with our partners to provide a great experience on mobile gaming devices, community feedback plays an important role in shaping these improvements for all players.

We asked Microsoft what it meant by “limited number of players” and “coming soon.”

If I had bought an Xbox Ally myself, I’m not sure I would have waited for Microsoft to figure it out. At a minimum, i It will dual bootand occasionally return to Windows for new BIOS updates.

There are many lingering misconceptions about Linux gaming, such as how it supposedly offers fewer options than Windows, doesn’t offer game stores other than Steam, doesn’t play as many games, and runs those games poorly in comparison. With some exceptions – most of them are games with it Advanced anti-fraud solutions – This is not true.

You can download games from the Epic Games Store, from Battle.net, from Ubisoft, GOG, and more, and the efforts of the Linux community mean that many older PC games that had problems running on Windows work fine on Linux. Proton DB It helps you check if your favorites are among them.

Photos by Sean Hollister/The Verge