Latest ROG Ally status and gotchas?

Bazzite
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I just bought the ROG Ally (RC71L) Z1E because it was massively discounted here (like half the price of Ally X). I’ll stick with Windows 11 until the free 3 months Game Pass is up, but it’s only been a week and Windows is really annoying me.

Before I jump to Bazzite, is there any gotchas and general info for ROG Ally that I’d want to know? I found out that Fingerprint Scanner apparently don’t work (naturally) and that sucks. What about the general performance and battery results in the last few weeks? I’ve only paid attention to it when it hits big on mainstream YouTube and that was more about Ally X.

Side Note: maybe we can have a pinned post for general “Bazzite use for Handheld and HTPC discussion” thread?

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One thing that hit me was that I didn’t have sound in speakers in Bazzite (I had sound if I plugged in headphones). I updated the BIOS on the ROG Ally, and that fixed the problem.

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I am already making sure BIOS, firmware and such are updated on the default Windows install first, yes.

Does dual boot work btw?

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Yes, but follow our guide for dual-booting.

I have an Ally X and there really isn’t that many gotchas today, but here’s the wiki page that I probably should update since it seems most of these issues are now squashed. I could confidently say that the Ally and Legion Go are probably our most supported handhelds outside of the Steam Deck.

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Nice - do update me when that’s updated so I can make a more informed decision.

I think I’ll go with the Windows-to-Go route. I’ll just grab an SSD enclosure and connect it via USB-C while I’m at home.

Thanks for the info!

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here’s an update: most things work. check out digital foundry’s youtube video on bazzite running on the ally. the VRR issues that they critique here are also improved as best as it can be with valve’s implementation of VRR in gamescope.

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Thank you - it is reassuring to see most of it is gone. What about the Extreme Standby Mode issue in this report: Rog ally becomes stuck after waking up

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Bought Ally X and it arrived this morning, after a few small kinks 1) small error in the installer that can be solved by a quick googling /troubleshooting 2) Decky plugins didn’t work initially but SimpleTDP finally worked. Now, I got 850gb of games almost downloaded on it.

I flashed the latest bios on W11 and tested one game, but got tired of the UI immediately. I had Bazzite guide ready from last night and the OS installed already on the USB drive and just plugged everything in and with some small fine-tuning it went pretty well. Now it is a full working Steam Deck, but I can see small bugs here and there. It is still much, much better than W11 even with the bugs, and they are not really big. The immersion of Steam Deck does not go away, and the desktop gives you all the options for youtube, browsing etc.

Rog Ally X and Bazzite are made for each other, and any small kinks there may be, are fully forgiven considering it is still the better than W11 experience. My first reaction to Bazzite was “Wow! This is what I wanted from out of the box!” And my wife will be able to use the Ally X now (she is a MAC user so she’ll appreciate the SteamOS simplicity).

In fact, I got so impressed by Bazzite that I joined the forums here, and went out and bought a 4TB Samsung 990 Pro and will be installing my Desktop PC (5800X3D + RTX4090) Bazzite and start helping the community to make the Nvidia experience better.

I’ll keep Windows for the Desktop PC on a separate NVME drive and ready to be booted, but will be exploring Bazzite quite the bit and see when it can be made my main OS. For the Ally X, I made it immediately the main OS, there’s nothing I need on Windows.

I am that impressed by it. I’m not a coder (I learned some very little coding once), but I grew up with the C64 era, and messing around with Bazzite took me way back and made me appreciate the freedom within an OS.

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I’m getting an Ally Z1E delivered on Friday. (!!) I’m planning on immediately installing Bazzite without a separate Windows boot partition. I saw that fwupd recently started supporting the ROG Ally, which (in theory) means that we can update the MCU without needing to go through windows. Does this currently work? If I can’t update the MCU, could it ever cause stability issues in Bazzite down the line? Thanks for your help.

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When you write “update MCU” are you talking about BIOS update? When I tried that, fwupd didn’t have any BIOS updates (this was for the ROG Ally), so I had to use a USB stick instead.

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I also joined the Ally club a few days ago!
I was already running bluefin on my framework 13 so it was clear before I got the device that bazzite will be my os of choice.

So far I very much like the experience! Especially the good standby implementation!
Just continue where I have left.
I would like to have the same experience on the laptop side of things… But not a big deal breaker for me…