I installed a SteamOS clone on a Windows gaming handheld, and it’s actually pretty good

Whenever we talk about gaming handhelds, it’s apparent that while there’s a lot more hardware variety in the Windows space — and more powerful hardware at that — the Steam Deck still reigns supreme due to its price and the ease of use of SteamOS compared to Windows. Well, if you’re deep into this ecosystem, you probably already know you can kind of put SteamOS on a Windows PC thanks to HoloISO, a SteamOS clone that tries to keep most of the same features. But there’s another, more recent option, called Bazzite.

There’s clearly an interest in putting a SteamOS-like experience on gaming handhelds, so I had to see what it’s like for myself. To be absolutely clear, this isn’t a review nor is necessarily a reflection on the quality of the project in itself. It’s only a depiction of my experience with a specific handheld and as someone who doesn’t really use Linux otherwise. It needs to be noted that these projects can only do so much when there are so many handhelds out there. And the handheld I used is the ONEXPLAYER X1 Mini, which is probably one of the newest and least popular options out there, so any potential problems are likely to be exacerbated in this specific scenario.

HoloISO or Bazzite?

An easy choice

Until I started researching for this article, I had only ever heard of HoloISO, but a good friend of mine told me about Bazzite, a sort of spiritual successor to that original project. HoloISO did go defunct for a brief period there, though the project seems to have been resurrected in a different GitHub repository. The main differences on paper seem to be that HoloISO tries to more closely replicate the entire Steam Deck experience, while Bazzite goes further to provide an arguably better experience. You can choose between KDE or GNOME-based desktops, for example.

I wanted to try HoloISO but after a couple of install attempts, I realized that, for whatever reason, I could not get into desktop mode and consistently saw a black screen. The Steam UI worked, but it was upside down with no way to fix it. So I tried Bazzite, and thankfully, things were much smoother. So that’s what my tests are based on, and if you have the same PC, that’s my recommendation. Your mileage will almost certainly vary, though.

Setting up was complicated

This handheld wasn’t made for this

Here’s a fun fact: Many gaming handhelds from smaller brands tend to use displays designed for tablets or smartphones, which have a native vertical aspect ratio. ONEXPLAYER does a good job of disguising this in Windows, but this was the first hurdle when it came to setting up Bazzite or HoloISO. Everything appears in a vertical orientation, and it’s still usable, but definitely not the most comfortable experience while the controllers are attached.

It gets worse when you load into the Steam UI, though, because Steam tries to correct this by rotating the screen… except in the case of this handheld, it rotates in the wrong direction, so everything is upside down. Now, in desktop mode, you can change the orientation of the display somewhat easily (this is why HoloISO was unusable to me without the desktop environment), but there’s another problem: this doesn’t affect gaming mode. It was still upside down.

I was very lucky to have a good friend who’s much more knowledgeable with this kind of stuff than I am. So, upon entering a specific command in the Linux terminal, I was able to fix the orientation of the display for the Steam-powered gaming mode, and we were in business. Here’s the command, in case you run into similar issues:

sudo rpm-ostree kargs --append-if-missing video=eDP-1:panel_orientation=left_side_up

I had some other issues with setting up, though. I had to reinstall Bazzite three times because I was never forced to create a sudo password and I didn’t realize I was missing an important step. So during the setup process, I was repeatedly asked for a password I didn’t have. I finally figured it out, though. Another weird thing is that there’s a helpful setup window when you first get to the desktop, which helps you install some programs to get you set up, including EmuDeck. However, you’re never prompted to connect to the internet before this, so this process didn’t work very well for me. It’s something to remember before you get started.

That being said, this setup window does make things much easier. In a flash, you get all kinds of emulators if you’re into that, and there are a lot of other pieces of software you can choose to install, too. It’s all completely optional, but it’s clear that this is an experience that wants to make things as easy as possible for users, even though there are some setbacks.

Performance

It’s pretty good

I didn’t spend enough time gaming on this handheld to do a scientific comparison between running games on Windows or Linux, but I did try all the usual games I play for a few minutes. Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Forza Horizon 5, and Elden Ring were all totally playable at the same exact settings as I played them on Windows on the same handheld. In fact, they generally play better, with higher framerates when the power consumption is set to the same level. It’s really impressive stuff.

I also tried Apex Legends, which was the first game I ran into real struggles with. Loading this game for the first time is extremely tedious — or at least it appears to be — as Steam takes over an hour to compile the Vulkan shaders. To be fair, even on Windows, preparing the shaders takes some time on this kind of hardware, but it was clearly worse here. That being said, I was able to skip the shader compiling process and the game seemed to work just fine. It was actually pretty smooth, on par with what I got on Windows, if not a little bit better. Rocket League also ran just almost as well as on Windows, though it seemed to be just a little bit slower than the numbers I got when I reviewed the handheld.

I also tried some emulation, starting with melonDS. I tried running a rom hack of a Pokémon title at 5x the native resolution, and of course, it ran flawlessly, just as it did on Windows. In fact, it might even have been a little clearer on Bazzite. However, melonDS isn’t really optimized to run in Steam’s handheld mode, so all the menus are still designed for mouse use. But once you’ve set up the emulator, you can play just fine with just the controllers and the touch screen.

My other test was Switch emulation, and Breath of the Wild ran about as well as it did one Windows, and maybe a little better. Visual glitches were still abundant, but the framerate seemed slightly higher when rendering at twice the native resolution. Again, the emulator UI isn’t designed for gaming mode if you’re trying to access the menus, but once you launch a game, it works totally fine.

And if you’re thinking about performance tuning, Bazzite has you covered too, even better than the ONEXPLAYER software ever did. If you’re willing to dig deeper, you can enable a tool called HHD, which allows you to customize power profiles for every game in your library. On Windows, it’s up to each manufacturer to offer different power settings, and ONEXPLAYER does have a general TDP setting in its overlay. But HHD actually lets you set power profiles for each game, so if you’re running Elden Ring and need all the performance you can get, you can do that. But then if you’re playing a Game Boy game in emulation, you can probably get by with 10W or less, so you can make it each app have a different power profile

Is Bazzite better for handhelds?

It’s a mixed bag

The important question at the end of the day is would I rather use this OS on my gaming handheld compared to Windows? Honestly, I’m inclined to say yes. Of course, the Steam UI is nearly perfect for controllers and touch screens, so that’s a big plus right there, but you can also simulate that on Windows with Big Picture mode. However, using the proper gaming mode on Bazzite gives you a few more options, with a proper performance overlay and some extra settings available. There’s also an easy management window where you can pause any game at a moment’s notice and close it from the Steam UI, which I believe isn’t on Windows.

I did have one major issue, though, which may be specific to my device. The left trigger did not register the same range of movement as the right, and in fact, it wasn’t enough to trigger a lot of actions in games. I couldn’t aim in Shadow of the Tomb Raider or parry in Elden Ring. If I pressed really hard, I could kind of get it to work, but not consistently. This is something I never saw on Windows, and it happened with two units of the same controller, so it seems to be some kind of software issue. What’s even weirder is that while the analog sticks worked as expected in games, when I went to set up the inputs in Steam, the left analog stick wouldn’t register any movement aside from moving left. Again, fairly strange stuff but I feel like it might be a matter of compatibility with this specific hardware on Linux.

In desktop mode, the KDE-based desktop feels very similar to Windows in concept, but there’s something about it that just feels smoother and more responsive. The touch keyboard appears and is dismissed much more quickly, and all the animations just feel smoother and properly designed for touch. That may sound weird to say, but think about it. Most of the animations in Windows seem to be designed for people moving a mouse, which takes a good while longer to do than just tapping something on screen. On a smartphone, things are generally much more responsive to touch, and this seems to kind of replicate that feeling. It’s hard to describe it while making sense, but something about it feels better. The only exception was, oddly enough, Steam in desktop mode, which refused to bring up the keyboard to allow me to log in.

And like I already mentioned, Bazzite also helps you out in that setup process, so right out of the gate I had a bunch of emulators available to me without having to open a browser and look them up. It was pretty nice, honestly.

I’m keeping Bazzite

I’m admittedly not much of a PC gamer, and this was a relatively short experiment. But for what it’s worth, I think Bazzite is a pretty great solution. The controller issues I had are definitely a huge problem, but since I don’t game that much on my PC, I’m interested in keeping this just to see how it evolves. The UI and overall experience on Bazzite just feels better, and I want to see it get that much better on this handheld. If you have a Windows gaming handheld lying around, I think trying Bazzite is definitely worth it, as long as you know how to get back to Windows if you end up regretting it.

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