Valve's Steam Deck runs Linux, while the Asus ROG Ally is a Windows machine. But both are computers, so you can install what you want on them. Phoronix compared Valve's Steam Deck and the new Asus ROG Ally on Linux explicitly to see which handheld console is better at gaming under similar operating systems. With the OS swapped from Windows 11 to Arch Linux on the ROG Ally, the performance margin between the two consoles didn't change much. The ROG Ally exhibited superior gaming performance to the Steam Deck, but the Steam Deck was able to outperform the ROG Ally in power efficiency and battery life.
Testing the ROG Ally on Linux is definitely an interesting proposition, since many Linux distros arguably feature less bloatware than Microsoft's latest Windows 11 operating system, which could improve performance and battery life. Linux versions also come with different AMD-based drivers that can change the performance behavior (scheduling) of AMD's Ryzen CPUs in Linux compared to Windows, which can potentially improve performance in some cases.
