SteamOS is finally coming to the Asus ROG Ally - so you can bin off Windows 11

The Asus ROG Ally gaming handheld, pictured from the back and the front.

(Image credit: Asus)

The Asus ROG Ally dropped in 2023 before a revamped ROG Ally X followed this year, and while many have sung the praises of the portable gaming PC, one complaint seems to remain constant: Windows 11 sucks on handhelds. The good news is that it seems the option to switch to SteamOS on the ROG Ally is now officially inbound.

Our reviews of the ROG Ally and ROG Ally X both include the same complaint - Windows 11 doesn’t feel quite right on a handheld device. While it’s familiar, Microsoft’s OS doesn’t have the same smooth feel as SteamOS on the Steam Deck.

So, with great interest, some folks picked up on a part of Valve’s latest SteamOS release notes, in which the company states that it has “added support for extra ROG Ally keys.” That amounts to a pretty sneaky way to mention that the ROG Ally is finally getting SteamOS support!

In fact, Sean Hollister of The Verge wasn’t sure if this meant what it seemed to suggest, so he sought confirmation from Valve that SteamOS is indeed coming to the ROG Ally. He received a positive response from Valve designer Lawrence Yang, who stated: “The note about ROG Ally keys is related to third-party device support for SteamOS. The team is continuing to work on adding support for additional handhelds on SteamOS.”

SteamOS is on the way! Soon...

That’s not to say we’ll be waking up to the possibility of installing a whole new operating system in a few weeks - it’s going to be a long process before we see SteamOS on the ROG Ally (or other Windows portables). According to Yang, though, Valve is “making stable progress” in realizing this goal.

Yang also comments on Valve’s previous promise that you will be able to switch between SteamOS and Windows on the Steam Deck. Known as dual-booting, on that topic, Yang observes: “As for Windows, we’re preparing to make the remaining Windows drivers for Steam Deck OLED available (you might have seen that we are prepping firmware for the Bluetooth driver). There’s no update on the timing for dual boot support - it’s still a priority, but we haven’t been able to get to it just yet.”

It’s interesting to see Valve sweep in and help out a competitor in a tough spot with the software side of its product, but it does make sense from a business perspective, at least.

More exposure for SteamOS - which is tied to Valve’s own gaming platform - has got to be a good thing in the end. And while it isn’t hardware sales, Valve is kind of turning rival handhelds into Steam Decks, in a way - at least for the software side of the equation.

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Muskaan is TechRadar’s UK-based Computing writer. She has always been a passionate writer and has had her creative work published in several literary journals and magazines. Her debut into the writing world was a poem published in The Times of Zambia, on the subject of sunflowers and the insignificance of human existence in comparison. Growing up in Zambia, Muskaan was fascinated with technology, especially computers, and she's joined TechRadar to write about the latest GPUs, laptops and recently anything AI related. If you've got questions, moral concerns or just an interest in anything ChatGPT or general AI, you're in the right place. Muskaan also somehow managed to install a game on her work MacBook's Touch Bar, without the IT department finding out (yet).