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I’ve owned my Asus ROG Ally X long enough to have cycled through its entire identity crisis. It shipped as a Windows 11 handheld, which mostly meant a desktop OS squinting at a 7-inch screen. Then I put SteamOS on it, and it ran so much better on the ROG Ally X that my Steam Deck started collecting dust, even if Valve’s appliance philosophy treats you more like a customer than an administrator. But a few weeks ago, I wiped the whole thing and installed the Handheld Edition of CachyOS, the same performance-obsessed take on Arch Linux for normal people that already runs my desktop.
The thing is, I expected a marginal difference. What I got was a handheld that feels faster than it ever did on Windows 11 or SteamOS. And when I went looking to see if I was fooling myself, I found a small mountain of testing that says I’m not.
Expectations are high for the Steam Deck’s eventual successor
My claim of “it feels faster” is the type of claim I’d dismiss out of hand most of the time, because feelings don’t care about hard numbers. But here’s one number for you that puts things into perspective. I ran Shadow of the Tomb Raider on CachyOS on the ROG Ally X and got an average of 44 FPS on High. Now, when we reviewed the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X with the Z2 Extreme chipset, we got 43 FPS.
That’s right, the Z1 Extreme on CachyOS is faster than the Z2 Extreme on Windows 11. Do I need to test more things? I have to admit that I didn’t run a gamut of Windows 11 tests before putting CachyOS on, partly because I had SteamOS installed, but also because I assumed our review of the older device would have benchmarks I could use.
Except, most of the games used in that review don’t run on Linux. Grand Theft Auto V does at least, and it’s a game I remember struggling to play on my laptop when it first came out. With CachyOS on the ROG Ally X, I got performance that old laptop could only dream of, averaging over 60 FPS with settings on high. I could easily get much higher, but I prefer the graphical fidelity in this game.
And you don’t have to look far to see that picture repeated. YouTube and tech media are full of reviewers telling the same story: Linux beats Windows 11 on handhelds, every time. CachyOS is just the latest iteration of that, showing what a fully open and optimized system can do.
SteamOS isn’t only easier to use than Windows 11 — it’s straight-up faster.
Most Linux testing on the ROG Ally X uses SteamOS or Bazzite, and that’s my experience as well. I’ve used CachyOS on my laptop for a while now, but I only recently found out about the handheld edition and had to give it a go. It’s even more familiar to me than SteamOS, and I’m not alone — it’s now the top Linux distro on Steam. But there’s also a philosophical difference. SteamOS and Bazzite are appliances, and that’s not a bad thing for most handheld users. CachyOS gives you the same Gamescope session and Game Mode experience while leaving the hood unlocked for further tinkering.
Under that hood is the stuff that makes the “feels faster” claim mechanical rather than mystical. CachyOS compiles its packages for x86-64-v3, targeting the instruction sets that the Ally X’s Ryzen Z1 Extreme actually supports, rather than CPUs from 2008. It ships sched_ext with the LAVD scheduler, which understands that a game’s render thread matters more than a background file indexer, something the stock scheduler treats as a philosophical debate. And it runs ZRAM with zstd compression, which matters more than you’d think when a big open-world game starts leaning on that 24GB of RAM.
Individually, each of those is a nerdy footnote. Together, they’re why menus snap, why shader-heavy scenes hold their frame times, and why the whole device stopped feeling like it was wading through something. Sure, SteamOS is tuned too, but it’s tuned once, by Valve, and then sealed behind an immutable filesystem. CachyOS hands you the same tuning and then lets you keep going. My brain vibes with that approach in a way it never did with Valve’s read-only world.
Big disclaimer: I’ve only been using CachyOS on this system for a few weeks, and haven’t noticed any issues. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist, and the handheld edition isn’t anywhere near as mature as SteamOS or Bazzite. The CachyOS forums have reports of the installer repeatedly failing on this device, or of the Handheld Daemon that handles the controls not working after reboots. GitHub has some reports of VRR not working and of noticeably worse performance than the previous distro they were running.
Linux isn’t a magic wand for overall efficiency either, and I’m yet to use a handheld that can rival the Steam Deck for power draw. My ROG Ally X and its 80Wh battery still drain faster than a Steam Deck, but the Z1 Extreme was tuned for performance, not power use. CachyOS made the experience smoother, but it can’t change physics.
Nice try Valve, but there’s already a couch gaming system in my home
Here’s the thing: most of the weirdness will get patched out. Trying CachyOS on your handheld costs you almost nothing, with a small time sink if things do go wrong. CachyOS Handheld ships with the Limine boot manager and automatic snapshots, so a bad update rolls back in a single selection instead of a full reinstallation.
Dual-booting Windows alongside it is well-trodden territory for those few anti-cheat titles that you can’t live without, and the pace of fixes for CachyOS issues is incredibly fast. I’ve seen reported bugs fixed within hours of being reported, and the CachyOS handheld repo is full of filed issues that get fixed, often before the discussion thread finishes adding new reports. Can you say the same about Windows 11, while they’re busy adding and removing Copilot features?
I’ve used every handheld gaming-tweaked operating system on my ROG Ally X, and a fair few OSes that were never intended to run on one. I expected that the move to CachyOS would be much of the same, a lateral move that took a few hours’ worth of extra tinkering to get running as I prefer. What I ended up with was the single biggest performance boost of this device, both in perceived smoothness and in hard numbers. The gap between Windows 11 and a lean Linux stack on gaming handhelds is real, and CachyOS adds a layer of scheduler and compiler tuning that SteamOS or Bazzite won’t let you touch. It’s not entirely friction free, but it’s the best handheld gaming experience I’ve had since the Nintendo Switch 2 launched, and it’s now my favorite distro for all of my devices.