According to YouTuber Dave2D who managed to get their hands on the Lenovo Legion Go S, the SteamOS version destroys Windows in performance and battery life.
Seeing this with Bazzite, Garuda, “vanilla” distros like Mint, Arch, Manjaro, etc. would be really interesting, I agree.
My amateur guess from the outside would be, that SteamOS is perhaps stripped down in a way, that “normal” Linux background stuff only gets booted up when switching into Desktop mode, which would explain the massive improvements for battery life. But that is a guess, cannot be sure about that at all.
On the Deck itself there are APU customizations at play, but not here. I don’t know that the underlying OSs are fundamentally different. I know one is arch and the other is Fedora, but they’re both immutable distros and should mostly be running the same things when launching in game mode.
For battery life it could just be a configuration difference in how the benchmarks were run on both OSs, or even down to the manufacturer software. Benchmarking hardware is hard, what can I say. I can say Dave2D isn’t great at it, which I suppose is not the point of his channel, but I certainly wish some of the more technical channels weren’t distracted right now, because there’s an interesting three-way comp to be had here and some digging into interesting things.
Seeing this with Bazzite, Garuda, “vanilla” distros like Mint, Arch, Manjaro, etc. would be really interesting, I agree.
My amateur guess from the outside would be, that SteamOS is perhaps stripped down in a way, that “normal” Linux background stuff only gets booted up when switching into Desktop mode, which would explain the massive improvements for battery life. But that is a guess, cannot be sure about that at all.
On the Deck itself there are APU customizations at play, but not here. I don’t know that the underlying OSs are fundamentally different. I know one is arch and the other is Fedora, but they’re both immutable distros and should mostly be running the same things when launching in game mode.
For battery life it could just be a configuration difference in how the benchmarks were run on both OSs, or even down to the manufacturer software. Benchmarking hardware is hard, what can I say. I can say Dave2D isn’t great at it, which I suppose is not the point of his channel, but I certainly wish some of the more technical channels weren’t distracted right now, because there’s an interesting three-way comp to be had here and some digging into interesting things.