It ran incredibly well on my machine and looked amazing. This is not a poorly optimized game in my experience. Could it be that it also ran fine on the machines of most reviewers?
Couldn’t have happened to nicer people. Reap what you sow.
If you’ve ever had to deal with a Gamergate dogpiling campaign, you are probably high as a kite on schadenfreude right now. You are probably knocking back a huge mug of crocodile tears.
As a more portable and budget-friendly alternative, consider a small emulation console. I’m very happy with my Anbernic RG35XXSP. Since the screen folds like on the original GBA SP, it’s absolutely tiny and fits into any pocket - without having to worry that the screen might scratch. Configure it correctly and you can close the screen to suspend games.
This kind of system would also make for a great first gaming device once your kid is around five years old.
Not quite. For starters, going by open bug reports and various forum comments, suspend and resume appear to be unreliable and buggy, especially with Proton - and based on developer reaction to at least one of the bug reports, there aren’t even any plans to fix this. This is an essential feature on a handheld gaming device, which means that this OS might not suitable for this device category at the moment.
Bazzite has potential, but it’s nowhere near as mature as Steam OS on the Steam Deck - and it might never be, because it’s meant to work on anything, lacking the close hardware-software relationship that Steam OS on the Deck has.
Also, since it’s using a different flavor of Linux as Steam OS as its foundation (Fedora vs. Arch), I would expect random games to not work or exhibit bugs that aren’t present on Steam OS. With Valve’s Steam Deck verified label, you can be reasonably certain that a game will work, but you can’t with other Linux distros. I’m basing this on reports on ProtonDB and from developers who have released games for popular distros, but then got notified of bugs that only appear on less common distros (read: not Ubuntu or Steam OS).
This doesn’t mean that you can’t have a great time with Bazzite. It might work just fine on your hardware, but there’s no guarantee this will be the case for everyone.
There is a life hack, which is so effective it might result in you lying down too much: If there is a wall right next to you, you can attach a basic monitor arm to it. I then added a tablet VESA mount, which allows me to either use it with a tablet or a small portable monitor that you can plug anything into, including games consoles, a normal desktop PC or the Steam Deck through a single USB-C cable - it’ll also get charged through the screen. Add a controller or mouse and keyboard combo and you’re golden.
This is also by far the most comfortable way to read ebooks, using a tablet with an OLED screen, ideally, with white or grey on black text and brightness set to near zero (in a dark room) and a mouse for scrolling.
Key to this is perfect placement of the monitor arm on the wall, since you can’t easily change it after having drilled the holes, so make sure it’s exactly where you want it to be. If there is no wall next to you, there are also various significantly more expensive articulated arms that attach to the bed, but they tend to cost hundreds instead of the ten bucks or so I paid for the wall mount.
The uncanny valley remains, but as a palette cleanser, I do enjoy looking at expensive games every once in a while. It’s like walking through a film set that clearly took months and lots of blood, sweat and tears by the artists who created it. For as much as I have always loved scrappy Indie games, this kind of splendor is one thing they can rarely provide.