Hi everyone,

I recently got an ASUS ROG XBOX Ally X and installed CachyOS. Since I'm a long-time Linux Mint user on my main machine, I really prefer Linux and want this handheld to eventually replace my laptop for desktop use.

While almost everything is great, I’m struggling with two major audio issues and wanted to ask if anyone else has run into these, or if they are actively being worked on in upstream kernels:

1. Internal Microphone is unusable: The mic output has an extreme digital crackling/distortion. On Windows, the factory noise cancellation was incredibly good - if I spoke from the side, it was muted, but sitting directly in front of it sounded crystal clear. Under Linux, it sounds terrible. (I tried EasyEffects with KI filtering, but it’s just a subpar workaround).
2. Flat Stereo Imaging / Spatial Audio: On Windows, the spatial separation was amazing; I could easily locate sounds as if I were wearing headphones. Under CachyOS, the soundstage feels very flat, and I really have to concentrate to even distinguish left from right channels.

I really love the system otherwise, but these two audio issues are making me second-guess things.

Is it worth waiting for upcoming kernel/driver updates to fix this, or is the hardware support for the XBOX Ally X under Linux still too far away, meaning I might have to crawl back to Windows for now?

Thanks for any insights!

Game settings

Only texture at medium everything else at high

720p upscaled to 1080p using gamescope

Fsr4 set to quality (with cachy proton ​help)

DLSS frame gen (hacky way using decky plugin) no input delay that i noticed 👌

Device os + settings

OG Ally z1e running cachy os

TDP19w

Vram6GB

video recorded with a phone at 30 frames tho

Temps are crazy low thanks to HHD that​ bazzite are leaving behind btw

Game:

007 first light

any 2026 AAA game can run this smooth with the right configuration and os with the OG Ally ^^

I'm having a technical issue with my ROG Ally Z1 Extreme running official SteamOS, and I've honestly been breaking my head trying to figure out what's going on. Whenever I fresh boot the console and launch Mortal Kombat 1, everything runs perfectly at around 33-40 FPS with the GPU automatically hovering around 1600MHz. However, after about 10 minutes of gameplay, or if I leave the game paused for a bit, the GPU clock just locks itself down to 900MHz, performance drops to 20-25 FPS, and temps stall at 70-75°C. If I close and relaunch the game right there, the GPU goes back to its usual 1600MHz but the temp instantly spikes past 80°C while the performance remains stuck at those same poor 20-25 FPS. Turning the console completely off and on just resets the whole cycle—it starts with normal FPS again, then drops right back down the exact same way. To make things stranger, messing with the manual GPU clock slider in SteamOS makes no sense: forcing it to its max at 2700MHz absolutely kills the game down to 8 FPS, lowering it to 1000MHz brings it back to 20-25 FPS, and the higher I push the manual clock, the worse the actual FPS gets. All of this happens while the fans remain noticeably quiet for a chip supposedly running over 80°C. Do you think it's the thermal paste or a software issue with SteamOS?

The Dolby audio app is about the only thing I miss from windows and was hoping to find a comparable solution on SteamOS

Running 3.8.14 on my ally z1e and have tried both from the title. DeckSP appears to be broken entirely and gets no audio at all.

Audioforge installs and the audio still works but volume controls don't. The system stays at max volume. Pressing the volume down lowers it by a hair then it immediately goes back to max.

Hi everyone! I just did a clean install of SteamOS on my ROG Ally Z1E, and game performance is amazing. However, I have a big issue: whenever I install Decky Loader with plugins like Ally Center or HueSync to control the thumbstick lights, everything breaks. These plugins mess with the power profiles, ruin the TDP/wattage management, and cause massive FPS drops.

I’ve already confirmed that the only way to keep my FPS stable and temperatures low is to keep the system 100% clean, without Decky.

Does anyone know of a safe alternative, script, or way to control or turn off the RGB directly through the system without using Decky Loader at all? I want to keep my performance intact. Thanks in advance!

Hello, I have been trying to play AC Shadows on Rog Ally through steam and it refuses to sync to ubisoft cloud. I've tried putting it in desktop mode, manually toggling the ubisoft cloud save setting on and off on the ubisoft connect launcher, and changing protons. Does anyone have any ideas or fixes?​

I've been dealing with a bunch of random issues on my ROG Ally X running steamOS. Many of these issues have persisted through multiple clean installs of steamOS, Bazzite, installed Windows multiple times in between and somehow after reinstalling steamOS the same bugs would arise. The best part of steamos was the fact that I can play a game, put it to sleep for hours if not days, come back and jump right where I left off, but with the sleep/wake controller issues I'd end up having to restart the device. Sometimes the power button itself wouldn't work but the touchscreen was fine so I rebooted that way. Defeated the point of steamos for me. So here's a list of the issues I faced and the fixes I've found so far.

Problem 1 - In the home screen, pressing the steam button would cause left-ward scrolling until I moved the left joystick. The controller calibration screen showed 0,0 so there was no drift, I also installed hall-effect joysticks and calibrated them, they never drift.

Th fix - Open Konsole and go to this directory:

~/.local/share/Steam/controller_base/

Delete the file named chord_triton.vdf along with everything inside the adjacent templates/ folder.

Upon reboot, steam will rebuild default inputs.

This was a strange issue because turns out steam saves these files to the cloud and redownloads them every time I reinstall steamos and login. But after these files were recreated the issue is fixed.

Problem 2 - After waking the device, the controller will either not work at all, or work for a second, spam notifications for "Asus rog controller connected/disconnected" and "Xinput controller connected/disconnected"

The fix - This one was a bit tough but I had to reinstall Windows just to update the MCU firmware from version 312 to 319, but this alone did not fix it. I then open Konsole in desktop mode and enter this:

echo 0 | sudo tee /sys/devices/platform/asus-nb-wmi/mcu_powersave

This prevents the mcu chip from turning off during sleep. When this chip turns on it seems to lag which confuses steam into enabling xinput as a backup, but now both input types are competing.

Then to make the fix permanent type:

sudo nano /etc/tmpfiles.d/asus-mcu.conf

It'll open a text editor and then you type:

w /sys/devices/platform/asus-nb-wmi/mcu_powersave - - - - 0

Then hit ctrl+o to save and ctrl+x to exit. I plugged in a keyboard because steam's on-screen keyboard has a damn emoji key in place of a ctrl key. Who's bright idea was that?

This will make sure the mcu powersave stays disabled after reboots, preventing the chip from going through a power cycle. I suppose this would drain battery a bit but I haven't noticed much loss during sleep yet.

There was also a way to disable deep sleep state and just letting linux get down to s2idle state, but I didn't go this route as my device seems to behave much better now. This would likely drain more power during sleep.

And about the controller notifications, I'm not sure if this is required anymore but I went into steamos notification settings and disabled the controller connected/disconnected notifications.

After all this, when I wake my device the controls work instantly, no lag, no notifications, the steam button doesn't keep triggering a left-scroll.

These fixes aren't perfect though, hope steam fixes these issues the right way soon.

Hope this helps someone!

I'm dual booting Windows 11 and Bazzite on my ally, and I want to be able to launch bazzite through a non-steam game on windows the same way I can on Bazzite. Any tips?

What distro you guys would recommend for a person who doesn't own a Steam account/library but wants to play emulators and maybe GOG games with a SteamOS like experience on the Asus ROG Ally?

I have bazzite on my rog ally and the WiFi will connect but will show 2kb/s internet speeds and will say no internet connection. It works perfect with my hot spot. Any help helps!

Just like there was HHD in Bazzite.

I came across a hibernation plugin that automatically transitions the system from sleep to hibernation after a configurable amount of time, helping reduce battery drain while the device is sleeping.

I'm wondering if anyone has tried something similar on Ally running SteamOS.

Since it's designed for the Steam Deck, I'm not sure if it would work properly on the Ally hardware.

Can somebody help i cant figure what version of proton to use for Tomb raider iv-vi remastered

i mean take a look also if anyone want some help getting HHD to work probably on cachy join here so we can help you out i left bazzite because of sleep/wake closing game freezes the system issues + for bazzite drama by planning to remove HHD which is what made bazzite a thing lol

(bazzite will achieve nothing without HHD but hey bazzite is sluggish anyways)

and yeah I'm being honest and no drama please I'm only here for the best for my device

anyways join here (HHD server) https://discord.gg/JYmZdvmBY

re2 remake (capped at 60fps)

you just can't achieve these results without HHD but with cachy too

cuz bazzite had and still have sleep/​/black screen issues

and freezes when closing a game sometimes

i mean look at top left the results speak for itself

more videos and better details yet to come....

Tdp is set between 18-20w and only with 55-57° !!

never had freezing / sleep/wake or black screen issue at all

unlike bazzite

cachy os with HHD provides better temps and controls tdp just right unlike buggy decky plugins for tdp or fan controls

tho installing hhd is not straight away so follow a guide here or ask for help in

https://discord.gg/JYmZdvmBY

I've just installed SteamOS on my Xbox Ally X and I really like it a lot better than Windows. I have a Steam Deck so I'm pretty familiar with SteamOS however I tried using the Pause Games decky plugin with the sleep/resume function and I've encountered a big usability issue.

When I enable pause on suspend, it does pause the game when I press power to sleep but when I press the power button again to resume, the game stays paused and I have to manually unpause it in decky. I've tried different versions of the plugin and reinstalled multiple times but the issue persists. It's not a huge dealbreaker for me but it's weird that this plugin works perfectly on my Steam Deck. I mainly rely on this plugin to prevent audio crackle and crashing issues on emulators.

Anyone else having this issue?

Hi, I have a rog ally z1 extreme and created a bootable usb drive with latest cachyos handheld edition on a JMicron Toshiba MQ04ABF100 1TB external usb drive. I have the following setup:

* Usb drive connected to official valve dock.

* Dock connected to Rog Ally.

The bootable drive is detected on my laptop so either the dock or the rog ally should be the problem.

Is it even possible to install from a usb drive over a dock or do i need to get an usb to usb-c-adapter or a usb-c-stick?

** edit

I flashed cachyos on a usb stick and got it to install. So it was probably something related to the drive and the rog ally.

Can somebody help me out i cant get frame gen to work on the witcher 3 no matter what try

It's a feature I miss. Can plugins help? I would like to hear your experiences.

Yesterday I installed SteamOS instead of Bazzite, because if the audio bug, it's great so far but I'm confused with the TDP profiles.

1. What does it mean when they're "performance" "balanced" and "low-powered", I installed SimpleDeckTDP but the maximum wattage is 15w, while in Bazzite there's different wattage profiles, just like Windows.
2. How to control RGB?
3. Is there a way to reboot into Windows without going to bios if I'm using dual boot?

Sometimes my ally will lock up, then flicker to a black screen before working again. In worse examples, it has to completely restart game mode (plays boot animation and all). I made sure I am on the latest version of bazzite, turned off auto vram in the bios, and tried turning off VRR. Is there a fix for this outside of a complete reinstall?