This will probably be the biggest competition the Steam Deck has within the handheld PC space.
Most noteworthy is that windows is finally focusing on providing a decent handheld experience, including booting straight to a controller friendly interface, and reducing background processes for better fps and battery.
Edit: The handheld Xbox UI will.come to all windows PCs, but it’s not clear if the reduced performance bloat version will be available. It sounds like only Xbox branded devices may get the full benefit of optimized windows.
It’s also the ugliest handheld PC yet (imo), but I can appreciate that they’re pushing for comfort over looks.
I don’t think there’s going to be a bunch of difference with the Z2 over the Z1, and you’ve gotta remember that they’re just 8000/9000 CPUs with Radeon graphics. AMD open sources their drivers too.
Ah, right, duh.
Ok so yeah, uh… the Z2 Extreme supposedly is going to have some kind of ‘AI’ functionality or additional component… god knows what that means…
Theoretically it could be more difficult for open source devs to fully leverage that, even if the drivers are open source…
But yeah, for the rest of it, it probably would not take much time at all given that Bazzite and SteamOS already run on the last generation of the same chips.
EDIT: On second thought: I wouldn’t put it past MSFT to go out of their way to invent an entirely new input controller interface for the buttons and thumbsticks and such, that would require open source devs to reverse engineer it a bit to properly interface with it.
There’s two versions of the Z2E, the one that is labelled “AI” has an NPU. More than any LLM crap, those NPUs can be really good for local ML features that increase accessibility for people. As for how well that’ll be supported on Linux, I’m not sure.
On the point of* your edit, MSFT have said that it’s going to support third-party stores directly in their game interface. I think it’s fairly unlikely that they’re going to break from their already exisiting Xbox controller input scheme. They already have a monopoly there, even third-party devices like the Legion Go use the Xbox layout and input scheme.