SteamOS on the ROG Ally Z1E
I have been meaning to do this for a while, but i didn't want the hassle of having to run Bazzite. Thankfully, Valve has released SteamOS 3.8, ahead of the Steam Machine launch, and with it the broadest wave of handheld support the platform has ever had. The ROG Ally line is part of that, which means my Z1 Extreme can finally run the same operating system that makes the Steam Deck such a pleasant thing to pick up and play.
A small caveat before we begin. The Ally sits in what Valve calls the "enhanced support" tier rather than the fully blessed one (that honour still belongs to the Steam Deck and the Lenovo Legion Go S). In plain terms, it runs, it runs well, but you should expect the odd rough edge rather than a cast-iron promise that every button does exactly what it should on day one.
I am not going to fuss about backing up Windows in any elaborate way. The Ally has ASUS Cloud Recovery baked into its BIOS, which will happily pull a fresh factory copy of Windows 11 down over wifi if I ever want it back. That is good enough for me. All I need to do first is copy off anything personal that I would miss, and the rest can be cheerfully wiped.
If you are more attached to your current Windows setup than I am, a full disk image with something like Clonezilla is the belt-and-braces option. For today, factory recovery is the safety net, and that suits me fine.
Right. Let us get on with it.
Step one: rescue your files
Reimaging wipes the internal drive completely. Steam saves that live in the cloud will come back on their own, but anything local will not. Screenshots, documents, save files for games that do not sync, that sort of thing.
Copy them somewhere safe now. A USB stick, OneDrive, another machine, whatever you have to hand. Once they are off the device you can stop worrying about them.
Step two: download the right image
The download you want is here: https://store.steampowered.com/steamos/download/?ver=steamdeck
The page is titled Download SteamOS: Steam Deck Image, the button says Steam Deck Image, and your instinct will be to assume that cannot possibly be the right thing for an Asus handheld. It is the right thing. This is the same recovery image Valve provides for every supported device. It is the file that strips out the old hardware checks which used to block installation on anything that was not a Deck. The Deck branding is just history; this is the file every Ally guide quietly points at.
Tick the box to accept the licence, hit the button, and you will get a file ending in .img.bz2. Hang on to it.
Step three: write it to a USB stick
You want a stick of at least 8GB. It will be wiped, so do not use one with anything precious on it.
I used Rufus. Load the image, pick your stick, click Start. That is genuinely all there is to it.
Now, two things will happen that look alarming and are not.
First, Rufus will not ask whether you want ISO mode or DD mode. That prompt only turns up for hybrid ISO files, and what you have is a raw disk image, which can only be written one way. No prompt is the correct behaviour. If you were braced to choose DD and the choice never came, relax, Rufus already did the right thing.
Second, when you look at the finished stick in Windows you will see an EFI folder (with a steamOS folder of grub files tucked inside) and a separate SteamOS folder, and Windows may start nagging you to format some other drives that have suddenly appeared. Do not format them. Those are the Linux partitions Windows cannot read, and they are supposed to be there. Close the pop-ups and walk away.
If you would rather sidestep Rufus altogether, Balena Etcher does the same job and never asks awkward questions in the first place.
One last note for this step. The vast majority of the time, writing the .bz2 straight to the stick works perfectly. Occasionally a stick will hang later during boot, and the fix in that case is to extract the .bz2 first (with 7-Zip on Windows) so you have a plain .img, then write that instead. I would not bother unless you actually hit the problem, but keep it in your back pocket.
Doing it from Linux instead
If you happen to have a Linux box to hand, Ubuntu has the cleanest method of the lot, and it is the one I ended up using when a Windows-written stick gave me grief.
The graphical route is the safest. Extract the image first (bunzip2 steamdeck-recovery-*.img.bz2, or just right-click and Extract), then open the Disks utility, which comes preinstalled. Select your USB stick from the list on the left, open the menu in the top corner, and choose Restore Disk Image. Point it at the .img, and let it write. Because Disks shows you the stick by name and size, there is very little chance of clobbering the wrong drive.
The terminal route does the decompressing and writing in one go, and it is Valve's own suggested command:
bzcat steamdeck-recovery-4.img.bz2 | sudo dd if=/dev/stdin of=/dev/sdX oflag=sync status=progress bs=128M
A serious word of caution. dd is nicknamed "disk destroyer" for good reason; it will overwrite whatever device you name, instantly and without a confirmation prompt. The /dev/sdX part is the bit that matters. Run lsblk first, find the entry that matches your stick's size, and replace sdX with it (the whole disk, for example /dev/sdb, not a partition like /dev/sdb1). Adjust the filename too, since your download may not be recovery-4. If you are at all unsure which device is your stick, use the Disks method above instead. The graphical tool removes the one way this step can go badly wrong.
Step four: get into the BIOS and turn off Secure Boot
SteamOS will not boot with Secure Boot switched on, so this has to go first.
Getting into the Ally's BIOS is its own small art. The official "hold this button" instructions are, in my experience, hopeless. Two methods that actually work:
The reliable way, while you still have Windows, is to go through it. Settings, then System, then Recovery, then Advanced startup, then Restart now. When the blue menu appears, choose Troubleshoot, then Advanced options, then UEFI Firmware Settings, then Restart. That drops you straight into the BIOS with no button-timing nonsense at all. (Holding Shift while you click Restart from the Start menu gets you to the same blue menu, if you prefer.)
The button way is to press the power button and then tap Volume Down repeatedly until the BIOS appears. Tapping, not holding. Volume Up works just as well. The trick is the repeated tap, not the hold.
Once you are in:
Press Y to enter Advanced Mode. Use the right bumper to move across to the Security tab. Find Secure Boot, set Secure Boot Control to Disabled, then go to Save & Exit and save your changes.
A word of warning here, because it caught me out. If your Ally has BitLocker (or Device Encryption, as Windows sometimes labels it) switched on, disabling Secure Boot will, on the next attempt to start Windows, throw you a BitLocker recovery screen asking for a 48-digit key. This is not a fault. BitLocker locks its key to the TPM, the TPM keeps an eye on the boot state, and changing Secure Boot trips that check. You can avoid the whole thing by suspending BitLocker in Windows before you touch Secure Boot (search "Manage BitLocker", then Suspend protection).
If you have already seen the recovery screen, do not panic, and do not feel you have to unlock anything. That prompt is only guarding a Windows boot, and you are about to wipe Windows entirely. Just carry on and boot the USB stick instead (more on that in a moment). If you genuinely still need to get into Windows first, fetch your key by signing in at aka.ms/myrecoverykey on another device with the Microsoft account the Ally is tied to.
Step five: install SteamOS
Plug the USB stick into the Ally. You will need a USB-C adapter or a hub, since the stick almost certainly is not USB-C and the Ally only has the one port to spare. Keep the thing on mains power throughout; you do not want it dying halfway through an install.
Now get back to the boot menu. If Windows is still installed, use the Windows route from the last step and pick the boot device option there. Otherwise, power on and tap Volume Down until the menu appears, then select the USB stick. It shows up with a UEFI prefix, something along the lines of "EFI USB Device".
Here is where patience earns its keep. The screen may go black, and it may sit on the Steam logo for what feels like an unreasonable stretch. Ten to fifteen minutes is normal, because the image is decompressing as it boots. Do not assume it has died until you are well past the quarter-hour mark.
Eventually you land in a desktop environment you can drive with the touchscreen, the trackpad, or a mouse. Find the icon that reads Wipe Device & Install SteamOS and run it. It will warn you, quite rightly, that everything on the drive is about to vanish. Confirm.
The install itself takes ten to twenty minutes. When it finishes, pull the USB stick out and let it reboot. You will be met by the SteamOS first-run setup: language, timezone, wifi, and your Steam login. Work through it and you are, properly, done.
When the recovery environment will not load
This is the step that fought me, so here is what I learned, in case it saves you the same hour.
You may not reach that desktop cleanly the first time. I saw a couple of failure shapes: a text console muttering about a service that "failed to start", and, on a later attempt, a brief cursor followed by a blank screen that never became the install GUI. Neither is necessarily fatal.
The first thing to understand is that a black screen with just a cursor, sitting there for a few minutes, is often not a hang at all. It is the recovery image building its swap and bringing up the desktop behind a blank screen. So before you do anything, wait a full ten minutes untouched. More installs are "fixed" by patience than by any clever intervention.
If it really has stalled, the reliable cure is almost insultingly simple: hold the power button for ten seconds or more to force the Ally off, wait a moment, then boot the stick again. A recovery environment that stumbles on the first boot very often comes up perfectly on the second. I would not read anything into a single failed attempt.
If it stalls in the same spot two or three times running, suspect the stick. Reflash it, ideally from a plain extracted .img rather than the .bz2 (this is exactly where the Linux method in step three earned its place for me). Writing the already-decompressed image cleared up the flakiness that a compressed write had left behind.
Two smaller things that help a rocky first boot: keep the Ally on mains power, and pull out any microSD card while you install, since it can occasionally confuse the boot. Pop it back in once you are up and running.
Step six: do you actually need the plugins?
Most guides will tell you, the moment you are booted, to go and install a stack of community plugins. Hold on a second. SteamOS 3.8 with the Ally's enhanced support does more out of the box than the older write-ups assume, and you may not need any of it. Check first, install second.
Start with the controls SteamOS already gives you. In Game Mode, press the Quick Access button (the three dots) and go to the Performance tab. That is where the native power controls live. The thing to look for is a TDP Limit slider. If it is there and it moves, you have proper power control already, and SimpleDeckyTDP would be solving a problem you do not have. You can set a global limit, or toggle a per-game profile if you want different ceilings for different titles.
While you are in that tab, turn the performance overlay up to level four or so. That puts a live readout of wattage, framerate, CPU and GPU load, and temperature on the screen, which is how you actually decide whether anything needs tweaking at all. Run a game and watch it. If the wattage is pinned at the ceiling while the framerate is lower than you would like, raising the TDP will help. If the framerate is fine and the wattage is sitting well below the limit, leave it be; fiddling buys you nothing but a flatter battery. And if you want longer sessions, nudge the TDP down until the framerate just begins to dip, then back off a notch.
In my case the RGB lighting simply worked, so HueSync never came into it, and the native power control was present and correct, so SimpleDeckyTDP stayed uninstalled too. Your mileage may vary, which is the whole point of checking rather than assuming.
If, and only if, the native TDP slider is missing or does nothing when you drag it, then it is worth reaching for the plugins. Switch to Desktop Mode, open a browser, and head to decky.xyz to install Decky Loader, which is the plugin manager everything else hangs off. From there you can add SimpleDeckyTDP for power sliders, or HueSync if your lights are not behaving. Each is a one-line install from the terminal, with the commands on their respective pages. Treat them as the fallback they now are, not the default first move they used to be.
If you want Windows back
No drama. Get into the BIOS using the volume-tap method (the Windows route is gone now, for obvious reasons), press Y for Advanced Mode, and find ASUS Cloud Recovery. Connect to wifi, let it pull the factory image down, and in due course you will have a clean Windows 11 again.
One thing people forget: switch Secure Boot back on afterwards, since Windows expects to find it enabled.
Worth knowing before you leap
The honest caveats, so nobody feels misled.
This is the enhanced support tier, so the occasional quirk is part of the bargain. And the big one: games with kernel-level anti-cheat (your Valorants, your Fortnites, and the rest of that crowd) generally will not run, because that machinery wants Windows and SteamOS cannot give it what it is asking for. Everything else runs through Proton, which by this point is very good indeed.
For me the trade is an easy one. A handheld that wakes instantly, sips its battery, and drops me into a game without making me fight a desktop first. That is the experience the Deck has been quietly enjoying for years, and now my Ally gets it too.