I think I bought this tablet around November 2024, from everyone’s favorite OK shop. The reason was simple: I wanted a tablet, and the only goal was watching videos. Ideally stock Android, able to install GMS, and not a Chinese brand… The price at OK at the time was hard to refuse — a bit over 300, under 400, and the condition was decent, so I grabbed it.

Back in the handheld emulator scene, a lot of people were obsessed with the idea of a “fighting handheld.” Mostly old-timers grinding KOF 97, pining for a handheld with good feel that could handle fighting games, or side-scrolling beat ’em ups and the like. And of course the god of the bootleg handheld world, Zhou Ge, answered their prayers with the Anbernic RG-Arc, a machine that’s blatantly modeled on the Saturn, complete with the standard six-button layout and that familiar disc-style D-pad. But once the thing came out, a bunch of old-timers weren’t happy, saying the design fell way short of the original Saturn, especially the D-pad feel, which was off by more than a little. They all insisted that only the original Saturn pad had that flavor, that perfect balance of firmness and give, that silky-smooth quarter-circle execution…

Back in May last year, I noticed the ROG Ally X handheld was not only in stock on JD.com, but the price was back to normal, and it even qualified for the national subsidy. Basically, a machine that originally cost over 6000 RMB ended up discounted by a little over 1000, so I got it for under 5000. The reason JD.com gives you is the “national subsidy,” but in reality you don’t need to bind any qualification for this subsidy—you just need your delivery address to be in Shanghai. A victory for the “Shanghai lords,” you could say. Naturally, I asked a fellow townsman bigshot in Shanghai to receive and buy it for me, and successfully got my hands on this handheld. A lot of people probably want to know: I’m a SteamDeck shill, so why did I buy ASUS’s handheld? How should you choose between it and the SteamDeck? I think I can explain it briefly with these points: It’s a Windows handheld, so it can play Windows-exclusive games (Galgame) It’s the only Windows handheld I know of that’s continuously optimizing power efficiency It’s the best Windows handheld I know of when it comes to self-made power control software At the time (2025), it had the largest battery capacity among Windows handhelds Some might bring up the ROG Ally + big battery mod, which has basically the same performance, but the biggest difference with the ROG Ally X is its 24GB of native RAM. The change that big memory brings is that you can allocate a large amount of VRAM to games, especially those poorly optimized ones that all need lots of VRAM. And from my observation, the root cause of stuttering when the SteamDeck runs those badly optimized games is often insufficient memory, and the ROG Ally X can clearly improve that.

I’ve never really had anything against Moondrop as a brand. I bought a pair of their ~300 RMB earphones a while back and they were fine — build quality and sound both held up. Their “anime marketing” is just a product-promotion路线, and it’s clearly worked. With the audio market getting more and more cutthroat, you have to differentiate to survive, even if that means leaning into a “trendy” style. So you see all these streetwear brands charging a premium for design and brand recognition. Moondrop charging a premium by rubbing up against ACG culture seems fine to me too — and their low-end stuff doesn’t even carry much of a premium. Instead, while keeping basic quality intact, they give you some “fashion” elements. At least they’re the best-looking option in the budget tier, right? You wear earphones out in public, so beyond sound quality, treating them as an accessory is a perfectly good approach. As for the industry “veterans” who trash Moondrop’s high-end products — in this mystical audiophile domain, high-end products are basically an IQ-tax genre anyway. Once you’re in IQ-tax territory, buying a Moondrop at least looks better on you than a HiFiMan. Recently Moondrop released two products I quite like: the Nice Buds and the Old Fashioned. Both are budget-focused with a retro flavor — one’s an earbud, one’s an over-ear.

I used to have a desktop: E3 1230V2 + 16G DDR3 + GTX 1070. I forget when I put it together. Once I started using a laptop as my main machine I pretty much stopped upgrading it, and honestly the performance was enough for me — I could play through Ori 2, Doom Eternal, even Genshin without issues. Genshin 2.0 even ran at 4K with settings cranked, so I never bothered upgrading. In the first half of last year someone gave me a bunch of spare parts they’d retired, and I pieced together an i7 12700 + 16G DDR5 + 512G NVMe setup. Then I grabbed a cheap motherboard off JD, swapped the whole thing into the case, and installed Fedora 43 as my main system.

Getting my hands on this machine was a bit of a fluke. I’d been messing around with running LLMs on Intel hardware, using the Xe Linux graphics driver, and every time I filed a bug with Intel I got the same sneering response: “The Xe driver is for LNL and BMG. We don’t care about your ARL integrated graphics.” Truth is, plenty of Xe driver bugs have nothing to do with LNL or BMG—they’re just bugs. And cards from the Arc 140T / A770 era benefit hugely from the Xe driver too; the performance gains are real, and using them makes far more sense than clinging to TGL-era stuff. Getting unceremoniously dumped by Intel pissed me off, so I vented: “Should I buy a Lunar Lake laptop just so I can complain about Intel?” And then this Lunar Lake device showed up for testing. Special thanks to Cat Dad—here’s his blog, packed with good stuff, go check it out.

I already had two x86 handhelds on hand, but there was still a reason to buy a third. At first I just wanted something to play PS2 on. My old device was a Retroid Pocket 4, an Android handheld with a MediaTek Dimensity 1100 — just barely enough for PS2, but some games still drop frames. What’s worse is that PS2 emulator on Android: it hasn’t been updated in ages and looks like it’s on its way to being completely dead. So I started looking for a replacement. Then I came across all those high-end Android retro handhelds — Aya Neo, Ayn Odin, Retroid Pocket 5/6. The budget for these things has climbed to around 2,500 RMB. Honestly, I really don’t like Android handhelds. For one, the OS itself is bloated for a gaming device. For another, Android has input latency when playing emulated games. A lot of people probably can’t feel it, but if you compare side by side it’s obvious. So isn’t there some slightly smaller handheld that runs Linux and can handle PS2 emulation? That’s when I spotted a batch of brand-new AYN Loki Max units on Xianyu. After thinking it over, I went for it.

As a longtime ThinkPad user, I’d always stuck with the X1 Carbon series, and I’d always felt the Carbon deserved its flagship status. But as time went on and the nature of my work changed, my demands for performance kept climbing. The thing is, the X1 Carbon is fundamentally a thin-and-light, so its performance ceiling is very limited — and, absurdly, the battery capacity isn’t great either. That eternal 57Wh (I hear they bumped it to 58Wh in 2026) means that aside from being light and thin, both battery life and performance are pretty mediocre. It just wasn’t meeting my needs anymore. So after watching and waiting for nearly a year, I finally saw off the absurd MTL architecture and welcomed the TSMC-powered ARL-H. I picked up the ThinkPad T14p Gen 3 with integrated graphics — the so-called “China-exclusive pocket rocket” — in the U285H + 6400 high-frequency DDR5 64G memory configuration. I ran the numbers and buying the RAM myself would actually cost more than paying the upgrade premium, so I just went all the way. I’ve been using the machine for nearly a year now. Feels like if I don’t say something soon, Panther Lake will be out. So let me just jot down some impressions here.

Honestly, I’m not sure why I bought this thing. Maybe because I saw it on sale during Double 12. I did the math, and building an eGPU dock myself would have cost more than this. I’d also been wanting to play games again, and I wanted something that worked with my Linux laptop and my Windows handheld, with some room to spare. After looking around, this seemed to fit, so I bought it. Anyway, I bought it. I mainly want to talk about my experience using it, because I think a lot of people are curious and there’s very little online about how this thing works under Linux. So I’ll share my impressions and give Linux users thinking about an eGPU dock some reference.

Preface: I’ve never really had any particular need for a tablet, but it’s not like I have zero use for one either. I do want a tablet. My needs are simple: use it as a reader, browse the web, watch videos, read PDFs, listen to something to fall asleep to at night. That’s it. The tablet I’d been using was a cheap used LG I picked up from OK’s place. I don’t think I ever wrote about it, but for 300 yuan it’s worth the price — it does fine as a video machine. Its biggest problem is the system. It’s an Android tablet, and a Japanese Android tablet at that, packed with all sorts of junk that causes all sorts of problems, whether it’s system updates or app compatibility. For example, I ran into a situation where my proxy app wouldn’t work. If my home network didn’t have a global proxy, this thing really wouldn’t be able to watch YouTube. So I had an idea: why not try using Linux as a tablet? GNOME, for instance, has been criticized for years for having a UI that’s too “touch-oriented” — so if you actually use it as a touch tablet, wouldn’t it be more suitable? Once the idea was there, I got to work.