Valve and Lenovo have announced that they’re bringing SteamOS to the Lenovo Legion Go S, making it the first officially licensed third party handheld that can be powered by Valve’s gaming-oriented branch of Linux.
This is part of a big new push for the handheld PC gaming market by Lenovo. The Legion Go S is a slightly smaller 8″ rendition of the upcoming Legion Go 2, which has an 8.8″ display. The Go S’s 8″ screen is still impressive, with a 1920×1200 resolution and 120Hz refresh rate, this is allied with either the AMD Ryzen Z2 Go or the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme, 16GB or 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM and either 512GB or 1TB of SSD storage. All models come with Wi-Fi 6e support, a pair of USB 4 ports and a microSD card slot as well.
This isn’t exclusively SteamOS, though. Lenovo is hedging their bets with a Windows 11 version as well, and this will actually ship first. The Windows edition Legion Go S will debut this month starting at $730 for a config with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage.
Other SKUs will ship in May. The Windows edition will then have an entry level model at $600 with 16GB RAM and 1TB storage, or you can go with SteamOS starting at $500 for 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD.
This follows through on Valve’s plan to open up SteamOS to third parties once again. The gaming OS originally debuted with Steam Machines back in the day, but its return with Steam Deck has been exclusive to Valve’s own handheld up until this point. Last year they talked about porting it to the Asus ROG Ally, for example.
The tricky thing for Valve is that, where SteamOS was able to target Steam Deck as a fixed platform, where they were able to leverage specific hardware features for the screen, implement quick suspend / resume and other tweaks, it’s trickier to be a more general OS.
A lot of PC handhelds have common ground to the Steam Deck by using AMD integrated chipsets as their foundation, but everything else will require dedicated support. That can be the display driver to enable VRR and other refresh rate controls, supporting back buttons, different Wi-Fi chipsets, and much more. Still, Valve is committing to providing the same experience to their new and upcoming partners, and many gamers are hoping that they’ll offer SteamOS as a basic download that anyone can use with their game PC – handheld, laptop, or desktop.
