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.
The Lenovo Legion Go S will also be available with Windows 11, but there’s a big price advantage if you opt for SteamOS. The Windows edition will have an entry level price of $600, but you can save $100 by going with SteamOS, this edition costing $500 instead. The entry level models will be available from May 2025, though a Windows edition Legion Go S will debut later this month, starting at $730 for that particular configuration.
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 the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme, up to 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM and up to 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 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
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Steam Deck
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