SteamOS Will Soon Be Available on Non-Steam Deck Handhelds
Valve will begin allowing third-party handhelds to license SteamOS starting with Lenovo's new Legion Go S.
At CES 2025, Lenovo announced that it will ship a version of its upcoming Legion Go S handheld called the "Powered by SteamOS" that will run, you guessed it, SteamOS. This is the same OS that powers Valve's Steam Deck, which is pretty good if you're primarily someone who owns all their PC games on Steam.
As part of the launch, Valve published a blog that confirmed that alongside the Legion Go S, Valve is working on "a beta of SteamOS which should improve the epxerience on other handhelds and users can download and thest this themselves." Meaning that SteamOS should be available on non-Steam Deck handheld gaming PCs as well.
The benefits of SteamOS, especially for those with massive Steam libraries, is that of the handheld PC interfaces, SteamOS is very smooth and easy to navigate. While not mandatory for handheld PC gaming, it has its fans and soon even non-Steam Deck owners can install it for their own handhelds.
IGN is at CES 2025 where we already previewed the Legion Go S, a lighter version of Lenovo's 2023 handheld the Legion Go. It comes in a lighter formfactor, but with some improvements under the hood. It is not, however, a next-gen handheld. That's the Lenovo Go 2, which will utilize the AMD Z2 Extreme SoC and is currently in the prototype phase.
Be sure to stick around for all our updates from CES and let us know if you're excited to install SteamOS to your non-Steam Deck handheld.
Matt Kim is IGN's Senior Features Editor.
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