Almost exactly a year ago, we were publicly yearning for the day when more portable gaming PC makers could ditch Windows in favor of SteamOS (without having to resort to touchy unofficial workarounds). Now, that day has finally come, with Lenovo announcing the upcoming Legion Go S as the first non-Valve handheld to come with an officially licensed copy of SteamOS preinstalled. And Valve promises that it will soon ship a beta version of SteamOS for users to “download and test themselves.”
As Lenovo’s slightly downsized followup to 2023’s massive Legion Go, the Legion Go S won’t feature the detachable controllers of its predecessor. But the new PC gaming handheld will come in two distinct versions, one with the now-standard Windows 11 installation and another edition that’s the first to sport the (recently leaked) “Powered by SteamOS” branding.
The lack of a Windows license seems to contribute to a lower starting cost for the “Powered by SteamOS” edition of the Legion Go S, which will start at $500 when it’s made available in May. Lenovo says the Windows edition of the device—available starting this month—will start at $730, with “additional configurations” available in May starting as low as $600.
The Windows version of the Legion Go S will come with a different color and a higher price. Credit: Lenovo
Both the Windows and SteamOS versions of the Legion Go S will weigh in at 1.61 lbs with an 8-inch 1200p 120 Hz LCD screen, up to 32GB of RAM, and either AMD’s new Ryzen Z2 Go chipset or an older Z1 core.
Watch out, Windows?
Valve said in a blog post on Tuesday that the Legion Go S will sport the same version of SteamOS currently found on the Steam Deck. The company’s work getting SteamOS onto the Legion Go S will also “improve compatibility with other handhelds,” Valve said, and the company “is working on SteamOS support for more devices in the future.”
I was on vacation last week, the kind of vacation in which entire days had no particular plan. I had brought the ROG Ally X with me, and, with the review done and Windows still annoying me, I looked around at the DIY scene, wondering if things had changed since my last foray into DIY Steam Deck cloning.
Things had changed for the better. I tried out Bazzite, and after dealing with the typical Linux installation tasks—activating the BIOS shortcut, turning off Secure Boot, partitioning—I had the Steam Deck-like experience I had sought on this more powerful handheld. Since I installed Bazzite, I have not had to mess with drivers, hook up to a monitor and keyboard for desktop mode, or do anything other than play games.
Until Valve officially makes SteamOS available for the ROG Ally and (maybe) other handhelds, Bazzite is definitely worth a look for anyone who thinks their handheld could do better.
Bazzite says that you can swap an SD card full of games between any two systems running Bazzite. This kind of taunting possibility is very effective on people like me. Credit: Bazzite
More game platforms, more customization, same Steam-y feel
There are a few specific features for the ROG Ally X tossed into Bazzite, and the Linux desktop is Fedora, not Arch. Beyond that, it is like SteamOS but better, especially if you want to incorporate non-Steam games. Bazzite bakes in apps like Lutris, Heroic, and Junk Store, which Steam Deck owners often turn to for loading in games from Epic, GOG, itch.io, and other stores, as well as games with awkward Windows-only launchers.
You don’t even need to ditch Windows, really. If you’re using a handheld like the ROG Ally X, with its 1TB of storage, you can dual-boot Bazzite and Windows with some crafty partition shrinking. By all means, check that your game saves are backed up first, but you can, with some guide-reading, venture into Bazzite without abandoning the games for which you need Windows.
Perhaps most useful to the type of person who owns a gaming handheld and also will install Linux on it, Bazzite gives you powerful performance customization at the click of a button. Tap the ROG Ally’s M1 button on the back, and you can mess with Thermal Design Power (TDP), set a custom fan curve, change the charge limit, tweak CPU and GPU parameters, or even choose a scheduler. I most appreciated this for the truly low-power indie games I played, as I could set the ROG Ally below its standard 13 W “Silent” profile down to a custom 7 W without heading deep into Asus’ Armoury Crate.
Enlarge/ Yes, that is SteamOS. No, that is not a Steam Deck.
Since the successful launch of the Steam Deck nearly two years ago, we’ve seen plenty of would-becompetitors that have tried to mimic the Deck’s portable form factor and ability to run PC games. Thus far, though, these competitors have all been missing one of the Steam Deck’s best features: integration with the increasingly robust, Linux-based SteamOS 3.
That’s finally set to change with the just-announced Ayaneo Next Lite, the first non-Valve portable hardware set to come with SteamOS pre-installed. We can only hope this is the start of a trend, as Valve’s gaming-focused operating system brings many advantages over gaming portables (and maybe desktops) that run a full Windows installation.
A bespoke, portable gaming OS
Ayaneo’s announcement highlights a few vague-ish features of the Next Lite, including a 7-inch 800p screen, a 47 Wh battery, and drift-resistant hall-effect joysticks. But even though the announcement doesn’t include a specific asking price, Ayaneo promises that the device “integrates outstanding cost-effectiveness” and will be “the all-new cost-effective choice with flagship experiences.”
That ad copy highlights one of the main advantages a SteamOS-based gaming portable brings over one sporting Windows: cost. Sure, OEMs are likely paying much less than the $139 consumer asking price for a copy of Windows 11. Still, even a $70-per-unit bulk license would represent a good 10 percent of the ASUS ROG Ally’s $700 asking price (and an even bigger chunk of the price difference between the Ally and the Steam Deck). In an increasingly competitive portable PC gaming market, being able to cut out that significant cost over Windows-based alternatives could be a big deal.
Enlarge/ Look how happy not paying for a Windows license has made these gamers.
Then there’s the interface. Modern Windows is designed with a desktop/laptop or tablet form factor in mind. That UI definitely leaves something to be desired when forced into a 7- or 8-inch touchscreen that lacks a keyboard and mouse. Our review of the ROG Ally highlights just how annoying it can be to have to fiddle with Windows settings on a touchscreen running “an awkwardly scaled” version of the OS. And while Microsoft has experimented with a handheld-friendly version of Windows meant for portable gaming devices, nothing public has yet come of the effort.
SteamOS 3, on the other hand, has been built from the ground up with portable gaming on Steam Deck in mind. That comes through in many little ways, like a built-in “suspend” mode, tons of battery-optimization features, and menus that are designed for a small screen and joystick navigation.
And let’s not forget the way that most Steam games are pre-configured and optimized to “just work” on the OS after you download them, eliminating the kind of settings tweaking that’s often needed when running Windows on a gaming portable. As Ars’ Kevin Purdy summed it up in his ROG Ally review, “I find it easier to install, launch, and configure games on Valve’s Steam Deck, a handheld PC rooted in Arch Linux, than on the Ally’s combination of Windows 11 and Asus’ own Armoury Crate software.”
Enlarge/ A mess of launchers and OS cruft crowd the screen when launching The Witcher 3 on the ROG Ally.
Kevin Purdy
Yes, a Windows installation means a gaming portable is compatible with almost every PC game ever made, including many that still don’t run on SteamOS for one reason or another. But SteamOS’s robust Proton compatibility layer means an ever-expanding list of thousands of games are certified as at least “Playable” on SteamOS, including most of Steam’s most popular titles. That’s a huge change from the desktop-focused “Steam Machines” era of the mid-’10s, when early versions of SteamOS could only run the relative handful of games that developers bothered to explicitly port to Linux.
While Proton does come with at least some performance overhead, a variety of Steam Deckbenchmarks show games running under SteamOS tend to perform comparably (or sometimes better) than those running under Windows on the handheld. That’s also a huge change from the Steam Machines era, when Ars’ testing showed that many SteamOS games ran significantly worse than their Windows counterparts on the same desktop hardware.
