A gaming OS for US Bye-bye Windows gaming? SteamOS officially expands past the Steam Deck. Legion Go S is cheaper without Windows; upcoming OS beta will allow for personal installs. Kyle Orland Jan 7, 2025 3:51 pm | 47 The Lenovo Legion Go S will be the first non-Valve hardware to be officially "Powered by SteamOS" Credit: Lenovo The Lenovo Legion Go S will be the first non-Valve hardware to be officially "Powered by SteamOS" Credit: Lenovo Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreAlmost 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 deviceavailable starting this monthwill 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 chipsetor 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."A promised beta version of SteamOS will be released publicly before May, Valve said, "which should improve the experience on other devices, and users can download and test this themselves. And of course we'll continue adding support and improving the experience with future releases." We found this logo hidden deep in an abandoned steel forge. Credit: Aurich Lawson | Steam The official launch of the "Powered by SteamOS" program has been a long time coming; Valve's Lawrence Yang said as far back as 2022 that the company is "excited to see people make their own SteamOS machines." More recently, Valve confirmed that it was working on official SteamOS support for the Asus ROG Ally.On the Steam Deck itself, the SteamOS experience has been consistently improving over the years thanks to new features and new updates to the Proton compatibility layer that allows Windows-based games to run on SteamOS' Linux core. But SteamOS as a whole has been held back somewhat by the aging Steam Deck hardware, which is not up to the most graphically demanding modern games.Now that SteamOS will be available more widely, players will be able to enjoy the platform's best-in-class interface and gaming features on a wide variety of hardware form factors and power levels. That has to be at least a little bit worrisome to the people at Microsoft's games division, who have gotten used to Windows being the de facto PC gaming solution for decades now.Who knows, maybe Valve CEO Gabe Newell's 2013 prediction that Linux was the future of gaming was simply a little bit too early.Kyle OrlandSenior Gaming EditorKyle OrlandSenior Gaming Editor Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper. 47 Comments