Steam Deck's OS Expands to Lenovo's New Handheld

Valve is steadily spreading its influence – first with Steam as a PC games hub, then with Steam Deck in the handheld area, and now the latter's OS is exclusive to Valve's products no more.

Valve announced that Lenovo's new handheld, Lenovo Legion Go S, revealed at CES 2025, will be powered by SteamOS, becoming the first officially licensed third-party device boasting the system.

"We built this operating system to provide a seamless user experience optimized for gaming, while retaining access to the power and flexibility of a PC," Valve said, adding that its team is making updates to ensure full support and the same seamless experience as on Steam Deck.

These updates will improve compatibility with other handhelds, and users will be able to download and test a beta of SteamOS ahead of the Lenovo Legion Go S's launch.

The handheld features an 8” WUXGA 16:10 120Hz1 PureSight touch display with VRR support, either the Lenovo Legion Go AMD Ryzen Z2 Go processor or AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme processor with up to 32GB of 7500Mhz LPDDR5X RAM, a 3-cell 55.5Whr battery, Wi-Fi 6e support, a pair of USB 4 ports, and a microSD card reader.

This SteamOS development makes me wonder if Valve will one day release a Windows and macOS competitor. It's an interesting thought, but the industry needs to learn how to work with Linux, which SteamOS is based on, first. Some popular multiplayer games, like Apex Legends, for example, are not available on Steam Deck because they use Windows-specific kernel-level anti-cheats, which are not compatible with Linux. Steam is aware of it and is "monitoring the trend of games requiring kernel-level access," so maybe this issue will be resolved in the future, and the idea of SteamOS for PC won't be that crazy.

Other than that, Lenovo also presented ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable, the first display that can be extended from 14 to 16.7 inches.

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