Wednesday, January 8th 2025
SteamOS expands beyond Steam Deck
With Lenovo's announcement at CES 2025 of the Lenovo Legion Go S, we are pleased to share that their "Powered by SteamOS" model is the first handheld officially licensed to ship with Valve's SteamOS. 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. SteamOS is the same operating system we run on Steam Deck, and the team is making updates to ensure it fully supports the Lenovo Legion Go S and provides the same seamless experience customers expect.
In addition, the same work that we are doing to support the Lenovo Legion Go S will improve compatibility with other handhelds. Ahead of Legion Go S shipping, we will be shipping a beta of SteamOS which should improve the experience on other handhelds, and users can download and test this themselves. And of course we'll continue adding support and improving the experience with future releases.
Frequently-asked questions:
What is SteamOS?
SteamOS is an operating system built by Valve. It features a seamless user experience optimized for gaming, while retaining access to the power and flexibility of a PC, and plays tens of thousands of games on Steam. SteamOS currently officially ships on Steam Deck and will soon ship with certain Legion Go S models. Valve is working on SteamOS support for more devices in the future.
What are the key benefits of SteamOS?
SteamOS is optimized for gaming and provides a console-like experience that's meant to be used with a controller. It offers features like quick suspend / resume to get you quickly in and out of games, and offers seamless system and game updates.
What is the user experience of SteamOS?
SteamOS puts the player directly into Steam, with access to the full Steam ecosystem - your Steam Library, Steam Cloud, Steam Chat, Steam Game Recording, and more. The user interface is optimized for controller use and it's easy to install and play Steam games. Best of all, users don't have to worry about driver updates and hardware tweaks - all of this is handled seamlessly through built in system updates.
Can this run every game on Steam?
SteamOS is Linux based, and the vast majority of the Steam library runs on SteamOS, thanks to the Proton compatibility layer Valve ships. This allows developers to ship games for Windows without worrying about porting to Linux, and games will seamlessly work on SteamOS. When a game doesn't run well on SteamOS, we call it out with our Verified program so customers know what will and won't work well.
Is this the same operating system that is on Steam Deck?
Yes, it's the same operating system that Steam Deck runs.
Is a user locked into playing only Steam games?
No, if players wish to they can go to desktop mode and install other game launchers and software if they wish.
Source:
Steam
In addition, the same work that we are doing to support the Lenovo Legion Go S will improve compatibility with other handhelds. Ahead of Legion Go S shipping, we will be shipping a beta of SteamOS which should improve the experience on other handhelds, and users can download and test this themselves. And of course we'll continue adding support and improving the experience with future releases.
What is SteamOS?
SteamOS is an operating system built by Valve. It features a seamless user experience optimized for gaming, while retaining access to the power and flexibility of a PC, and plays tens of thousands of games on Steam. SteamOS currently officially ships on Steam Deck and will soon ship with certain Legion Go S models. Valve is working on SteamOS support for more devices in the future.
What are the key benefits of SteamOS?
SteamOS is optimized for gaming and provides a console-like experience that's meant to be used with a controller. It offers features like quick suspend / resume to get you quickly in and out of games, and offers seamless system and game updates.
What is the user experience of SteamOS?
SteamOS puts the player directly into Steam, with access to the full Steam ecosystem - your Steam Library, Steam Cloud, Steam Chat, Steam Game Recording, and more. The user interface is optimized for controller use and it's easy to install and play Steam games. Best of all, users don't have to worry about driver updates and hardware tweaks - all of this is handled seamlessly through built in system updates.
Can this run every game on Steam?
SteamOS is Linux based, and the vast majority of the Steam library runs on SteamOS, thanks to the Proton compatibility layer Valve ships. This allows developers to ship games for Windows without worrying about porting to Linux, and games will seamlessly work on SteamOS. When a game doesn't run well on SteamOS, we call it out with our Verified program so customers know what will and won't work well.
Is this the same operating system that is on Steam Deck?
Yes, it's the same operating system that Steam Deck runs.
Is a user locked into playing only Steam games?
No, if players wish to they can go to desktop mode and install other game launchers and software if they wish.
40 Comments on SteamOS expands beyond Steam Deck
Edit: So far, Bazzite has been the only distro that recognised my monitor as Freesync + HDR right from the start without any tinkering. I think this says something.
Devs don't agree on something - they create own fork. Such approach is the worst nightmare of hardware makers.
Yeah, I know some distros share the same base (Debian, Arch, etc.) but still, there are too many of them.
Every day some people are born, some die. And apart from that, every day a new Linux distro is made as well. :kookoo:
Since Valve is directly cooperating with Archlinux devs, this is probably the best way to go if you want to achieve maximum SteamOS support.
But I have seen with my own eyes that even Debian-Ubuntu-based Mint is doing pretty well with Steam games. Proton does it's job.
Anyway, people, if you want to go with Linux, choose something popular backed by good community.
I can assure you that, unlike Windows 12 is going to be final final final final version of Windows 10 (11 and 12 were not suppossed to exist),
there won't be more than 2 major versions of SteamOS. Because when it comes to games and software, GabeN can't count to three and above. :D
Bazzite's gaming stuff is evidently packaged in anArch-based distrobox container, which btw you can install on any distro if you want. Pretty cool.
Anyway, I think the Freesync + HDR thing is due to KDE Wayland. On X11 you typically have to jump through some minor hoops to enable Freesync. But KDE Wayland auto-detects everything. Pretty great. Wayland of course exists in other forms, but the ecosystem is quite fractured. Gnome and KDE seem to have the most mature implementations.
www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://store.steampowered.com/steamos/download%3Fver%3Dsteamdeck&ved=2ahUKEwjz46zhjeqKAxUzTUEAHT_IJfwQjBB6BAgmEAQ&usg=AOvVaw0GX5sK4oauDoym4SMeT-0r
What is probably causing more issues is the fact that there is not really a unified GUI toolkit, and even if there was one, it would be different from the Windows one (or Max OS X for that matter). Therefore causing significant extra work to get an application looking good and similar on multiple OSes. But this is not an issue for gaming either, since the game engine is its own GUI toolkit so to speak. In fact gaming should be one of the easier types of software to port to Linux, since it basically only requires the game engine itself to be Linux compatible, and games built upon a Linux compatible engine would almost automatically run on both OSs. Since we even have a unified rendering API amongst the OSs (Vulkan), it's really just laziness from the devs preventing Linux binaries.
People don't know what the different distros are, or which one they need, or that they're not really that different for most things. It's easy to get lost in the forest.
People also don't know that it's easy to get an experience similar to other OSes thanks to Wine, Proton and the different desktops which are available for various different distros. Even if you somehow manage to figure out which distro you want, you still get confused choosing your desktop.
People also don't know that you don't need special skills to use Linux. You have the same keyboard, the same mouse, the same click functionality, it works with a GUI, and so on. The idea people have about Linux is a bunch of pizza-munching fat geeks who never leave the house typing frivolously in the terminal all day and night.
Speaking of which, people also don't know where to ask for help. Sure, Linux is a community OS, but what is the community? Even I don't know outside of TPU. And if you happen to know, the answers you usually get for your questions begin with "open the terminal and..." even when there are way easier GUI solutions available as well.
This all paints the picture of a quirky OS made only for true nerds in the eyes of common people. Hardcore Linux aficionados don't get this for some reason. They keep insisting that it's easy, which it really is once you got the above figured out.
For example, the man page for "cp" looks like this. By contrast, "tldr cp" outputs the following:
General users, even what you might call "casual power users" (which is basically just a euphemism for "gamers") don't have to use the terminal on Linux these days though. Maybe once in a blue moon. There's usually a GUI solution. The trick is in knowing about the GUI solution, lol.
I use the terminal a fair bit myself, but these days rarely on the machine I'm sitting at--usually I do it when managing a remote machine over ssh. Even for that purpose, you could probably make do with a GUI interface, like Cockpit, most of the time.
Probably 90% of my posts on this forum concerning Linux are made with the aim of informing people about this-or-that GUI solution. The intent isn't to position myself as an expert, or to evangelize about Linux generally, though I do think it's a fantastic (and free!) product. Rather my intent is to simplify some of the pain points I went through. Auswolf is exactly right about Linux advice on the internet. It's mostly terminal copy-pasta, which is fine and good and (usually) accurate/effective, but it can also be intimidating to new users. Also, if you're like me, seeing long terminal commands proffered as solutions will prompt you to figure out what the terminal commands are intended to do before you commit to them. This can add a great deal of overhead to what might already be a frustrating troubleshooting exercise.
On the other hand, there are tasks for which the terminal is undoubtedly the most efficient option.
EDIT: I should add, to bring this rambling back on topic, that GUI tools are easier to find these days, the vast majority of them included as defaults. The amount of progress Linux has made in the last few years, with respect to user-friendliness, cannot be overstated. And that progress owes in large part to the influence of Valve and the Steam Deck.