SteamOS is inching across a Windows-soaked PC gaming world, one slow step at a time.
At CES this week, Lenovo said it will ship a version of last year’s pricey, high-powered Legion Go 2 handheld with Valve’s gaming-first, Linux-based OS preinstalled starting in June.
Valve has been trying to push SteamOS beyond its own kit, rather than leaving it locked to the usual suspects. After launching the SteamOS Compatible label last May, SteamOS 3.7 added support for manual installation on AMD handhelds such as the ROG Ally and the original Legion Go.
That spread hit a wall on ARM, where compatibility is thin, and the hardware ecosystem is massive. Valve’s upcoming Steam Frame VR headset could shift that, with a new SteamOS build designed for the headset’s Arm-based internals.
If that ARM work goes anywhere useful, it could open the door to a swarm of Android-based gaming handhelds across every price bracket. Emulators like Fex can technically get Steam games running on that sort of kit, but native SteamOS support would be a different beast.
For handheld fans, it lands as Valve’s Steam Machine is meant to make SteamOS easier to drop onto a living room telly. Desktop players are still staring at the awkward bit, because rigs with Nvidia GPUs may remain SteamOS’s last stubborn frontier.
When speaking to Frandroid a year ago, Valve staffer Pierre-Louis Griffais said, “With Nvidia, the integration of open-source drivers is still quite nascent. There’s still a lot of work to be done on that front, so it’s a bit complicated to say that we’re going to release this version when most people wouldn’t have a good experience.”
