Back in August of 2023 I got an early first look at the original Lenovo Legion Go before it was officially announced. I was very impressed with the Windows 11 based portable gaming PC. After using it for a little while I asked the Lenovo Legion team representative if they had tried running Steam OS on it.
He said, “Oh it runs Steam!”
I said, “No, I mean Steam OS, the Linux operating system that Valve’s Steamdeck runs. There’s an open-source Steam OS that anyone can install. I wonder if the performance will be much different with that versus Windows 11. It probably wouldn’t support the same number of games though.”
Lenovo, “Oh, we’ve been too busy getting this one to work well to think about that.”
A little over a year later, now we’ve got a whole new Lenovo Legion Go S announced that does exactly what I suggested. Now, the Steam OS version that was open-source back in 2023 was a very old version, so Lenovo probably had to give Valve a call and ask about using their newest version on Lenovo’s own hardware, and it looks like negotiations were successful.
Why is this a good idea?
In my original review of the Lenovo Legion Go, I criticized the device for Windows 11’s user interface design.
Windows 11’s centered bottom edge navigation system is terrible for an Ultra-Mobile touch screen PC design like this. You can’t reach the buttons with your thumbs while holding the device! Windows 11’s user interface design is actually really bad design all around… but it’s especially bad for something with hardware controller buttons on the left and right edges. Lenovo tried to get around this with a custom games launcher that auto-ran on top of Windows 11 when the Legion Go booted up, but that made everything much slower.
A Linux-based operating system is going to be much lighter-weight for portable hardware as it will require less RAM. Steam’s version also has a great gaming centric user interface. You can switch to a KDE Plasma desktop interface in the Steamdeck OS if you need to run desktop applications, but the game-centric interface boots by default and is going to be a much better user experience for a portable console like this than what you get with Windows 11.
Of course, many years ago, Microsoft was much better at user interface designs that would have been absolutely excellent for a device like this. Windows 8, for example, (seen above) would have been a fantastic interface on the Legion Go since it has left and right edge touch screen gestures for controlling actually useful aspects of the operating system. Plus it was much more navigable with controller style hardware.
I’m really looking forward to the release of the Lenovo Legion GO S! Hopefully it will be a much better user experience than Windows 11 and hopefully the Linux based operating system will show a noticeable performance improvement as well.