Valve Is Going To Open Up SteamOS to Other Handhelds

SteamOS has been a major milestone for the gaming community. What it ultimately aims to achieve is a unified experience across multiple devices. While a few companies have claimed that they would ship SteamOS with a gaming handheld, none have done so. For many reasons, but key among them is the issue of quality. Well, things are about to change, and soon, you’ll be able to play any games on SteamOS using a variety of other devices.

As shared by the folks over at The Verge. SteamOs is slated for release on other devices sometime this year. The first device to sport official support will be the Lenovo Legion Go S. Lenovo has reportedly been working with Valve to bring the same version of SteamOS that runs on the Steam Deck to the Legion Go S. 

That’s not the only device that Valve has been working on. Valve said in August that it had begun working on support for the Asus ROG Ally. It’s not clear if SteamOS will work on all handhelds just yet, but there are options like Bazzite for that. Bazzitie is a community project that offers a SteamOS experience on multiple devices. It’s not a perfect experience just yet. It will require some tweaking to work perfectly but it’s a great way to experience the best that Linux gaming currently has to offer. 

There are a few reasons why SteamOS hasn’t made it onto devices just yet. When speaking to The Verge Pierre-Loup Griffais from Valve said: 

“In general, we just want to make sure we have a good pathway to work together on things like firmware updates and you can get to things like the boot manager and the BIOS and things like that in a semi-standardized fashion, right?” 

This makes sense, otherwise it could lead to an Android situation. Where lower-end devices have created the misconception that the operating system is slow. Despite the opposite being the case. 

If you’d like to find out more about Valve’s future projects click here.