Valve didn’t start selling the Steam Deck in Australia until late 2024, nearly three years after its initial release in the US, and by that stage I was prepared to wait for either a big sale or a big leap forward in performance.
Eventually, Lenovo had 50% off the 16GB RAM / 512GB SSD / Z2 Go / Windows version of the Legion Go S, at which point I couldn’t help myself.
The modern Windows experience is bad enough, and then you try to use it on a handheld with a small touch screen.
Despite having an Xbox app which can be navigated with a controller, it still feels like a desktop application, unlike SteamOS which feels much closer to a dedicated console OS.
It gets worse though – many demanding 3D games run significantly better in SteamOS (i.e. Linux) via a compatibility layer than they do in their native Windows.
SteamOS now officially supports the Legion Go S, with some newer variants having it pre-installed.
It runs on top of Linux, and plays Windows games using a compatibility layer called Proton, a collaboration between Valve and CodeWeavers which started as a fork of Wine.
The experience is pretty slick, with some impressive QOL stuff:
There's an insane amount of controller configuration available, including the ability to download community settings, so even older games with limited controller support can be tamed
You can play games via streaming from the Steam app running on a PC
Multiple devices running Steam on the same network can “download” installed games from each other, instead of via the Internet
The main catch is that pretty much any game which requires anti-cheat software won't run.
The PlayStation Portal, which is only capable of streaming games from a PlayStation 5, holds up remarkably well in comparison here. I played through a lot of Death Stranding 2 on the Portal, where the latency didn’t impact the experience much at all, and the graphical experience was much better than a AAA game running on the Legion Go S.
Game Pass is compelling enough that it’s worth keeping Windows installed here, warts and all. A good mix of indies and AAA games, including day-one releases, for a reasonable monthly subscription fee.
The Legion Go S has a 1900x1200 display with 120Hz and VRR support, which is nice, but arguably overkill for the underlying hardware. Most of the time, you’ll be dropping the resolution far below that to get games running well.
On one hand, you can have something like Cyberpunk 2077 running at 60FPS, but then Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 struggling to hold 30, even with every possible graphics setting turned down as low as possible.
Don’t waste your time with the official SteamOS installer if you want to dual boot with an existing Windows installation.
The current SteamOS installer is a recovery image, which requires you to fully wipe the drive. You’ll find a ton of outdated information telling you otherwise, but just trust me.
Just install Bazzite, there's dual booting instructions here.
If you’re dual booting, you’ll probably want at least a 1TB SSD. You can upgrade the SSD in these things, but not easily. I'm making do with the 512GB I have, though with plenty of modern games weighing in at over 100GB there's not a lot of breathing room.
You can throw in a MicroSD card, but the big caveat here is that even if you cough up for a fast one, some games won’t run well when installed on it - even indies.
It depends.
In general, I’m very happy with it at the price I paid, but probably wouldn’t be if I'd spent the full asking price.
If you want to play all the latest AAA games at 60FPS, you'll need to lower your expectations or wait for better hardware.
There are much faster AMD processors in the pipeline, and a rumored PlayStation handheld in the works which actually runs the games on the device rather than requiring a PlayStation 5 to stream from.
The Switch 2 is probably a better fit for a lot of people, particularly if you don't like the idea of tinkering and tweaking settings.
© 2025 Tim Hanlon