By Sean Hollister , a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CN

Valve will officially let you install SteamOS on other handhelds as soon as this April

submited by

Style Pass

2025-01-08 08:00:02

By Sean Hollister , a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.

SteamOS was always supposed to be bigger than Valve’s own Steam Deck, and 2025 is the year it finally expands. Not only will Lenovo ship the first third-party SteamOS handheld this May, Valve has now revealed it will let you install a working copy of SteamOS on other handhelds even sooner than that.

Pierre-Loup Griffais, one of the lead designers on the Steam Deck and SteamOS, tells me a beta for other handhelds “is slated to ship after March sometime,” and that you might discover the OS just starts working properly after that happens!

Griffais and his co-designer Lawrence Yang would not confirm which handhelds might just start working, though there are some obvious candidates: the company confirmed to us in August that it had been adding support for the Asus ROG Ally’s controls.

Also, quite a few PC gamers have also discovered that Bazzite, a fork of Valve’s Steam Deck experience that I loved testing on an Ally X and vastly preferred to Windows, also works wonderfully on the Lenovo Legion Go. There still aren’t that many handhelds out there at the end of the day, and I would think Valve would take advantage of work the Linux gaming community has already done on both.