Lenovo Legion Go 2 To Get A SteamOS Upgrade To Take On Steam Deck
Gamers clamoring for a more powerful version of Lenovo's Legion Go handheld with SteamOS instead of Windows will get their wish in a few months. At CES, Lenovo announced it's planning to release a SteamOS edition of its second-generation Legion Go, which will ship with the same core hardware as its existing Windows variant.
Why does this matter? SteamOS is a streamlined platform for gaming and is optimized precisely for that, whereas Windows is more of a do-everything operating system. If you're buying a handheld strictly for gaming—which is probably most people—Valve's Linux-based SteamOS is a really good platform with an intuitive UI and some nifty features like the quick suspend/resume function.
Lenovo already made its foray into SteamOS territory with Legion Go S, which is a solid first effort (we ran into some minor issues as noted in our review), but the Legion Go 2 is a more premium handheld with higher-end specs.
Like the Windows variant, the Legion Go 2 with SteamOS will feature an 8.8-inch OLED display with 1920x1200 resolution (16:10 aspect ratio), 144Hz refresh rate, and 500 nits brightness. Underneath the hood, it's packing an AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme processor (8C/16T, up to 5GHz, 16MB L3 cache), up to 32GB of LPDDR5X-8000 memory, and up to 2TB of PCIe 4.0 solid state drive (SSD) storage.
It also features the same connectivity options (1x 3.5mm combo jack, 2x USB-C [USB4, DisplayPort 1.4, Power Delivery 3.0), 1x microSD card reader supporting up to 2TB), the same controls, and so forth. The only thing different is that it will run SteamOS.
Why not just install SteamOS on Windows version of the Legion Go 2? We haven't tried it, but others have and they report less-than-optimal results.
Lenovo says the Legion Go 2 with SteamOS will be available in June starting at $1,199.
