Lenovo Officially Announces The Legion Go S Handheld With SteamOS

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Lenovo Officially Announces The Legion Go S Handheld With SteamOS

Following weeks of rumors, today at CES in Las Vegas as part of debuting other new wares, Lenovo introduced the Legion Go S handheld gaming console option that is officially licensed by Valve for SteamOS...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Lenovo-Legion-Go-SteamOS

[vimja]

I wonder what Valve requires of companies that license SteamOS. Press is already calling the Legion Go a supperior SteamDeck. But of course Valve are doing the thing properly - selecting components that work well with Linux and upstreaming all the fixes and new drivers they make. That way we can be sure it will be supported for a very long time and even if one day the should drop support, we can install a Linux distribution of our choice and continue using the hardware.

How is it going to be with third party devices? Will they come with half-arsed out of tree drivers and badly written shell-scripts in the initrd to get everything working? Or is Valve putting in some quality control for these things, much as Google is doing nowadays for Android?

[DumbFsck]

Is 2025 going to be The Year of Linux *handheld gaming devices* ?

[DumbFsck]

I wonder what Valve requires of companies that license SteamOS. Press is already calling the Legion Go a supperior SteamDeck. But of course Valve are doing the thing properly - selecting components that work well with Linux and upstreaming all the fixes and new drivers they make. That way we can be sure it will be supported for a very long time and even if one day the should drop support, we can install a Linux distribution of our choice and continue using the hardware.

How is it going to be with third party devices? Will they come with half-arsed out of tree drivers and badly written shell-scripts in the initrd to get everything working? Or is Valve putting in some quality control for these things, much as Google is doing nowadays for Android?

If those recent WMI drivers are an indication, if Valve is requiring some sort of minimum support to also be OSS, at least _some_ quality is to be expected. Not that anyone would fix it if it isn't good, but probably they'd be ridiculed.


Also, of they finally release an official ISO that third parties can use more easily, they can use that branding that was leaked a while ago to say "this is one of the good ones", and consumers could in theory avoid the ones that use the ISO but don't do the bare minimum to get the compatibility sticker.

If Valve wants to be sly they could release the OS with a name that does not include their trademarks, or that uses some different one, so not "Steam OS 3", so the ones using the trademark are " guaranteed" to meet some quality bar, and if someone uses the OS without Valve helping set it up can do it but can't say it works "with Valve's SteamOS", only that it "comes with Valve's Holo Linux" or whatever.

[Jumbotron]

AMD had better shit or get off the pot when it comes to either RDNA 5 or, if the rumors are true, replacing RDNA with UDNA ( a unified RDNA / CDNA architecture ).

Because Jensen and Nvidia just announced the Blackwell RTX 50 GPU that amongst other things can generate 3 additional frames for every one rendered frame based on AI. So a more sophisticated version of interpolation that you see in TV sets that can go above the standard broadcast frame refresh of 60hz

They also released an AI development PC based on Blackwell that is the size of a Mac Mini that can process 3,300 + AI TOPs and can handle 200 billion parameter LLM’s. In a Mac Mini case.

Which begs the question….how long before Nintendo builds a next-gen Switch with one of these chips and destroys the entirety of SteamOS handhelds….or even a PS 5 ?

[fahrenheit]

The next Switch, according to current expectations (read rumours), is slated to feature a cut down Nvidia Orin (ie. 8 cores instead of 12, but more ram), this is Ampere. So this will probably get you PS4 or the low end xbox.

The issue with handhelds is always the trade-off between performance, weight and battery.

[sarmad]

can generate 3 additional frames for every one rendered frame based on AI

That's gotta be terrible on latency. I can't imagine playing at 4x latency to be any fun, unless if they found a way to include user input into the frame generation parameters.

[Jabberwocky]

I wonder how much optimization these devices will get and how long before we see another uarch. I hope AMD64 gets supported for a long time. I badly want official latest SteamOS for desktop.

AMD had better shit or get off the pot when it comes to either RDNA 5 or, if the rumors are true, replacing RDNA with UDNA ( a unified RDNA / CDNA architecture ).

Because Jensen and Nvidia just announced the Blackwell RTX 50 GPU that amongst other things can generate 3 additional frames for every one rendered frame based on AI. So a more sophisticated version of interpolation that you see in TV sets that can go above the standard broadcast frame refresh of 60hz

They also released an AI development PC based on Blackwell that is the size of a Mac Mini that can process 3,300 + AI TOPs and can handle 200 billion parameter LLM’s. In a Mac Mini case.

Which begs the question….how long before Nintendo builds a next-gen Switch with one of these chips and destroys the entirety of SteamOS handhelds….or even a PS 5 ?

If Nvidia didn't strong arm or screw over every single partner they worked with they would have been unstoppable. Messed up partnership with Apple, then mining over gaming, GeForce Partner Program which was anti-consumer and screwed over AIB marketing, after that started directly competing with AIBs with FE and restricting cards which made their best AIB (EVGA) leave and finally now GenAI over everything else... oh somewhere between that they promised open source drivers LOL. I don't get why so many people still shill for them when they leave such a long trail of bodies.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

It begins, and I hope it spreads.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

If Nvidia didn't strong arm or screw over every single partner they worked with they would have been unstoppable. Messed up partnership with Apple, then mining over gaming, GeForce Partner Program which was anti-consumer and screwed over AIB marketing, after that started directly competing with AIBs with FE and restricting cards which made their best AIB (EVGA) leave and finally now GenAI over everything else... oh somewhere between that they promised open source drivers LOL. I don't get why so many people still shill for them when they leave such a long trail of bodies.

I hear you, but they seem pretty close to unstoppable.

AMD: up 168% over the last five years
INTC: down 65% over the last five years
NVIDIA: up 2221% over the last five years