Evicting Winbloat: Installing SteamOS on the Legion Go S (Windows Edition)

If you've been following the Big Tech's War on Users series, things get heavy over there. Let's take a breather. This one is about taking a gaming handheld I grabbed on sale, wiping Windows off it, and actually enjoying my games. It's a nice change of pace — same underlying philosophy of owning your own setup, a lot more fun getting there.

The NY Times just named the Steam Deck OLED the best handheld right now, and honestly for a first purchase they're not wrong — it's tried and true, works out of the box, huge community behind it. This post is for a different person: the one who grabbed the Legion Go S Windows edition on sale and wants to know how to make it sing. Or really anyone on a supported handheld looking to swap to SteamOS, or on other hardware considering Bazzite or ChimeraOS instead — most of this applies regardless of which gaming Linux you land on. The Windows firmware prep especially — do that no matter what you're putting on it.

I picked up the Legion Go S (Windows Edition) on sale. The catch is that "Windows edition" means exactly what it says, and Windows on a handheld gaming device is... not great. But we'll get to that.

The Legion Go S came in two chip variants — the Z2 Go and the more powerful Z1 Extreme — with both available in Windows and SteamOS editions. Configuration options for RAM and storage varied between them. This guide is based on the Z2 Go Windows edition, but the process applies to the Z1 Extreme as well.

As of early 2026, Rammageddon and tariffs hit the handheld market hard enough that Lenovo has since discontinued the Go S Z2 Go on their official site — before pulling it, Lenovo's own storefront had it sitting at nearly $1000, nearly double what it launched at. The OG Legion Go 1 had its own separate drama around the same time — Lenovo Korea said driver updates were ending, use AMD generic drivers instead, then Lenovo global walked it back and confirmed support through 2029. Then some updates quietly dropped out of nowhere anyway. Lenovo's communication on all of this has been... a journey.

That said, retail stock of the Go S is still floating around at sane prices — Woot and similar outlets have had them in the $550-580 range recently. If you stumble across the Z1 Extreme Windows version on clearance you're getting 32GB RAM and a more powerful chip for potentially a great deal, and this guide applies to that model too. Shop fast though — Lenovo isn't making more.

And honestly that advice extends to the whole handheld market right now. Between Rammageddon, tariffs, and supply chain chaos, MSI and ASUS have raised prices significantly, the Steam Deck OLED went scarce for a while, and Valve pulled the $399 LCD entry model entirely. If you see any handheld you want at a price that makes sense — that's your moment. The days of waiting around for a better deal may be on hold for a while.

Anyway — on to what this post is actually about.

I've had an OG Steam Deck for a while, so SteamOS isn't new territory for me. The goal here was simple: get the Go S running SteamOS, retire the Deck, consolidate. What I didn't expect was the number of things you have to do before you can even think about wiping Windows, and how badly it goes if you skip them.

This post is what I actually ran into. Including the wrong turns.

Why Bother Wiping Windows?

On a gaming handheld, Windows is fighting itself. Every background process, every launcher that auto-starts, every piece of telemetry calling home — all of that is CPU cycles and RAM that isn't going toward your game. On a desktop with serious specs that overhead is annoying but survivable. On a handheld where every resource is a finite shared pool, it's a measurable performance tax.

The Windows 11 minimum requirements aren't aspirational — they represent what Windows actually consumes just to function. And that's before every GPU vendor, handheld maker, and game platform decides they also need a piece of your system tray. Legion Space, AMD software, Steam, Xbox Game Bar, Epic, EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard — each one assuming it has the right to run all the time until you actively fight it. Windows is a jack of all trades trying to serve everyone from enterprise IT to your grandmother's email, and it carries the weight of all of that simultaneously.

On the 16GB version that math gets ugly fast. Windows idle chews through 4GB+ before you've launched anything. Add 3-6GB allocated to VRAM from that same shared pool and you're potentially in single digits left for the actual game. On a device specifically designed for gaming that's a rough situation. SteamOS idle overhead is a fraction of that — the 16GB on this thing goes a lot further than the spec sheet might suggest once Windows is out of the picture.

There's also the suspend. The Steam Deck spoiled me years ago and I'd forgotten how bad Windows sleep is until I had to wait for this thing to actually come back from it during setup. SteamOS suspend is PlayStation-quality — hit the power button, game is back where you left it in seconds. Not "please wait while we reconnect everything" seconds. Actual seconds.

Before You Touch That Wipe Button

Here's the part most guides either bury or skip. The Windows version of the Go S ships with older firmware than the SteamOS version. Some of that firmware doesn't get picked up through Steam updates like it normally would. If you wipe Windows before handling this, your options when things don't work right are: get the files from a separate Windows machine and figure out how to transfer them, or reload Windows and run through the whole setup again just to wipe it again. Neither of those is fun.

Do this first. All of it. Fight the urge to just take the SteamOS image and jump straight to install.

The Windows Setup Gauntlet

First boot drops you into Windows setup. Go ahead, take a deep breath.... this is going to take some time and yes it will be annoying. You're going to need to give it a name, connect to a network, and — because leopard spots — Microsoft has made skipping a Microsoft account login nearly impossible on a fresh install, and in this case you're going to need it a few times through the process. I'll leave the decision to you, but for speed either use one you already have or quickly spin up a junk account with throwaway details just to get through it. Either way, just get through it. One handy shortcut during setup — Legion L + B opens the virtual keyboard if you need it.

One fun detail: there's no brightness slider during setup. The screen was dimmed down for some reason and the only option was a contrast mode toggle. They have the full accessibility suite and couldn't manage a brightness slider. Just something to be aware of so you're not squinting at a dim screen wondering if something is wrong with the display. Most likely your screen is perfectly fine — Microsoft just being Microsoft and not considering a device with no external brightness controls.

Once you're at the desktop — you guessed it! There are more Windows updates. You say, but the setup said it installed updates? Sure it did, just didn't bother to install all of them. Some of these are driver updates that actually matter, so let them run.

Legion Space

Legion Space should be sitting in your taskbar as a shortcut icon already — click it and it'll download and install itself. Fair warning: it is slow. Seriously, go make coffee and hit the bathroom. It will probably be done by the time you get back....maybe. Don't assume it's hung, just give it time — and yes I agree with all of you thinking "shouldn't they have a working version to just get going preinstalled without all this hassle?"

Once it's actually open go to Settings → Drivers and check for updates. Install whatever is there. The controller firmware update may auto-prompt — mine did, and that differed slightly from the guide I was following. Either way, get it updated.

The Trackpad Firmware — Do Not Skip This

This is the one that will ruin your day if you ignore it. The trackpad firmware update is not in Legion Space. It's not in Windows Update. It's also not in most versions of Lenovo's support site. It's buried on a Chinese-language version of their knowledge base with instructions that need translating — someone on Reddit did that work and it's documented in this thread.

The direct download link for the firmware is in the Retro Handhelds guide — grab it from there and follow the translated instructions.

Why does this matter so much? Skip it and the trackpad is flaky or outright non-functional in SteamOS. In game mode that might not sound critical since you're using controllers. But desktop mode is where it earns its keep — precise cursor work, scrolling, right-click context menus. It's an instant mouse for anything that doesn't work cleanly with thumbsticks. Some games benefit from it too. Miss this firmware step and getting it fixed after the fact is a project.

Lenovo should put this in Legion Space. Or ask Valve to loop it into SteamOS updates — the partnership exists, the relationship is there, the Go S is officially supported hardware. The path to fixing this is not complicated. A broken trackpad experience on a multi-hundred dollar device you put their name on is not a good look. All they'd have to do is add one entry to Legion Space. However, given they've since discontinued the Go S — don't hold your breath waiting for them to clean this up.

Making the Bootable Drive

Head to the SteamOS Recovery page and download the recovery image for the Legion Go S.

You'll need to extract the image before Rufus can see it. Rufus is what the guide recommends and it works fine — with one caveat I learned the hard way: plug your USB drive directly into your computer, not into a dock. I plugged mine into an Anker dock and Rufus failed at the end of the image creation process. Plugged straight into the machine: no errors.

On Mac or Linux you can use Balena Etcher or just dd from the terminal if you're comfortable there — the bz compressed variant of the image should work directly without extracting first on those platforms. And yes, technically you could do this on the Go S itself before wiping it, since you're still in Windows at this point.

If Rufus gives you trouble, Ventoy is an alternative worth trying — it got the image created without errors when Rufus on the dock failed. That said, Ventoy introduced its own headache at the boot stage (more on that in a moment), and ultimately Rufus plugged directly into the computer is what actually worked end to end.

Installing SteamOS

Power off. Hold Volume Up and press Power to get to the Novo boot menu. Fair warning: it takes an uncomfortably long time to respond — long enough that you'll convince yourself you did it wrong. You didn't. Keep holding and it'll get there. Go into BIOS Setup → More Settings → Security and disable Secure Boot. Exit saving changes.

Hold Volume Up and power on again. Boot from USB.

A note on touch and keyboard input in the boot environment: touch stops working in Ventoy's launcher. I tried a keyboard dongle — didn't register. USB-C cable — same. What finally worked was flipping the keyboard to USB mode (not Bluetooth). It's the kind of thing Windows stopped caring about so long ago I'd forgotten it was a toggle. In USB mode it registered immediately and the install started.

The first attempt failed completely during the boot sequence — couldn't load partitions. Back to the drawing board.

I redid the image with Rufus plugged directly to the computer. Booted it up — the Go S had helpfully forgotten that I'd set it to try USB first and dropped me back into Windows, which was mildly panicking from all the reboot cycles. Found the boot menu button timing again. Started the image... and it randomly rebooted to Windows right around where the desktop should have launched. No idea why. Tried it a second time, same image — and it worked. Went straight through, installed without issue.

If it reboots on you partway through: try again. Don't rebuild the drive first.

Once it finishes, the Go S reboots into SteamOS. Sign into Steam and run through the shorter setup process.

Post-Install Setup

Hit the Legion button (your Steam button) → Settings and let it check for and install updates first. While you're getting familiar with the interface — Quick Access Key + Y cycles through thermal modes on the fly if you want to dial in performance vs battery life without going into menus.

Then do these steps in order:

Settings → System → Enable Developer Mode

Settings → Developer → Show Advanced Update Channels: On

Back to Settings → System:

Update Channel: Main
Steam Client: Beta

One or both of these will trigger a reboot. Let it do its thing, then check for updates again.

Boot to Desktop (Legion button → Power → Switch to Desktop)

Open Discover and search for firmware. Install it, then open it and make sure your controller firmware is at version 0.0.3.8 or newer. Update it if it's not.

While you're in Discover, install ProtonUp-Qt. This lets you install community-built Proton versions like GE-Proton beyond what Steam ships by default. Once installed, you can point individual games or your whole library at them for better compatibility on titles that need it.

Optional but recommended: Decky Loader

Open a browser in desktop mode, go to decky.xyz, and download the installer. If you're using Firefox it'll download as decky_installer.desktop.download — rename it to decky_installer.desktop before running. Move it to your desktop, double-click, hit Launch, then Continue. Follow the prompts (you'll need to enter a sudo password or let it set a temporary one). Install the Release version.

Hit the Return to Gaming Mode icon on the desktop when done. Decky Loader shows up as the small icon opposite the Legion button on the right side of the quick access menu. From there you have a plugin marketplace — community settings recommendations, Proton compatibility ratings, how long to beat a game, theming, and more. Some plugins can have occasional issues after Steam updates and may need to be reinstalled — that's been the case for years. Occasionally a plugin will go sideways and take Decky down with it entirely. If that happens your options are a clean reinstall from desktop mode after wiping it out, or going into the plugin folder directly and removing the troublemaker manually. Neither is the end of the world but worth knowing going in. The useful ones are worth it.

One More BIOS Setting: VRAM

Before heading back to game mode, go back into BIOS (Volume Up + Power, Bios Setup → More Settings → Configuration → UMA Frame Buffer Size). The default on mine was 512MB which is comically low. For the 16GB RAM version I set it to 6GB — gives the GPU enough headroom for modern titles while still leaving plenty for the system side. If you're on the 32GB version the community generally recommends 10-12GB as a set-and-forget.

The Good Part

I popped the microSD card from my old Steam Deck into the Go S. The card mounted, Steam read what was already on it, and every game just appeared — no reformatting, no re-downloading, no fussing. That's the SteamOS ecosystem doing exactly what it should.

And that IPS display is looking pretty.

Gaming Compatibility: What You Should Actually Know

SteamOS isn't officially supported on every handheld. Valve's blessed list right now is basically the Steam Deck, the Legion Go S (that partnership is part of why this guide exists), and to varying degrees the ROG Ally. Anything else is more of a community effort with varying results. If you're on non-standard hardware, look at Bazzite or ChimeraOS — both deliver a similar experience without being tied to Valve's hardware list. I ran ChimeraOS on a machine that later became my home server and it held up great. Bazzite gets more community fanfare these days and both have a solid chance of working on your hardware.

On compatibility, don't just trust Deck Verified. That badge means it works perfectly out of the box with no fuss. It's a conservative floor, not a ceiling. The better resource is ProtonDB — community reports on what actually runs, how well, and any tweaks needed. For multiplayer titles specifically, check areweanticheatyet.com first.

The games that reliably don't work on SteamOS are mostly live service shooters using kernel-level anti-cheat that isn't Linux-compatible by design. Valorant (Vanguard) isn't coming. Some of the big multiplayer titles that use EAC or BattlEye are a different story — Epic and Valve worked together on Linux support for both, so the toggle exists. Whether a specific game works comes down to whether the developer flipped it.

Diablo 4 works. That's a Blizzard live service game, and they did the work to make it compatible. I played the full original story on my Deck. So the "live service = broken" assumption isn't universal — check first.

Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 is a useful example of the nuance here. It has Easy Anti-Cheat, and Bandai Namco hasn't opted into Linux support. But ProtonDB has a launch parameter workaround that gets it running. Story mode, offline parallel quests, all of it works fine. Steam cloud saves loaded my character right up. Online play and some medal features don't work — but if that's not why you play it, you're fine.

For developers holding out: the technical lift is genuinely minimal for EAC and BattlEye games. Epic built the Linux support into the platform and handed it to everyone. It's close to a checkbox in the developer backend settings. What's left isn't a technical problem, it's a business decision. Bandai Namco, for instance, could flip that switch today. Considering Xenoverse 3 is presumably on the horizon — making 2 fully work on SteamOS ahead of the launch, right before a Dragon Ball sale, might be a nice little PR move to catch the handheld audience's attention. All they'd have to do is hit the Linux toggle. For fans of a certain beloved Dragon Ball abridged series... let's just say hitting the muffin button would be a nice change of pace.

Beyond Your Steam Library

Game mode is essentially a full-screen Steam Big Picture with good software around it. Under the hood it's just launching executables — which means you can add non-Steam shortcuts and launchers and they show up as cards just like everything else.

A few worth knowing about:

Blizzard Launcher — I launched Diablo 4 in desktop mode. The launcher opened, logged in, went straight to the game. No fuss. You could also theoretically add it as a non-Steam shortcut to launch from game mode directly, though I haven't tested that specifically.

EGS and GOG — Heroic Launcher handles both cleanly. Add it as a non-Steam shortcut and it shows up in game mode like anything else.

Xbox Cloud Gaming, Chiaki-ng (PlayStation Remote Play), GeForce Now — all work. Chiaki-ng is the current actively developed version — the original Chiaki is maintenance mode only, Chiaki4deck was the Steam Deck focused fork, and chiaki-ng is what both became. Search for it in Discover and install from there. No PlayStation Portal needed to stream from your PS5.

Steam Remote Play — if you have a more powerful PC on your home network, Steam can stream it directly to the Go S. On a decent wired LAN the latency is low enough it feels local. WiFi can be hit or miss depending on your setup, distance from the router, and how congested your network is — your mileage will vary. Turns your handheld into a thin client for your desktop when the conditions are right.

You can also plug into a monitor in desktop mode and run dual-screen if you want to go full unhinged. It's a full Arch Linux computer that happens to fit in your hands. The desktop isn't just a config screen — it's actually usable.

Worth Noting: SteamOS Won't Reboot Without Asking

One last thing. SteamOS doesn't restart for updates without your permission. Your game session is yours until you decide otherwise. This sounds like a small thing until you've lost progress to a Windows update that decided 2am was optimal timing.

Anyway. Go play something.

Quick Reference: Shortcuts and Touch Tips

Touchscreen in desktop mode:

Single tap — left click
Double tap — double click
Hold/long press — right click
Two finger tap — right click alternative

Trackpad note: works great in desktop mode for mouse movement and clicking. There's a known open bug with Valve where pressing down to click doesn't register as a click event in game mode — only works as a button binding there. Desktop mode is where it earns its keep.

Windows Edition shortcuts:

Legion L + B — virtual keyboard
Legion L + A — Ctrl + Alt + Del
Quick Access Key + Y — cycle thermal modes
Legion L + LB + Menu (hold 4 sec) — factory reset controller
LT + LS (hold 7 sec) — calibrate left joystick
RT + RS (hold 7 sec) — calibrate right joystick

SteamOS shortcuts:

Legion/Steam button — Steam menu
Quick Access Key — Quick Access Menu
Quick Access Key + Y — cycle thermal modes
Quick Access Key + RB + Menu (hold 4 sec) — factory reset controller
LT + LS (hold 7 sec) — calibrate left joystick
RT + RS (hold 7 sec) — calibrate right joystick

Next up: I grabbed an NVMe drive on a Prime sale before Rammageddon hit the storage prices and put it in a ROG Arion enclosure. Here's how I set it up as removable game storage and the formatting adventure it took to get there.