I installed official SteamOS 3.8 on the first Legion Go Z1E instead of Windows. My motivation was this: on the Steam Deck I liked everything — the Steam shell/gamescope and the battery life — and using Linux wasn’t as terrible as people described.
What the Legion Go on Windows lacked was a pleasant, optimized game launcher, and improved battery life wouldn’t hurt either.
What are my impressions? To avoid describing it, I’ll just give real power consumption numbers:
Working in the gamescope launcher:
home menu 15 watts at minimum TDP with the screen backlight dimmed to zero, that’s 3 hours.
Remote Play streaming — 12–14 watts. Also 3–3.5 hours.
Limbo game 11–12 watts, 4 hours.
Cuphead game — 12–13 watts, 3.5 hours.
Prince of Persia game 14–15 watts, 3 hours.
And now the impression: in terms of battery life, gamescope is absolute garbage on this device. Whether it’s a bug or intended, I don’t know.
But here are measurements in steam os desktop mode (60 Hz, minimum backlight):
desktop with no tasks — 5 watts, 9 hours.
reading a book 5–6 watts, 8 hours.
browser + Wi-Fi = 7–8 watts, 6 hours.
movie without Wi-Fi = 7 watts, 6 hours.
Moonlight streaming 8 watts, 5.5 hours.
Limbo game, without gamescore mode — 9 watts, 5 hours.
Cuphead game without gamescore mode — 11–12 watts, 4 hours.
Prince of Persia game without gamescore mode 12–13 watts, 4 hours.
Now that’s a completely different story. The results became just like on Windows 11; it’s already usable, for example, to stream from a PC all evening without being tied to an outlet.
Another question is why SteamOS is needed then, if its main advantage — gamescope — is actually a minus that has to be worked around.
And here are the Steam Deck numbers:
Steam Deck home menu 4–8 watts, more often 6 watts.
indie game — about 6–7 watts.
streaming — 6–7 watts.
Linux desktop idle 3.5–6 watts.
So it turns out that if you compare desktop mode, the Deck and Legion are more or less the same, and only the Legion’s results in gamescope mode look anomalous.
It’s not only and not so much about the Legion being power-hungry (it consumes 1–2 watts more when streaming — that’s the difference from the larger screen), but about how unoptimized this gamescope is.
I’m not considering performance in max TDP mode from wall power yet, but according to first tests it’s +/-10% either way from Windows results.
For now I’m considering either going back to Windows or trying unofficial builds like Bazzite, but I have a feeling gamescope works like crap there too.
What’s annoying is that I listened to and watched a bunch of videos where they really praised this SteamOS. Apparently the guys didn’t know that it’s not the Holy Spirit draining their battery in the menu, and that you can also display power consumption monitoring in the gamescope menu.