Valve made a Steam Deck Verified program for things that aren't Steam Decks
This metric is an extension of the Steam Deck Verified program, and it will award a checkmark to games based on a data subset within that vetting process. In other words, game developers won't have to take any additional steps if they're already completing Steam Deck Verified. On the player end, compatible games will show a blue checkmark when viewed in the Steam Store and Steam Client while running the operating system on a device other than the Steam Deck.
The announcement is mostly a future-proofing move. Right now, the Lenovo Legion Go S is the only handheld besides the Steam Deck that's officially running Valve's operating system. But Lenovo was already teasing a second iteration of the hardware at CES this year and Valve clearly has plans for the number of SteamOS platforms to grow. The landscape for handheld gaming could start looking quite different if SteamOS really takes off as a standalone service.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Forbes
6 hours ago
- Forbes
Nikhil Sawhney Turbocharges India's Triveni Turbine Into A Global Champion
This story is part of Forbes Asia's coverage of Best Under A Billion 2025, which highlights 200 Asia-Pacific public companies with less than $1 billion in revenue and consistent top- and bottom-line growth. See the full list, sorted alphabetically, here . T riveni Turbine's 10-hectare factory complex in the Sompura industrial belt, about 48 kilometers northwest of India's tech capital, Bangalore, is a picturesque landscape of pink-and-yellow flowering shrubs and an abundance of mango, coconut and sapodilla trees. But the heart of this verdant campus is another green expanse—a gleaming, 10,000-square-meter shop floor churning out rotors and blades alongside assembly bays and test beds for steam turbines. Powered by either fossil fuels or renewables such as biomass, these giant machines use steam to spin a rotor to generate electricity. The company specializes in turbines of up to 100 megawatts (MW), producing 300 to 350 machines a year at its two factories (the second is located in another Bangalore suburb). They are deployed in an array of industries, such as cement, steel and chemicals as well as by independent power producers. (Bigger turbines of more than 100MW make up more than 90% of the global steam turbine market.) Triveni Turbine's manufacturing and refurbishment facility at Sompura in Bangalore. Courtesy of Triveni Turbine Amid the steady hum of the factory, Nikhil Sawhney, the company's vice chairman and managing director, reveals his ambitions: 'In the next five years we'll more than double our revenue,' he says. 'I don't see why we can't triple it also.' In the year ended March 31, Triveni's revenue jumped 21% from the previous year to a record 20.1 billion rupees ($237 million) and net income rose by a third to 3.6 billion rupees, earning it a spot on the Best Under A Billion list of companies for the second year in a row. Since getting involved with operations 14 years ago, this fourth-generation scion of a Delhi clan with roots in the sugar business has helped transform Triveni from a largely domestic outfit into a notable global player. Over that period, market cap has surged to $2.4 billion from $262 million and it now has 6,000 installed units in 80 countries, up from 2,500 in 30 markets in 2011. It is the No. 2 player in the global market in the up-to-100MW segment, after Siemens Energy, a spin-off of German giant Siemens, according to U.S.-based energy intelligence firm McCoy Power Reports. 'It's been a journey based on a lot of focus and discipline,' the 48-year-old says. Global Upstart Since revving up its international expansion in 2010, Triveni Turbine has motored its way to the No. 2 spot in the market for its products, trailing only megabrand Siemens Energy. *Based on number of units installed in 2024 Source: McCoy Power Reports, Triveni Turbine But Sawhney still has speed bumps to navigate. The steam-turbine business is undergoing rapid change amid the transition to cleaner energy; competition is intense not just from Siemens but other multinational players, such as Brazil's TGM Turbinas and the U.K.'s Baker Hughes; and the threat of tariffs is rattling his U.S. expansion plans, making him acutely aware that he must keep innovating. 'We need to develop new products and new technologies and create newer market segments all the time,' Sawhney says. 'We are very paranoid as a company.' Since going public in 2011, shares of Triveni have rocketed about 1,600%, propelling Sawhney's father, Dhruv Sawhney, under whom the $1.8 billion fortune is listed, into the billionaire ranks, starting in 2022. The fast-growing turbine business accounts for two-thirds of his net worth of $2 billion, with the rest mostly from a stake in the legacy company Triveni Engineering & Industries, which Sawhney's older brother, Tarun, 51, runs as vice chairman and managing director. (Their father is chairman and managing director of both companies.) Dhruv Sawhney, Triveni Turbine's chairman and managing director. Courtesy of Triveni Turbine Triveni Turbine 'has a dominant position in the domestic market, an expanding share in the international market, and strong technological prowess,' according to Teena Virmani, a research analyst at Mumbai-based financial services firm Motilal Oswal. 'It's also very efficient financially,' she adds. It leads in India with a 55% market share in revenue terms, followed by Siemens Energy India with 40%, according to the firm. While the domestic market for steam turbines contracted 10% in revenue terms in fiscal 2025, partly due to national elections and macroeconomic jitters, Virmani expects demand to revive in fiscal 2027. She cites a 120% jump in the company's domestic enquiries—considered a precursor to orders—in fiscal 2025; international enquiries rose 30%. Motilal Oswal estimates compound annual growth of 19% for both revenue and after-tax profit over the next two years. Cranking Up Triveni Turbine's revenue has grown at a CAGR of 30% over the past four fiscal years. Fiscal year ends March 31 Source: Triveni Turbine The global market for steam turbines up to 100MW excluding China and Japan declined about 28% in gigawatt terms from 2014 to 2024, according to McCoy. But 'we do not think this is reflective of the long-term market,' says Sawhney. Triveni has sustained its momentum, and exports—mainly to Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia—accounted for nearly half of total revenue in the year to end-March, up from 11% in 2011. Sawhney says more than 70% of its turbines use renewables, such as biomass. This is in line with data from McCoy that machines powered by renewables accounted for nearly three-quarters of the global market for up-to-100MW steam turbines in 2024, up from 42% in 2014, while those using fossil fuels fell to 22% from 36%. In another nod to sustainability, Triveni has devices that turn municipal waste into energy. Many of its machines also go into combined heat-and-power systems, which capture waste heat from generating electricity and use it for other industrial purposes, improving energy efficiencies. 'We are very paranoid as a company.' Triveni's key turning point was in 2010, when the family, which was at the time mostly making only small turbines of under 30MW, revved up its international ambitions by forming a joint venture with General Electric to make bigger machines for overseas markets. The machines were produced in India with GE marketing them abroad. The joint venture helped drive global expansion until 2019 when the partners went their separate ways, with Triveni eventually buying out GE's stake. Despite the breakup, exports have jumped threefold since Triveni went solo. 'Our competitiveness in that market [for 30MW-100MW turbines] is significant,' Sawhney says. Global sales got a boost in 2016, when he moved into making turbines for the oil-and-gas industry that adhere to safety, efficiency and other standards set by the American Petroleum Institute (API), a U.S.-based trade group. Triveni now supplies API-compliant machines to the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Central and South America, and Europe. Virmani describes the market as competitive but lucrative and says the company's 'technological expertise and faster turnaround capabilities' make it well-positioned to capture a larger share. Nikhil Sawhney, Vice Chairman & Managing Director of Triveni Turbine. Harshith Dambekodi For Forbes ASIA S awhney's investments in building technological prowess turned out to be another lucrative bet. The company now holds around 400 patents, industrial designs, trademarks and copyrights and rolls out four to five new products a year. It has long-standing research partnerships with universities in India and abroad, including the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and the University of Cambridge in the U.K., Sawhney's alma mater. 'No one licenses world-beating technology,' he says. 'We have to create it ourselves.' Capex for fiscal 2026 is set at 1.7 billion rupees and besides R&D will be used for beefing up testing and assembly infrastructure. 'We can use cash for growth [via M&A], but we don't want to grow like that,' Sawhney explains. The R&D efforts have translated into more business. In January, in collaboration with an Italian company, it scored a 2.9-billion-rupee electrical energy storage project from state-run power-generating company NTPC. The system compresses industrial-grade CO₂ into a liquid state that can be kept under pressure and released as needed. The advantage of the technique is that energy can be stored without the use of rare earths such as lithium, which is used by battery storage makers, Sawhney explains. While he is confident about this technology, he says scaling up might be a challenge. 'It's easy to innovate and prototype in India because of the low cost, but…it is hard to scale up because people are risk-averse,' he explains. Sawhney realized early on that one way to differentiate Triveni from its competition would be to focus on aftermarket services. The company has partnerships with local workshops and service centres to repair and refurbish not just its own models but also those of other manufacturers. 'Since we suffer from a brand discount when compared to global companies, our entire offering needs to be better, we have to up the service game, we have to up the response time,' he avers. Aftermarket services have risen to 32% of revenue in fiscal 2025 from 16% in 2011. 'No one licenses world-beating technology. We have to create it ourselves.' Another key advantage for Triveni is that it can offer budget-friendly customized products. When Gurgaon-based JK Cement was shopping for a steam turbine for a cement plant in 2022, Triveni was able to integrate a new 18MW device into the company's existing turbine deck, gearbox, generator and other parts. 'They really went the extra mile,' says JK Cement's CEO Madhav Singhania. 'No one else could have come up with the sort of solution that they offered.' JK Cement says the refit cost less than half the amount they would have had to pay to an off-the-shelf vendor, who would have replaced the whole system. Singhania tapped Triveni again in 2024, seeking a 23MW steam turbine for another factory. Sawhney says that 90% of their customers come back with repeat orders. The company spent $10 million expanding in the U.S., including opening a 9,300-square-meter assembly plant in Houston last year, closer to its oil-and-gas clients. But Sawhney says the company is 'resizing' its U.S. ambitions in the face of potential U.S. trade tariffs. 'The increased uncertainty has not led to order conversions,' he explains, adding that the company might switch to using a local supply chain in the U.S. to make turbines stateside if tariffs are onerous. The U.S. unit contributed less than 1% to revenue in fiscal 2025. The company specializes in turbines of up to 100 megawatts (MW), producing 300 to 350 machines a year at its two factories in Bangalore. Courtesy of Triveni Turbine The ability to pivot may be part of Sawhney's DNA. His great-grandfather founded a sugar-making business in 1932, then branched into sugar machinery in 1961 and steam turbines in 1968, which at first were powered by bagasse, the residue from crushing cane stalks. In 1973, Sawhney's father joined the sugar-equipment making and engineering business run by his uncle before merging it with his own father's sugar mills in 2000 to form Triveni Engineering & Industries. The patriarch is largely credited with modernizing the operations. Sawhney and his brother, Tarun, grew up in Delhi, where the main sugar business was headquartered. Like their father, they both went to the elite, all-boys Doon boarding school in Uttarakhand in northern India. Sawhney and his brother also both followed in their father's footsteps by attending Cambridge, where Sawhney earned a master's degree in economics. In 2002 he headed to the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School for an M.B.A. 'There was never any pressure to work in the family business…my dad pushed me and my brother to gain outside exposure,' Sawhney says. He interned at Nomura and Barings during his summers at Cambridge, but after business school he joined the sugar-trading desk at Triveni Engineering before moving in 2007 to its turbines division, which was eventually spun off to form Triveni Turbine. While the buck still stops with his father, Sawhney says he has operational freedom. 'We are very aligned in terms of the larger goals,' he says. So will the next generation be involved in the business too? 'Why not? If I get the grades,' quips Sawhney's only child, 16-year-old Zahan, who's headed to the U.K. for A-level studies. He had accompanied his dad to the Sompura factory in July. 'It would be my hope that he works with the business because he finds it exciting and relevant,' says Sawhney. 'He can take a business that has a legacy and an industrial customer base and make it more relevant to a wider world.' More from Forbes Forbes Forbes Asia's Best Under A Billion 2024 List - Small and Midsized Companies Forbes Maker Of Popular Skin Booster Shot Rejuran Becomes Billionaire On K-Beauty Boom By John Kang Forbes Indonesian Paints Billionaire Uncorks His Bottled Water Ambitions By Gloria Haraito Forbes Thailand's Sappe Accelerates Efforts To Establish Itself As Global Lifestyle Brand By Susan Cunningham
Gizmodo
11 hours ago
- Gizmodo
Lenovo 15.6″ Touchscreen Laptop (8GB RAM, 256GB SSD) Is Such a Steal, You'd Think It's Refurb but It's New
Lenovo is known for making sleek powerhouses, and the IdeaPad lineup is especially good at delivering just that. If you've been thinking about picking one up, now's a solid time. Best Buy is offering the Lenovo 15-inch IdeaPad 1 touchscreen laptop for just $330 – that's $250 off the usual price. This is a more recent version of the IdeaPad 1 line with refreshed internals and some new, smart additions and with a discount this massive, we're definitely calling it a steal. See at Best Buy The laptop flaunts its impressive 15.6-inch full HD touchscreen display featuring an 87% active screen-to-body ratio. Sprinkle in 300 nits of brightness alongside a wider viewing angle with the IPS panel, and you've got yourself a screen that delivers great visuals while also being easy on the eyes, both indoors and outdoors. Streaming, browsing, or multitasking – it holds up well in all use cases. And since you can't really call a laptop powerful without solid internals, Lenovo backs this one up with the AMD Ryzen 5 7520U quad-core processor. It's paired with 8GB of LPDDR5 RAM and a 256GB SSD, enough to handle all your day-to-day work and play. Store and access all your files, media content, and games without a problem. Video calls get better, too. The 720p webcam gives you detailed, clear visuals, while the Smart Noise Cancelling feature minimizes background noise. There's even a privacy shutter because, yes, we take our camera paranoia seriously. Multitaskers getting curious about the battery – good news. The battery is designed to last up to 9 hours, which means an entire day of work. There's support for rapid charge as well, so 15 minutes of charging gets you around 2 hours of use, which is great for those hectic days when you're on the go and don't have time to sit near an outlet for long. Speaking of being out and about, carrying the laptop around won't weigh you down. At just 3.47 pounds, it's a reliable, no-fuss travel companion. IdeaPad 1 runs on the ever user-friendly Windows 11, and supports Copilot. The experience is made even better with Wi-Fi 6, which offers a strong internet connection. There's a lot more to like about the IdeaPad 1. It packs serious power into a slim frame that's easy to carry. This deal brings the price down to just $330, but it might not be around for long. We recommend jumping on it while you can, since we likely won't be seeing another discount this massive before Black Friday. See at Best Buy
Gizmodo
13 hours ago
- Gizmodo
Screw Foldables: Lenovo's Rollable ThinkBook Proves There Are Better Uses for Flexible Screens
With a buzz and a whirl, my laptop begins to unfurl. In less than six seconds after the press of a button, my petit 14-inch ThinkBook stands erect over my desk with a taller 16.7-inch display. There is literally nothing else like Lenovo's ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable, and that's partially why it costs a whopping $3,300. And you know what? There are few things cooler in laptop world than watching your screen expand from its original size. When you're dropping a hefty chunk of change on a laptop of this size, its benefits need to outweigh any tradeoffs. As cool the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable is, when you actually use it, you'll find the joy of having a towering screen is actually one of its more annoying flaws. Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable It's an enormously expensive laptop with a limited gimmick. But, hey, it's the most-usable way to bring a larger screen on the go. Pros Cons Normally, these kinds of 'concept' devices never leave the lab. When they do, companies bring them out for journalists and influencers to fool around with before being whisked off to gadget Elysium. Lenovo deserves credit for being ballsy enough to bring the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable to market. After all, how will we know if something may become a game changer unless we regular folk have a chance to play with it in our plebeian hands? I'd love to encourage innovation, but a rollable device that costs more than two laptops combined needs to meet or beat what's expected from both a 14- or a 16-inch laptop, no matter which way up the screen is facing. At nearly three times the cost of other lightweight laptops, the Rollable ends up feeling weirder and occasionally more limited than a traditional device despite its neat party trick. Despite its unique mechanism, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable houses a similar kind of screen you find on many foldable phones. These flexible displays are way thinner than the ones on other laptops, which means they can twist, bend, or—in this case—spool out several inches from the laptop's main body. There have been multiple attempts at folding laptops, including Lenovo-made devices like the ThinkPad X1 Fold 16. The Rollable feels much more like a traditional laptop—and that's to its benefit. It still functions like a laptop no matter if you're using the 14- or near-17-inch mode. Either way, the OLED panel comes with all the benefits of organic light-emitting diode screens with self-emitting light, including a high color accuracy and deep, inky blacks. The laptop even packs Dolby Vision HDR for better contrast when you're streaming your favorite shows on Netflix or Disney+. Just know the taller screen won't let you watch content much larger than usual in its normal 9:16 aspect ratio. At the office, I prefer to work on widescreen monitors over a longer, portrait-style display. Then again, there are plenty of coders or writers who like to scroll less. There's nothing better than getting to read through an article without needing to jump to the trackpad. It also allows for multiple windows stacked on top of each other. Windows 11 already has a tiling system that makes it easy to put your apps where you want them. For some reason, Lenovo provides yet another tiling app through the device-specific software called ThinkBook Workspace. The app opens automatically when you unfurl the screen. If you use that app's specific tiling feature, it places a black bar between each app, and if you want that screen real estate back, you have to close the app. The ThinkBook Workspace includes a sometimes-handy 'Smart Copy' mode to access all your copy and pastes from your recent clipboard. It takes a little too long to load, considering most browser extensions with the same capabilities are near instantaneous. Workspace is necessary for the Rollable due to some apps not supporting the abnormal aspect ratio. But as I found out, it also gets increasingly annoying the more you interact with it—like a rat-catching feline who tends to leave a furball on your bedspread every night. Even if you would rather do without, Workspace is not something you can easily remove through settings or the Control Panel. I gave up, and just let it be. At first, it felt very strange to go a full workday staring at a laptop screen without any bottom bezel. When rolled out, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable sports wide bezels on top and thinner ones on the bottom. Laptop purists who demand the same size bezels all around may balk at how it looks, but it's the screen that counts most, and what's here looks very, very nice. That's not to say there aren't many strange considerations about the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable you need to take into account. The screen doesn't tilt any further back than around 110 degrees, which—depending on the angle of your body and your sitting position—may not offer the best screen experience. The laptop won't roll out unless it's at least around 90 degrees open. If the screen is rolling and you start to fold the laptop lid, the mechanism will stop and the laptop will scream at you until you tilt it back to the correct position. You can't choose to stop the rolling mechanism while it's going. So while the laptop is technically more versatile than your typical thin and light, you won't be able to use it like you could any laptop with a screen that stays put. The big problem with other foldable laptops is that the need for the hinge and slim body limits the space these devices usually have for larger batteries. Without enough space, laptop makers can't include more powerful processors, RAM, and all the other specs that would push the performance you need on a portable big-screen device. I experienced this lack of performance firsthand on devices like the $5,000 HP Spectre Fold and Lenovo's own $2,500 ThinkPad X1 Fold 16. The end result is a device you don't actually want to use despite being more portable. The ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable doesn't have that problem. It's packing an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V CPU and the integrated Intel Arc 140V graphics. It contains all the expected specs, such as a 1TB SSD, 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM, and a 66Wh battery. The Core Ultra Series 2 chips made their debut last year, and they're still a relatively strong option on small, portable machines. I found the Intel Core Ultra 258V behaved as well as can be expected when the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable was plugged in on performance mode. There's no real performance loss between using the device in a 14-inch or 16-inch mode, at least when it's sucking down power from an outlet. The Intel Core Ultra 258V keeps pace at or just below chips like AMD's AI 7 350 in CPU-heavy tasks with the device firing on all cylinders. For graphics tasks, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable still won't be your laptop of choice even with Intel's built-in Arc 140V GPU. If it's benchmarks you want, the M4 chip found on Apple's MacBooks still wins out. It's when using the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable off battery power that the larger screen added more than a few hiccups. I had positioned two Chrome browsers on top of each other with around a dozen tabs each, and the PC would occasionally glitch, blurring text on the southern part of the screen. Other times, one of the Chrome windows blacked out randomly. The ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable also leads to strange circumstances with some apps. This isn't a laptop meant for gaming, but I decided to load a few on it for kicks. Lightweight games like Hades defaulted to 2,000 x 2,352 resolution and sat in the middle of the 16.7-inch screen. Tactical Breach Wizards maintained the same resolution but extended the display from end-to-end. I don't know how many games support this extra-long aspect ratio, but I've never experienced anything quite like it on a laptop. The latest Intel chips are more efficient than previous-gen ones, though that doesn't mean laptops like the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable are truly all-day devices. Even without running the motors to winch open the screen, I only ever got around 5.5 hours of battery life, at most. Naturally, with the screen unfurled to its full height, the battery will necessarily drain faster than using the 14-inch screen. If I were limiting use and running on battery-saving mode, I could push the device to last a full day's work. But why would I, considering this is a device made for multitasking beyond anything else? Thin and light laptops have been trending thinner and lighter, but when clammed up, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable feels like a device from another time. It slides effortlessly into a backpack's laptop sleeve and you can carry it around with one hand, though not as easily as you may want to thanks to its 3.72 pounds and bulky chassis. What that extra heft implies is that the device is supremely sturdy. There's no keyboard flex to speak of. My palms felt like they were rising on a bed made of inch-thick aluminum. That build quality also translates to other parts of the device, though I can't speak for how long the display's motors or flexible screen will last long term with constant scrolling, daily. It survived more than a week's worth of back and forth to the office, but I can't say what will happen in several months' time. If you're spending over $3,000 on a laptop, you want it to be top of the line in every other way than just the screen. It's a good thing the keyboard offers a smooth and responsive typing experience. The haptic trackpad has a similar high-quality responsiveness, where every click has the same satisfying feeling of popping bubble wrap. The design seems copied straight from Lenovo's Chromebook Plus 14 that I reviewed last month—and yes, that's a good thing. It's the kind of low-profile keyboard and trackpad I could tap all day long. For its size, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable is packing hefty speakers. The twin Harman Kardon speakers blast sound out both the left and right sides of the laptop. It's not enough to fill a room or shudder your bowels with extreme bass, but they can get relatively loud. The audio on the average Netflix movie sounds clear enough that I wasn't immediately reaching for a pair of quality earbuds or headphones. Even with an extended display, I still felt the need to connect an external monitor whether I was working in the office or at home. In this kind of setup, the 16.7-inch screen is a godsend for a writer like me. At the same time, the Rollable is only packing a pair of Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports on the left side of the device. You'll end up needing a port dock close at hand. Considering its thick size, you would expect to find an HDMI port or more I/O, but the Rollable's thicker body is made to house the rolling screen apparatus. Companies keep trying to find ways to make laptop screens bigger without expanding the size of the laptop itself. We've seen and tested our fair share of multi-display bolt-ons, like the Xebec Snap, the Aura Triple Laptop Display, or Lenovo's separate clip-on concept monitor. When you lay out the long line of failures, Lenovo's ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable is the best attempt at extended screens yet. If it weren't for the annoying software and compatibility issues, I would be left with a black hole where the money in my wallet used to be. The only thing that could fill that hole would be the tenuous sense of optimism that the screen or rolling mechanism would continue working for months or years down the road. I could only keep that upbeat attitude going for so long. The thought of my $3,300 laptop breaking is enough to have me roll up on my back with my legs and arms as erect as the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable, like a cockroach about to croak.
