http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/SteamOS/ Steam is coming to a new operating system As we’ve been working on bringing Steam to the living room, we’ve come to the conclusion that the environment best suited to delivering value to customers is an operating system built around Steam itself. SteamOS combines the rock-solid architecture of Linux with a gaming experience built for the big screen. It will be available soon as a free stand-alone operating system for living room machines. Four new Steam features focused on the living room. Available soon in both SteamOS and the Steam client. - In-home Streaming You can play all your Windows and Mac games on your SteamOS machine, too. Just turn on your existing computer and run Steam as you always have - then your SteamOS machine can stream those games over your home network straight to your TV! - Music, TV, Movies We’re working with many of the media services you know and love. Soon we will begin bringing them online, allowing you to access your favorite music and video with Steam and SteamOS. - Family Sharing In the past, sharing Steam games with your family members was hard. Now you can share the games you love with the people you love. Family Sharing allows you to take turns playing one another’s games while earning your own Steam achievements and saving your individual game progress to the Steam cloud. - Family Options The living-room is family territory. That’s great, but you don’t want to see your parents’ games in your library. Soon, families will have more control over what titles get seen by whom, and more features to allow everyone in the house to get the most out of their Steam libraries. ----- They're really pushing forward. I can imagine HTPC's and MiniPCs becoming commom after this gets released.
This looks very promising but if it's a custom version of Linux it would mean that only games ported to Linux would be playable on SteamOS. The game streaming feature also looks nice but of course if it adds any kind of latency I would never consider using this feature. In the end I would say that while it looks great, I think that the Nvidia Shield is still a better option for PC gamers that want to "expand" their PC gaming experience. But ultimately, if SteamOS becomes popular and every game work natively on it, I wouldn't be surprised if we all switched to a PC-console "hybrid" running off this OS.
Oh I really hope this blasts the Linux side of steam wide open now (more games / support). God I hope so... I had a feeling they'd pull something like this, I'm sure there was a meeting discussing Ubuntu and other distros and someone just said "fuck it, let's make our own OS, make games available to all linux distros and tell them if they're having problems, just install our OS and quit bitching." I'm hoping this does bolster support for Linux in general (the big distros at least) as I can't really be arsed having yet another partition with another distro on there.
praise gaben Really though, I would rather have things like this than half life 3. I finally have a reason besides Windows sucking to get Linux.
Not me. I would rather have Half Life 3 than a million Steam OSes. The concept is interesting, but it seems pointless when you consider that there's still a large number of Steam games that are only available on Windows. If they could somehow magically port all of those games to Linux, then maybe it would make sense. I also wonder how DirectX 11 games would be ported to Linux - does OpenGL have all the same features now?
Seems like they're making the effort, though I know not all games are going to make it (hopefully they're not just referring to the titles already ported to Linux). Also, I'm assuming there's more to this considering that there's still two announcements for this week, and leaving it at another operating system that plays games would be a terrible idea. Also, about the Half Life 3 thing. I would love Half Life 3 as well, but in the end Half Life 3 is just a game, no matter how great it is. Things like Steam OS and Valve's push towards Linux are possibilities of a better future for pc gaming. I say possibilities because it's a little early to make predictions, and this still could be a pointless move from Valve. That's just my take on it.
I never liked Valve and Steam but the fact that they are pushing Linux is making me change my mind. It may appear pointless to some, but not to those who love linux. And the fact is that Valve want to push Linux. By doing this I think they are possibly doing it in the best way possible. They know the game base is windows based, that cannot be avoided or changed. So they are developing this streaming thing that might turn out to work fairly well, we shall see. The whole thing could be an interesting alternative to windows for gamers and thanks to valve popularity with both gamers and developpers, in the longer run this might greatly contribute to more games running native on Linux. I am sure Microsoft are grinding their teeth at this news.
I don't think Valve want to "push Linux", I think what they want is a captive market. If your gaming device ONLY runs Steam, then you can't buy games from Origin/Impulse/etc. I firmly believe that the fact it's Linux-based is purely because they don't need to pay for it, and not for any philosophical reasons. Gaben has been vocal about how much he dislikes Windows 8, but ultimately he's there to make money. Valve ain't no charity, after all! Mildly irritated, probably. They'll still sell a shitload of Xbox Ones, and most of their money comes from the corporate space.
No, this is aimed at HTPC/TV setups. Think "console replacement", not PC. I guess it'll also be able to run "desktop stuff", but then again, you can technically do that on Android phones, but have you ever seen someone doing it?
Well I suppose that depends on How closed/open Steam OS is going to be. If it is Highly controlled and restricted then your explanation would make sense, but given that Linux has a tradition of openness, I dont see what would prevent said competitors to also make a Linux/Steam Os compatible version of their software. Anyway, this news sure got me interested! While this is certainly not an immediate danger to Microsoft, Linux based systems are pretty much the biggest menace to M$'s monopoly on end-user PC desktop OS. While Linux user base is still very small, it has been steadily growing over the years. Moves like this is yet another step in the direction of creating an alternative to Windows, and they can't like it. Someone from Microsoft ( I dont remember who) during an interview said " We prefer seeing people pirating windows than seeing them use Linux". I thought this was pretty funny but goes to show that they do not take the potential "linux menace" too lightly.
In Gabe's Linux talk last week he mentioned that part of the reason Valve wants to use Linux is to keep things open, and Valve already has a vast history of that anyways. Edit: Although, I still don't think MS cares that much about this. Their gaming market is probably more with xbox, and people use windows for reasons besides gaming. I'm pretty sure Steam OS is headed more towards being a console anyways (steambox). Just because it runs most games doesn't mean it will replace windows. But yea, I can't say they're too happy about this.
I doesn't need to totally prevent competing services from being installed, it just needs to be a slight pain and nobody will bother. I get that people like Linux, I use it on my home server and my VPS, but I still think that if SteamOS and SteamBox are successful, it will be in spite of its Linux core, and not because of it, in much the same way that Android is successful. I don't see SteamOS as an alternative to Windows. It's an appliance like OpenELEC or pfSense. Sure you could use it as an ordinary desktop OS, but you wouldn't.
I am thinking long therm here. SteamOS certainly wont be an alternative to windows, and I never said such a thing. ( edit: actually I did but i did not mean it in "that" way. I meant for a computer based set top box setup for PC gamers, who otherwise would have no choice but to use a Windows + shell setup.) But something like SteamOS can help open the door a little more to let Linux into people's home. This adds up to many other little things that are slowly pushing linux closer to the mainstream market. That was my point. But once again, the effect SteamOS could have will ultimately depend on how SteamOS turns out to be. If it is highly self contained like Android on phones, the linux aspect wont be as much relevant. I mean, I am sure lots of people do not even know Android is Linux based, nor do they care. But then, unlike android, this is designed to work on standard home computer Hardware and should probably be open source so we might see lots of "mods" done to it.
Yeah, I got that, but I still disagree. I think the fact it has Linux underneath it will turn out to be incidental, like its presence under Android. Of course this is all speculation, since none of us has actually seen it! The current Linux Steam client is closed source, I wouldn't expect the actual Valve-developed components of SteamOS to be any different. I also wouldn't expect the Linux-ness to be "on show" here, they're selling a living room experience appliance, not a nerdy hacker toy like Ouya.
I don't know. I'm on the fence about this. I have been dabbling in Linux territory with Android devices and XDSL on my Xbox but I'll stick with Windows for the moment.
As a Linux gamer currently, this is rather exciting news. Valve's already contributed things in their Linux push, and hopefully this continues that trend.
I'll say this: if this really got wide support from Valve and other developers, then it might actually be worth it to use SteamOS instead of Windows - since all I use Windows for these days is games. But I predict that there will always be games that will not be ported to it, such as older PC games that aren't even on Steam. For that reason, I'm hesitant to use it. Windows, for all its flaws, is actually really good for games.
