Just read a little something I liked. Source: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/128065-Valve-Reveals-SteamOS Well, id say this sounds pretty good as far as SteamOS being an open platform. Im actually excited about this at this point. I mean, its free, I have a bunch Of unused P4 machines, you can be sure I will use one to test this out.
Rather excited about this. Particularly the streaming part. If that works well enough to run games from my desktop on my HTPC I'll be very pleased!
Valve certainly wants to innovate. With a tiny PC/Console that has power equal if not greater than PS4/X1, And a price in the $300 range? I might even hold off on both consoles until 2015...plus, games like Routine & The Forest look incredible and will be available on Steam and are compatible with Oculus Rift
wine but even with that yeah some just dont work, Linux is good for DOS games also with dosbox. also there's no reason not to have both if you want wither it's different partitions or even different drives
The way they let it out in the news is that the Streaming system will work for pretty much anything, not just "steam powered games". But hey, I'll be skeptical about this one until I see it works.
Don't see the need for this, the Steam client on Windows is just fine - I can't see myself installing ANOTHER OS just for Steam...Again :|
No reason? Here's one: simplicity. I already have 2 boot partitions (4 partitions total) on my PC - I don't want to make it any more complicated. Plus, I'm using an SSD, so I have limited space. I'm running out of space on my Windows partition as it is. I'm probably going to install another drive soon, but I'm still going to need as much space as possible for my Windows partition.
If I were to install all the OS variants I want to try, then I'd need either 10 dedicated drives or a big ass drive with 10 partitions...
Meh, streaming for Windows games? No thanks. Give me good Nvidia driver support and the ability to force things like SGSSAA and maybe i'll build a 2nd HTPC for SteamOS. Otherwise meh.
personal preference really, sounds like your current setup isn't adequate as it is, also it sounds like this(SteamOS) is designed and intended to be used as a system hooked up to a tv and not as a main PC, the idea is to stream content from your main system to a second one hooked up to your TV(and have local content of course) to use on your big screen with a controller. and with Drives being swappable / easily added eg USB or SATA , it seems pretty simple to me. Nothing needs to screw with your current setup and if you're planning on adding a new drive anyway...? either way the OS clearly isn’t for everyone. but the only reason not to try it is really not wanting to.
I have at least a Dozen unused 2Ghz+ Pentium 4 machines I got from the garbage. This is perfect to try something like this, and this will be a good test to see how light the system is.
Give me better nvidia driver support for linux and more developers jumping on the Steam Linux bandwagon and job done as far as I'm concerned. I do hope they don't force installation of this OS on existing Linux users, like "This game requires features only available in Steam OS or Windows" for whatever reason.
can't see that happening, what i can see happening is it popping up with a warning "some features only available in big picture mode or steam os" alienating users so early into OS adoption is not a good move, still we'll have to wait and see what it's going to turn out like. I don't expect a fully polished product for the initial release. but at base it'll be a linux os, so shouldn't be any major headaches(he says inviting all hell)
Chiming in a bit late here, but I'd like to see this have some sort of console/PC hybrid system- as in when running a full screen app (a game) you have the option to "sleep" the background OS so as to free up a lot of system resources. I've been toying with that idea for a while now, but I'm just not that good of a programmer to make.
You can't really sleep an OS as that's what your graphics / sound / input and other various hooks run through. All you can do is try to reduce the amount of background crap taking up memory/CPU and optimize use of available memory/CPU. Steam OS's main purpose will be to do just this. Cut away all the crap that usually runs in the background so you're left with a pure gaming OS much like PS3 or Xbox operating systems. A light OS takes up less resources so there's more horsepower available to developers. Only you'll have the option to customize it yourself (add or remove software/hooks) unlike console OSs which are locked from changes that aren't sanctioned by the company who created the device. On paper it's pretty much the holy grail of gaming. Commercial games on a stripped down, user controlled open OS, simple enough on the surface so that a 6 year old could use it, yet so customizable underneath that the raging nerd in you can get to work optimizing the 'engine room' further if needed.
