Did Valve already get what they wanted from SteamOS? i.e. Win kernel + BigPicture DE

[mwpow3ll]

It was supposed to be a bridge from Windows to Linux for people who were big gamers. Unfortunately gaming on Linux will never become a big thing, and if you suggest otherwise, look at what's happened since the beginning and how after 20 years Linux still is not good for gaming (in the sense that the availability of games is minimal at best, and Wine is not an acceptable solution to that problem). Now, there is a very specific reason and that is that it was not made for gaming. In addition, the people who are pro-Linux are anti-DRM, and you simply cannot have an ecosystem on computers where things like games are done entirely open source. Games are very expensive to make, and with little (generally negative) money to be made there is no point in doing it. Additionally, developing a game open source is cool for novelty purposes, but it will never take off and become massive (see: LoL, Dota2, etc where they've filled football stadiums). Granted, you can play those games on Linux if you try really hard, but my point is that a lot of reason is due to DRM and how many people are against it, when they just don't understand that you can't have an efficient ecosystem for certain things, particularly media (which gaming is one of) without it. Do not dare reference Nexiuz or whatever it is called now. It has some cool graphics, but it is NOT fun for me to play, I would much prefer to turn on my console and play video games on that.

Now, a little tangent but who really cares. Gaming in the sense that people are stuck on is not going to ever improve on Linux, so why start? The FPS's of the 90s are exactly what they sound like, old. Gaming is evolving from meaning those to meaning things like farmville or what have you, and if those were done on the web it would mean that it would work perfectly on Linux, as Google Chrome has by and large the best support for WebGL and the like (Firefox is bad at that, it didn't even support websockets in web workers until VERY recently, which to this say is dubious at best https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=504553, and that support is crucial for games) and Chrome / Chromium is readily available for Linux.

So, we should instead focus on a distro that is extremely easy to use for general consumers who give NO fucks about what us enthusiasts or activists (whichever you or I may be) care about and just want a computer that works that they never have to touch, and a computer that if it breaks they can take it into a shop where someone who cares a lot more about that sort of thing can fix it for them. I believe ElementaryOS has that potential, and ultimately I think it is the bridge from consumer OS's to Linux. If they want to run a game, they can load up Google Chrome that's right in the dock in the bottom of their screen and get going. If they want to change their display settings, they open the settings menu and it's right there. No editing text files, no using terminal.

Full disclaimer: I am a former Linux user turned Mac user due to taking UI design classes and no distributions offering actually good UIs for my preference. ElementaryOS is great but it's not my personal cup of tea.

Uh... you need only to look at the mobile gaming market to see how wrong you are...

[Jedibeeftrix]

Maybe squirrl is trolling here? Dunno.

Most gamers I know would never buy a gaming PC in a store. The hardware is always out of date and last generation and overpriced too. Buy online or build your own.

There are great games coming that will only crawl on consoles. Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen are what I'm looking at. MMO games are also PC only and very popular. There's also hardware like the Oculus Rift and other things that only support PC. When it shows up on console it tends to be way overpriced and only good for one game.

As a programmer my dream PC is either a super-powerful desktop workstation or a very mobile laptop. A tablet is ridiculous. Believe me. I've tried using a SSH shell off an ASUS Transformer and the experience is sub-par. I do like big displays and have a 50" 4K on my home desktop. But running off a tablet with no multitasking and only one app running? Who works like that?

And if you put a multitasking OS on a tablet and attach a keyboard it becomes just another laptop.

very much agreed.

i have a powerful gaming desktop with three 24" monitors, and i have a samsung ultrabook (series9).

i did have a 7" tablet back in the day, but by the time a got a 5" phone i wasn't even reading on it anymore.

Game, write, read, there isn't a use-case for large-screen tablets that don't do much useful.

[leech]

Full disclaimer: I am a former Linux user turned Mac user due to taking UI design classes and no distributions offering actually good UIs for my preference. ElementaryOS is great but it's not my personal cup of tea.

Mac OS X's UI is utter shit. It looks pretty, but the functionality just blows. I had to configure mine to be more Gnome-Like to make it usable for me. Though I definitely see in the lay out of things that Gnome-Shell seems to try to copy it, it's just Gnome-shell seems far more usable to me.

Plus, oddly enough, Debian Jessie running in VMware seems to be much quicker than the Host OS on my Macbook Pro.

[Luke]

Steam surely planned to bring their own users

It was supposed to be a bridge from Windows to Linux for people who were big gamers. Unfortunately gaming on Linux will never become a big thing, and if you suggest otherwise, look at what's happened since the beginning and how after 20 years Linux still is not good for gaming (in the sense that the availability of games is minimal at best, and Wine is not an acceptable solution to that problem). Now, there is a very specific reason and that is that it was not made for gaming. In addition, the people who are pro-Linux are anti-DRM, and you simply cannot have an ecosystem on computers where things like games are done entirely open source. Games are very expensive to make, and with little (generally negative) money to be made there is no point in doing it. Additionally, developing a game open source is cool for novelty purposes, but it will never take off and become massive (see: LoL, Dota2, etc where they've filled football stadiums). Granted, you can play those games on Linux if you try really hard, but my point is that a lot of reason is due to DRM and how many people are against it, when they just don't understand that you can't have an efficient ecosystem for certain things, particularly media (which gaming is one of) without it. Do not dare reference Nexiuz or whatever it is called now. It has some cool graphics, but it is NOT fun for me to play, I would much prefer to turn on my console and play video games on that.

Now, a little tangent but who really cares. Gaming in the sense that people are stuck on is not going to ever improve on Linux, so why start? The FPS's of the 90s are exactly what they sound like, old. Gaming is evolving from meaning those to meaning things like farmville or what have you, and if those were done on the web it would mean that it would work perfectly on Linux, as Google Chrome has by and large the best support for WebGL and the like (Firefox is bad at that, it didn't even support websockets in web workers until VERY recently, which to this say is dubious at best https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=504553, and that support is crucial for games) and Chrome / Chromium is readily available for Linux.

So, we should instead focus on a distro that is extremely easy to use for general consumers who give NO fucks about what us enthusiasts or activists (whichever you or I may be) care about and just want a computer that works that they never have to touch, and a computer that if it breaks they can take it into a shop where someone who cares a lot more about that sort of thing can fix it for them. I believe ElementaryOS has that potential, and ultimately I think it is the bridge from consumer OS's to Linux. If they want to run a game, they can load up Google Chrome that's right in the dock in the bottom of their screen and get going. If they want to change their display settings, they open the settings menu and it's right there. No editing text files, no using terminal.

Full disclaimer: I am a former Linux user turned Mac user due to taking UI design classes and no distributions offering actually good UIs for my preference. ElementaryOS is great but it's not my personal cup of tea.

Surely Valve/Steam knew damned well that DRM would not be allowed into the kernel or the drivers on Linux, and also that lots of Linux users like myself ignore all paid software. They also planned to bring their own users and their own programs. So long as they accept that the mainline kernel and video drivers will never stop allowing capture of audio and video outputs, and never compromise on being able to copy any file in the filesystem this is not a big deal. Browsers and game clients can have userspace DRM extensions, we can simply choose not to install them. Hackers capable of driver-level attacks will easily bypass their non-system DRM but that is nothing new anyway.

Windows offers system-level DRM, but those who wanted to turn the PC into a cable box also wanted to become the cable COMPANY via the Windows Store. Valve ported some "expendable" games to Linus because they too were threatened by those who admire a closed platform. This whole episode is evidence to me that Microsoft had in fact hoped to lock the (skipped) Windows 9 to the Windows store. This as well as their UI and locked bootloaders blew up so badly that MS jumped right to Windows 10 and their store is drifting aside. Not since IBM tried to close down the PS architectiure with the PS/2 and the MCA bus have I seen this level of blowback and failure of an attempt to close down the platform. Without Linux, Valve would have had no ammunition for their shot across Microsoft's bow, as MS could have said "what choice do you have?"

One option for the AAA programmers might be this: release first for Windows, then release the Linux version when the game shows up on torrents and there is nothing left for the DRM to protect. Or, just not spend so much fucking money on their games. As for me, the true FOSS games like 0ad, Criticalmass, and Scorched3d are plenty good enough, and they don't require hundreds of watts worth of video cards to play at 1080p either.

Disclaimer: I too was dissatisfied with every DE out there, liking Cinnamon and gnome-shell for their looks but with issues using gnome 3's default interface and offended by the "page's law" ridden GNOME 3 code base. It has taken me three months of playing with GTK themes and cairo-dock to essentially duplicate my old Cinnamon/legacy UbuntuStudio themed desktop on MATE, simply to get onto a lighter, faster, true compiled codebase. Been worth every second, and in a sense the most interesting "computer game" I have played this whole year.

[Svartalf]

Yeah, I have to agree. Big Picture running on Windows pulls the rug from under SteamOS's feet: much bigger games catalog, less half-assed ports and better hardware support (drivers).

And let's be honest, gamers don't give a damn about the stuf running underneath.

Thing is...doesn't seem that anyone's selling or even half-heartedly trying to sell the Alienware boxes. Do also remember that Dell's been one of Microsoft's darlings- they've made motions over time for Linux support, but they've always used it to cudgel Microsoft into things they weren't willing to do for Dell. Alienware's Dell's baby. I view much of this as being slightly suspect, truthfully. I'd not heard that Alienware was going to be selling a SteamBox until I saw the powered off thing sitting at Fry's with a G510s keyboard attached to it a couple of months back. Was tickled to see what was purportedly a SteamBox- disappointed to not see it running and to find out it's a Windows PC that's little different than any other box on the market other than it's all fixed like any other All-in-One, but you get the pleasure of attaching it to your TV, etc. Didn't strike me as being in keeping even remotely with what Gabe was pushing for.

It doesn't help, considering the claims they originally made, that you can't just "make" a SteamBox out of a pile of parts right at the moment. Much bigger games catalog doesn't mean much if you can't effectively use it with the 10' UI and use rules that the other Consoles use. Better driver support is actually rather debatable. I worked for one of the Big Two. Sorry...they don't work much better. They've got more kludges to side-step poorly written games in the Windows world driver set. I know, I helped triage the stuff so they could actually DO that. Saying that they don't do it...heh...skip it. All of the Big Two does this. Intel, if you'll remember has a bunch of the same kinds of problems with their code. It's just better hidden on Windows.

[Kano]

Don't you think that W 10 and also Stream's future will be streaming? Right now in your LAN from Xbox One or your fast gaming box to a simple client. Then you could use Android TV/tablets as well...

[nanonyme]

Don't you think that W 10 and also Stream's future will be streaming? Right now in your LAN from Xbox One or your fast gaming box to a simple client. Then you could use Android TV/tablets as well...

As I said before, I think the future of W10 is xbox will run a crippled version of Windows 10 so you can't escape the application that provides the console look&feel into a desktop system. Architecturally they will most likely end up being identical so Microsoft can make less operating systems.

[Rich Oliver]

Closed source containers Apps seem to be the way to go to me. As already pointed out big games need to be closed source. There's no way you could do GTA V as an open source project. Personally I don't play GTA V, so I'm not looking for open source alternatives to the big adrenaline games. But normally when you mention some closed source triple AAA title, someone will point out an open source alternative. Even if it was as good, which it probably isn't, it would still be irrelevant because it doesn't matter how good a game is if no one is playing it. Marketing is one of the things you have to pay for if you want a big successful game.

For me open source is like driving. I don't mind driving a proprietary car, but I don't want to drive on proprietary roads. I don't want General motors, Renault or Nissan owning the roads and laying down the law for their own petty ends. The same with opensource, the key thing is to have an open source operating system. The open source community has put a lot of effort into making open source software to run on closed source operating systems. Wouldn't it be better to put the effort into enabling people to build closed source software on top of an opensource operating system?

Containers seem to offer a good compromise allowing the app developer to protect his/ her software development investment and allowing the user to protect their operating system.

[Svartalf]

Containers seem to offer a good compromise allowing the app developer to protect his/ her software development investment and allowing the user to protect their operating system.

Unless the container tech can provide performant access to GPU, input devices, and sound devices, it's not going to work very well. It's not like a server chunk that you can plunk into Docker, after all.

Having said that...I don't know if any of the people doing work in this space actually have thought in those terms yet. If they have, then yeah, that's one of those good things to have in hand- it'd allow you to make a single title that plunks onto any of the given consoles as needed with minimal efforts to target several of them at the same time. I just don't think we're there yet.

[log0]

Closed source containers Apps seem to be the way to go to me. As already pointed out big games need to be closed source. There's no way you could do GTA V as an open source project. Personally I don't play GTA V, so I'm not looking for open source alternatives to the big adrenaline games. But normally when you mention some closed source triple AAA title, someone will point out an open source alternative. Even if it was as good, which it probably isn't, it would still be irrelevant because it doesn't matter how good a game is if no one is playing it. Marketing is one of the things you have to pay for if you want a big successful game.

For me open source is like driving. I don't mind driving a proprietary car, but I don't want to drive on proprietary roads. I don't want General motors, Renault or Nissan owning the roads and laying down the law for their own petty ends. The same with opensource, the key thing is to have an open source operating system. The open source community has put a lot of effort into making open source software to run on closed source operating systems. Wouldn't it be better to put the effort into enabling people to build closed source software on top of an opensource operating system?

Containers seem to offer a good compromise allowing the app developer to protect his/ her software development investment and allowing the user to protect their operating system.

Look at Unreal Engine 4. It is quasi (for devs only sadly) open source. Just separate the engine from the actual game, that is all I personally would be asking for. Sell the game content (dlc style), nobody is asking for it to be open source.