It's Been Three Years Since Valve Announced SteamOS, Steam Machines

[mcloud]

Last time I checked, couldn't buy the controller for my country (Brazil)

[ElectricPrism]

Every time I see a Valve thread on Phoenix I enter and see walls of text summed up in "The Sky Is Falling! The Sky Is Falling!"

"Valve shouldn't have done A, Valve should have done B. Why am I the only smart person who gets it?"

The end is not neigh. We have Steam Machines, Steam Controller, 2,500 games, Vulkan is solidified, MESA is starting to deathball if you use a AMD GPU.

Did excited Linux Gamers really expect to go to sleep and wake up to 10,000 games and instant victory? The gamer's expectation exceeded Valve's market strategy, and disappointment has lead to b1tching, whining, and complaining that gamers disagree with their market strategy.

I don't know if the average reader has considered it or not - but perhaps valve has a market strategy which require's that they hold back a little while before executing a all out assault on Windows, PS4 and XBONE.

We're talking about Valve - the company that has managed to make their income double every year consecutively for the last like 5+ years. People who are brilliant at marketing. I for one think that Valve is intelligent enough to know that a all out assault 6 months ago or 1 year ago would have been futile and lead to a permanent bad reputation.

I predict that once SteamOS gets 50-60% of Windows games that they'll begin to push harder. I mean this is arm wrestling - you don't exert all your energy to the kill until you can get a 55-65% lead in a 0 - 180 degree radius.

[jacob]

Hopefully the GoG client will be available for Linux soon.

You don't need a client for GoG, you can buy and download your games directly from the website.

[dungeon]

I was hoping for SteamOS gaming to take off, but it's still complete and utter shit.

I need to configure my settings to my liking. Like enabling SGSAA for older games (or other forms of anti-aliasing), using DSR, setting a frame limiter to reduce input lag, use injectors for SMAA or shader enhancements (like SweetFX or ENB), enable FastSync for games that run at 200+ FPS, using Dolby Headphone with my sound card, use different screen refresh rates for different games, use adaptive vsync, or 1/2 and 1/3 vsync.

And probably a gazillion other things I forgot.

Linux gaming is still a joke to me :-/

What all that has to do with SteamOS ... you seems just lacking community maded GUI tools for more advanced control of a driver, tools like nVidia Inspector or RadeonPro on Linux

[boltronics]

In Australia, SteamOS is non-existent. You can't buy any of the hardware (boxes, controllers, etc.) via Steam. All you get is a "Coming Soon" message. Likewise, you can't walk into an EB games store and see anything SteamOS-related. At best, you might find some retail software boxes in the PC gaming section that require Steam for activation and have a "Linux requirements" on the back of the box in tiny writing.

Having said that, GNU/Linux gaming might well be doing fine here - but I suspect only for those who would build their own computer. Every off-the-shelf computer is going to have Windows on it, and most people are not going to buy and off-the-shelf gaming computer and replace the OS. I can't see that happening. People have to plan their builds to be GNU/Linux gaming ready, so they would likely build a machine accordingly. I don't know if anyone is building their own boxes to run SteamOS... I hear people who have tried a custom SteamOS setup have ran into issues with updates breaking things and needing a keyboard and shell to get things going again. Hardly seems worth it. Steam should not have let that happen.

I can't see SteamOS ever really taking off if it's only going to be pushed to the USA and maybe a couple of other countries. Having said that, I don't think it matters. I think more people are looking for an alternative to gaming on Windows than mainstream game consoles, and Steam on GNU/Linux solves that very well.

[Nille]

Sure, but D3D is no hobby project for MS either,

And its not only for games and its only a small part in Windows. And D3D is not the reason for a Developer or a company to focus on Windows. In the past we also have games that uses only OpenGL but they are only available on windows.

[monohouse]

RealNC, SweetFX/ENB/ReShade can be done in WINE by setting the DX DLL's to native mode, I tested it and it works it's also possible to improve compatibility, stability and performance of WINE by using wine-nine with Mesa-nine, implied is the use of an AMD card, but try to avoid wine-staging and CSMT as it can cause stability and performance problems (on more than one occasion CSMT causes SLOWER performance), with wine-nine enabling DRI 3 in the X driver can help gain a little performance with that being said Linux gaming is still a joke, we are now in the dark ages of computing (things like windows 7-10 spyware edition) and with that come the dark ages of gaming (forced online modes, DRM, shitty console ports) but since Linux is still not ready to play games I game on windows XP (x64)

[monohouse]

Linux missed the train, it wasn't ready in time for the good games only now is it starting to be ready for the new games but the new games are shit

[dungeon]

At least we advanced much in last 30+ years

[johnc]

I don't know if the average reader has considered it or not - but perhaps valve has a market strategy which require's that they hold back a little while before executing a all out assault on Windows, PS4 and XBONE.

I predict that once SteamOS gets 50-60% of Windows games that they'll begin to push harder. I mean this is arm wrestling - you don't exert all your energy to the kill until you can get a 55-65% lead in a 0 - 180 degree radius.

Keep hope alive, man. Just like all those people who still think Valve is diligently working on HL3 and its release is right around the corner. There's some grand strategy at play and we just don't know it.

The fact is... Valve sucks at communication. That involves both talking and listening. They have to be one of the worst communicators in the tech industry. So what you're saying is complete speculation based on hope. But if we look at their actual actions, we can see plainly that they have pretty much abandoned the project. They stopped taking bug reports seriously many, many years ago. SteamOS is just Debian with the Steam client pre-installed; nothing interesting really came of it. And their Steam Machines "release" was universally regarded as a complete joke. And now Steam Machines don't even get a mention on the Steam Dev Days agenda, and SteamOS is relegated to a fourth-in-list OS.

It'll be interesting to compare the attendance numbers at Steam Dev Days next month against what they had in 2014.