Valve Confirms Linux Steam Box Will Be Open Platform

[Hamish Wilson]

I would ask you to name a single tyrant who did not have his advocates.

Not the same thing at all - advocacy in of itself does not impose anything on anybody. Power does. So arguing for something that lessens power as being tyranical I will always find rather amusing.

[Larian]

And considering advocacy to be the same as tyrany is a very rich conceit.

I would ask you to name a single tyrant who did not have his advocates.

[Hamish Wilson]

Exactly. And then, as valve posts statistics, we'll know exactly what percentage of linux users is sane and what percentage is insane.

As someone who wants easy maintainability and proper system integration, the free drivers are most definitely the sanest choice. And I game with them a lot to.

What crawled in your ass and died BO$$?

That being said, I doubt anyone will really care if a Steambox is going to use blob or free drivers, considering Steam itself is locked down and proprietary already.

Is it really that hard to accept that we won't be getting anything open sourced from either AMD or Nvidia for the time being? Not everything needs to be open source. And I find the idea of imposing open source no different from the tyrant that you say is closed source.

I am using free drivers developed in cooperation with AMD, so I do not find this concept hard to accept. And considering advocacy to be the same as tyrany is a very rich conceit.

[artivision]

Exactly. And then, as valve posts statistics, we'll know exactly what percentage of linux users is sane and what percentage is insane.

Sanity is to understand why Linux is better, safer and its the future, and that's because its open source. Sanity is when you understand that "right" (as we say human right - free access to knowledge) has its own freedom. That your democratic right (to chose where Linux must go, for example) doesn't exist (read GPL), before a universal truth that ether you accept it or not its there (truths are more than people and one of them embraces all). You cannot enforce things (like a poverty system) even if you are the overwhelming majority. That doesn't mean that you will just stay with philosophy, you will take action. If you want open graphics drivers then buy Intel or use their work for another closed GPU. If you don't like that games run only on windows then produce Wine code, they are at need for their new LLVM-based HLSL compiler. And goes on until we replace every closed thing. If we see closed drivers, they probably fail (if we are really sane).

[crazycheese]

The obvious choice would be to ship with Nvidia hardware and their official drivers. Those who dislike this can switch the driver and/or hardware as they please. Valve is not going to lock it down. Those who choose to suffer with the open drivers are free to do it

Its called reporting bugs and not "suffering". It goes this way:
Bug->Report->Fix->Improvement

Next time one uses open driver, there is no "suffering" anymore.

[efikkan]

What about the graphics drivers? They surely can't ship with the open source versions. Hahaha it's gonna be so amusing hearing all the linux zealots calling valve names that they didn't choose their wonderfully fantastic open source drivers. In linux apparently the only people thinking are the ones that try to make money out of it. I'd love to hear what the open source commies have to say about this.

The obvious choice would be to ship with Nvidia hardware and their official drivers. Those who dislike this can switch the driver and/or hardware as they please. Valve is not going to lock it down. Those who choose to suffer with the open drivers are free to do it

[efikkan]

I wonder if it's gonna be using X.org, Wayland or something else.

The first iteration of Steam boxes will most certainly user X.org, Wayland is not going to be ready in time.

[mark45]

I wonder if it's gonna be using X.org, Wayland or something else.

[newwen]

This sounds very good. They are also considering a high precision low-latency controller, which involves making Linux drivers for a non HID-device
I seriously hope they select a low-latency kernel to go along with it, which would also help for a smoother framerate.

What about integrating the Brain Fuck Scheduler from Con Kolivas?

[efikkan]

This sounds very good. They are also considering a high precision low-latency controller, which involves making Linux drivers for a non HID-device
I seriously hope they select a low-latency kernel to go along with it, which would also help for a smoother framerate.