Valve Confirms Linux Steam Box Will Be Open Platform

[Nille]

The obvious choice would be to ship with Nvidia hardware and their official drivers.

The Xi3 ppl using AMDs APUs

[adriankx]

i for one have nothing against closed briver, but sometimes can bite in the ass. i have a thinkpade edge13amd with hd3200 and run fedora 18 my card is not officially supported for some time now and amd official drivers were always buggy as hell on my harware. so i am gratefull that an OSS free alternative exists it surely doest have many features but since i mostly game on my big pc i hardly have to dual boot to play a stupid mmorpg. I own an nvdia 8400gs card too and i have to say works wonderfull on *buntus with official nvidia drivers. But when i`ll change my laptop in the future i will definatly go with intel an haswell couse the big bad monopolistic giant is trying to support open source very well. PS i am not a gamer i only play crappy mmorpgs and those games dont ask much resources so in my opinion even the curent intel GPUs can do most things average joe need, ofc heavy gamers dont even use an integrated gpu. Best wishes to all and excuse my poor english its not my native language

[przemoli]

The drivers picked up will be those which HW Valve will choose to put in that minibox and on the date they will choose to do it. And it will also be about CPU choosen.

They can choose Nvidia and their proprietary drivers (Nouveau lack too much in non-3D, even if they manage to fix reclocking...).
They can choose AMD and their proprietary drivers (AMD XXXg are not good for modern GPUs, and that will not change untill 8xxx are out...).
They can choose Intel and their FLOSS drivers (and hopefully Intel stuff will grow enought so it reach parity with Win stuff...).


Each and every have their advantages (Nvidia do good stuff, AMD can offer APU, Intel have GPU and CPU on one dish and is leading in manufacturing processes, etc.).

So lets first hear RELEASE date of this Steambox.

[Larian]

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.

Straw man, Hamish. My point was to caution against blind adherence to advocate positions because it's cool to do so. Is the point of advocacy, at least in part, not to upset the status quo in an attempt to work toward becoming the majority position? And once this is obtained, then do you not run the risk of the tyranny of that majority? One could argue that is precisely the position we are in now, but trading one foaming-at-the-mouth dictator for another with slightly differently colored spittle is not an improvement.
Some of the noise being made here on this subject (and their numbers are, thankfully, few) sounds remarkably like that of a dictator without a sufficiently large fan club. In common parlance they are oftentimes referred to as "wackos and nut jobs". I fear them with power, because they haven't demonstrated temperance with the "you're either with us or you're against us" stand on using proprietary drivers. Such hard-line stances are rarely appropriate.

[liam]

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.

Going with a low latenct kernel (like RH MRG) is what I suggested when I first heard about this.
Hopefully they will be working with RH on this because it would seem to be right up their alley.

[johnc]

Gotta hand it to Michael. His post-Seattle rattle was all legit and on the mark.

[Loafers]

modular, open, and portable ? could this be THE mini-pc?

In Gaben We Trust.

[timothyja]

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.

Are you really that stupid?

In linux apparently the only people thinking are the ones that try to make money out of it.

You do realise that the majority of the work done on all open source drivers is PAID for by company's like Red Hat i.e. not the people TRYING to make money on Linux but the ones that ARE making money on it.

There are two people in this world the naysayers and the doers. You my friend are a naysayer, and judging by your posts you always will be. Its just sad really.

[smitty3268]

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

Stop oppressing me by posting your opinions on Phoronix.

LOL

[smitty3268]

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

The vast majority of linux users just use intel integrated graphics, just like the larger PC market. Or do you mean linux "gamers"?