The SteamBox Countdown Is Complete

[Serafean]

Why do I have this gut feeling that I'm going to miss windows?

Same here.

Your PC is now a console, does the consumer really want that?
New Steam games that were once targeted towards PC are now even more likely built towards console. How well the machine sells will dictate this...
I Love steam because I can buy PC games. Especially games that are better on PC. Think -> Keyboard + Mouse. Not touchscreen, propriety OS, propriety hardware and now propriety games!

I just hope Gabe is being honest with himself when he tells the world that he's got the gaming community at heart. He states that the community contributes more than his whole company, but if he locks the community out, why bother?
At the end of the day, how well it sells is going to dictate a lot of factors regardless of what I say...

Very mixed feelings here, sounds like another Android in the making, which isn't good. All full of proprietary plugins. The only positive outcome I see is slightly more mainstreamed linux gaming. Show me a way to integrate it into an xbmc system without having to deal with any proprietary crap (except steam itself), and then we'll talk. I'm simply not interested in another multimedia platform.

Serafean

[sarmad]

And we are going to hear all the whinners since it will use Mir and Nvidia and AMD will do their drivers for it.

Are you basing this assumption on some facts, or are you just guessing?

[IanS]

Has anybody noticed that they've just spoiled that Total War: Rome II, and 4 other games that I can't identify, are coming to Linux? (They're on the screenshots at the top.)

The bottom middle one looks a bit like Trine 2 and unless I am mistaken the top right is likely Football Manager (the 2014 version of which will be on Linux, so it fits).

[Serge]

Because Valve makes their money off of license sales, I would expect that they stand to profit more from not attempting to lock in users to a certain platform.

[d2kx]

Re: Mir/Wayland

Right now they use Ubuntu 12.04 LTS so this is not even a question right now. They will probably update to 14.04 LTS in a year or so and the driver situation will be sorted anyway until then.

[blackout23]

lol @ Ars. The MS fanboys are in total meltdown.

Haha yeah. Amazing how retarded the average Ars commentator is. They think Gabe wants them to format their Windows PC and switch to Steam OS. They also don't seem to understand that Steam OS and Linux is not an attempt to replace Windows Gaming. Steam OS (Linux) games will have better cross-plattform support than anything that uses DirectX shit.

[iniudan]

Because Valve makes their money off of license sales, I would expect that they stand to profit more from not attempting to lock in users to a certain platform.

Which is why I think the game streaming client, will be release under free license, so OEM can compile it for their different consumer device embedded OS, for I easily see smart TV and Apple TV like box manufacturer, except maybe for Sony, integrating that service.

The server on the other hand will be proprietary, due to been integrated in the steam client.

[liam]

Phoronix: The SteamBox Countdown Is Complete

The SteamBox countdown page just expired!..

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTQ2NzI

Looks like they are going with the rt kernel (the mentions of improving audio and input latency).
I'm so glad they read my posts and took that advice
This is pretty damn exciting as they say the entire catalog with be available and it's encouraged to change out hardware and software components.
I hope they develop this in the open...

[asdfblah]

Looks like no one has stated the obvious, which makes me think if I'm missing something...

What worries me is the hardware support. Think about this: what hurts linux usage in the desktop is new users trying to use linux and failing to install/configure/run the distro, their programs and/or their (new) hardware. Let's say you download SteamOS and find out that it doesn't work as it should, what would you do? what do you think basic users/gamers will think, and say, about SteamOS and Linux? What do you think PC enthusiasts would think when their latest hardware doesn't even work?

Now, if SteamOS is based on Ubuntu 12.04... what would the hardware support be? How many bugs (persistent) you have had coming from, say, video drivers, or audio, or...? Have you seen the state of fglrx and the F/OS radeon driver? For me, fglrx has been a mess (it's good until you find one of those annoying bugs), and the F/OS driver is still being developed, it lacks optimizations, testing, features, ... and this is for the old architecture. Have you looked at GCN+ GPUs support? it's just recently started, kernel 3.12 still doesn't have complete support, AFAIK, and there is NO distro shipping 3.12 as official kernel.

I don't think a customized, downloadable distro is a good idea for Steam, or for anyone else wanting to have a product with good support.

I really hope I'm wrong about this all, though.

[Kristian Joensen]

he said it at the linux con 2 weeks ago

I saw the Linuxcon video that was posted and it didn't include anything about Infinity Ward or Call of Duty IIRC.