What's Your Hopes From Valve's SteamOS?

[mrugiero]

Arch breaks things easily when piling up changes. I honestly think it breaks a little too easy when doing it that way. I guess on the pro side, it's great for keeping up to date with all the latest and greatest. I love arch linux and I love pacman, but it's not invincible.

I know it breaks easily if you let changes pile up. Even though I don't use it, a dear friend of mine uses it as his main distro, and we always talk this kind of stuff (yeah, we are a bunch of nerds, so what? ). My point is, you choose to use a distro like Arch knowing it is a rolling release, so you shouldn't let them changes pile up to begin. For a rolling release, I think it's a damn good assumption that users upgrade often, and it being advanced makes a good assumption that the same will read about possible breakages before updating and will try and avoid problems.

EDIT: Anyway, on topic, I agree that it would be a bad idea to base SteamOS on it, since SteamOS is tailored to casual and hardcore gamers, which are not necessarily advanced users.

[b15hop]

Well, if you are using a rolling release, it's probably because you need to keep up-to-date, so you shouldn't be piling up changes.

Arch breaks things easily when piling up changes. I honestly think it breaks a little too easy when doing it that way. I guess on the pro side, it's great for keeping up to date with all the latest and greatest. I love arch linux and I love pacman, but it's not invincible.

[mrugiero]

i wouldn't claim that "dist-upgrading" on a debian distribution is that great either. It is however more controlled than arch's "do it whenever" which makes things much harder to deal with when you don't upgrade for a long time and these arch changes pile up with unknown consequences.

Well, if you are using a rolling release, it's probably because you need to keep up-to-date, so you shouldn't be piling up changes.

[bnolsen]

I don?t see why they would burden themselves with such a distribution (or Arch) that often breaks and changes, when Xubuntu 12.04 is rock solid and (mostly) painless. They can still tweak a few things to make it faster if needed?

i wouldn't claim that "dist-upgrading" on a debian distribution is that great either. It is however more controlled than arch's "do it whenever" which makes things much harder to deal with when you don't upgrade for a long time and these arch changes pile up with unknown consequences.

[b15hop]

My hope is that Valve would show these proprietary, DRM-inclined and ignorant f..ks from Sony and M$ how it should look when implemented properly.

It will all pan out in the wash. In the end, if the console is for us gamers and not just treated as a cash cow for valve, then we all win.

[0xBADCODE]

My hope is...

My hope is that Valve would show these proprietary, DRM-inclined and ignorant f..ks from Sony and M$ how it should look when implemented properly.

[stqn]

I hope so. I just made the switch to Manjaro and love it. Super up to date and moderately well tested packages, no-drama kernel upgrades with easy reversion if something goes wrong, good hardware detection. Just an awesome distro in general. Pamac could use some work but pacman does a good enough job if you know what you're looking for.


Unfortunately valve has said in the past that they like Ubuntu. We'll see....

I don?t see why they would burden themselves with such a distribution (or Arch) that often breaks and changes, when Xubuntu 12.04 is rock solid and (mostly) painless. They can still tweak a few things to make it faster if needed?

[eidolon]

...they should integrate a forum system so that the open source community can sort out problems themselves

http://www.gog.com/forum/general?search=Linux

In addition to the General discussion forum linked above, there are also currently 437 game-specific forums, some of which contain Linux configuration info (such as Planescape: Torment, for example), and GOG.com also features several user-generated lists on the subject (i.e. which games are known to work on Linux).

See also: Gogonlinux, LGOGDownloader

[b15hop]

I didn't mean GOG should provide users with the source code (although it would be nice), but I meant that they need it to port things to Linux, except by games supported by SCUMMVM. Also, as I stated in a later post, they don't actually "support" Windows either, and the degree of support they have in Windows (running on SCUMMVM or in DOSBox) is easily achievable in Linux, too, as the source code is not needed in either case.

Well I guess if they provide the game DRM free and have minute support, then they should integrate a forum system so that the open source community can sort out problems themselves? Also games with no support should be cheaper.

[mrugiero]

The weird thing about GoG is that although I love the idea. I have never bought a game from GoG. Yet I have steam games... I think my reasoning is that if I treat steam as a service, and I pay for something, I might as well use steam. Steam is a very good service therefore people use it, simple as that. I too wish that GoG games came with souce code, maybe that might help influence hardcore Open Source people to buy more GoG.

I didn't mean GOG should provide users with the source code (although it would be nice), but I meant that they need it to port things to Linux, except by games supported by SCUMMVM. Also, as I stated in a later post, they don't actually "support" Windows either, and the degree of support they have in Windows (running on SCUMMVM or in DOSBox) is easily achievable in Linux, too, as the source code is not needed in either case.