Slashdot Mirror
Valve Announces Linux-Based SteamOS
Today Valve Software announced SteamOS, a Linux-based gaming operating system designed for, as Valve puts it, "living room machines." They say, "In SteamOS, we have achieved significant performance increases in graphics processing, and we're now targeting audio performance and reductions in input latency at the operating system level. Game developers are already taking advantage of these gains as they target SteamOS for their new releases." One major feature they're touting is the ability to use the SteamOS machine to stream video games from other Windows and Mac computers in the house to your TV. They mention media streaming as well, but without much detail. "With SteamOS, 'openness' means that the hardware industry can iterate in the living room at a much faster pace than they've been able to. Content creators can connect directly to their customers. Users can alter or replace any part of the software or hardware they want. Gamers are empowered to join in the creation of the games they love. SteamOS will continue to evolve, but will remain an environment designed to foster these kinds of innovation."
Great, they gonna make all my current steam games compatible?
But does it run Windows?
Users can alter or replace any part of the software or hardware they want.
Thus turning the console into - dun dun dunnnnnn - a desktop?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You know, when I think back on my first Linux install way back in 1993 or so with Slackware, who would have thought that Linus's project would end up on hundreds of millions of servers, smartphones, tablets, game systems, embedded hardware and the like. I find the whole thing rather breathtaking. Linux really is one of the great successes of the computer age.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I don't know about SteamOS, but if they ever do GabeOs brand cereals, I'm never eating anything else.
It sounds like they are sticking with a GNU userland with the talk of 'Openness'
The real question I have is what will SteamOS will be forked from. Originally Steam for Linux went live on Ubuntu. Ubuntu would seem a poor candidate to fork an OS from primarily because Nvidia basically told Ubuntu we aren't supporting Mir which would make SteamOS dead end when Mir started.
If they forked from Debian I wouldn't be so worried. Or they could have forked from Fedora, CentOS, who knows. Honestly I'm just happy to see Valve pushing for AAA game development on Linux.
This has the potential to end Windows as the dominant gaming platform; maybe even as a gaming platform in general. Once that happens, one of the biggest obstacles to mass desktop Linux adoption will be gone. Excellent.......
Now comes the question, How well will XBMC integrate with this? If they both behave well together it's going to make for a damn good HTPC setup. Any word on if this is a completely own-rolled Linux Distro, or is it, as I suspect, an Ubuntu/Debian derivative due to their previous interactions?
"Then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three."
I'm assuming Wednesday is the Steambox announcement. You guys *really* need something with with a "3" in it for a launch. I don't think "Half-Life: Source" is gonna cut it.
Does this make Linux qualify for Steampunk? :)
Sounds pretty interesting, I would install it to see how it runs and see how the environment is.
You can't enforce DRM effectively until you lock down the device completely. So, of course Steam wants to control the OS. SteamOS sounds exactly like Microsoft's strategy of embracing, extending, and then extinguishing open standards.
So, yes, SteamOS will bring the Linux kernel to the masses, but as to the actual *benefits* of Linux -- transparency and freedom -- Valve is going to kill those.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
The original page on steam has two more icons to light up and a new countdown ending 2 days hence. Apparently there are two more announcements to go.
Silence is a state of mime.
I suppose the streaming from your PC to the Steambox would be through your local network. Is the bandwidth of a network connection sufficient for a full HD video stream? Would there need to be some lossy compression to allow streaming at a good frame rate?
So all of the older windows game work as. There are some open source ones that will need a lot of work to have them run on mac or Linux.
Now open mac os that run no non apple hardware can be even better.
Sounds like that's what they're going for- an "open" OS that can be used for any gaming device. It's a neat idea, but...
It will fail spectacularly. There is no money to be made on console hardware. Who is going to bother building a SteamOS device besides Valve? No one, because Valve is going to be making all the money.
Valve would've been smarter to go all-out, and just build a new proprietary console, but one that is supremely developer and consume friendly. Maybe that is what they are doing, but they are doing it too slowly. If the mythical SteamBox isn't at least as powerful as an Xbox One, and released within the next year, it's doomed, too.
Including the repos for MythTV out of the box and providing some form of integration would only enhance this project. Just my .02.
Having SteamOS for running a dedicated SteamBox in the living room is great but I wonder what the implications of SteamOS are for running Steam on other linux distros. I have a capable workstation at my desk and I really don't want to have to replace my current distro just to get the additional benefits of SteamOS. Will this cripple the momentum of Steam development for other distros?
Looks like Gabe is doing to PCs & set-top boxes what Google did with the phone. A customized Linux distro is a good start, but still much info missing.. does it integrate some gaming engine (maybe Source?) How much API support for hardware and software that aids in writing games? Is it even a gaming OS or is it just some content provider wrapper around Linux?
- I stole your sig.
Linux is the future of gaming because Valve created their own version of Linux.
BTW, its not living room ready if I have to set up a big PC shoebox with liquid cooling to play the same content I get on a console.
Still waiting for the actual SteamBox, but apparently I now have to give Valve suggestions on who to design it.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Whatever improvements they make will hopefully be sent as patches and pull requests to the open source projects they're likley building upon...I don't want to run a commercially run distro, or at least one that's more restrictive like Ubuntu, etc....
I run Arch for a reason.
What on earth are you talking about. All they would need to do is expose it as a public dynamic library.
That of course doesn't make it a good idea –they would have an absolute nightmare with compatibility, and it would be counter productive to getting devs to actually ship software for their system.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Unless im misunderstanding something this allow me to watch my games being played..not actually playing them on the Steam OS? Why not just stream directly from the PC to TV? I dont even see the point to that ides rather play the games not watch someone else play.
Jack of all trades,master of none
I've been wanting to stop dual booting for nearly two decades. The purists complain that locking you out of the OS (DRM) components is vehemently prohibited in the spirit of Open Source and basically creates the very problem OSS was designed to get away from.
On the other hand, software companies complain they need to lock you out in order to combat piracy and protect their digital assets. Without doing so, they have no way to protect their revenue stream.
I have never found a good solution to this problem. It's been a good 20 years, and nobody else has either so those of us who straddle the fence between purity and utility still dual boot.
I do not like the idea of SteamOS. I would really like the entire computer industry to be based on open formats, source and standards but that is a crack dream that will never happen. Something needs to give. Maybe this is it. I prefer to believe I trust Valve more than anyone else with something like this.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Wine LGPL but the stuff that winetrick use and download to make some games work sure ain't that why those dll are not packaged with Wine.
Eve Online shipped a Wine wrapper for their Mac and Linux "ports" back in the day. They just shipped a compiled Wine (with the LGPL license and source) and a script that called Wine calling Eve Online's client.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
This is unclear now: is it just a GNU/Linux distro (like Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, etc.), or a vastly different OS that happens to use the Linux kernel (like Android and Sailfish)?
Circumcision is child abuse.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This could have a lot of ripple effects.
1) Improved Wine support.
2) Better cross platform libraries/tools.
3) Linux distro optimized for gaming.
The interesting thing to consider is that Valve doesn't need to turn a profit right away. It's a private company and Gabe is looking at the long game here. He sees his reliance on Windows as a weakness and he intends to change that.
I dont get it. What are they talking about? Has Linux ever been rock solid? Upgrade your kernel, and things breaks apart. That is hardly rock solid to me.
...except the masses doing the adoption, are adopting SteamOS, not Linux specifically. This does little to raise awareness among the unwashed masses of the existence of "GNU/Linux the open source alternative", it just becomes "a consumer product that distributes/plays games". This will do about as much for GNU/Linux as Mac OS X did for BSD.
GNU too, unless SteamOS is something more along the lines of Android and just uses the kernel. Credit where credit is due; they did as much or more work on the base system than Linus.
Now Linux users can experience all the heartache and frustration that goes with Steam! Mysteriously vanishing content, random lock-outs, and a customer service strategy apparently developed by EA. I can't wait! [/snark]
On some levels, Steam is a wonderful idea, quick access to varied content, a centrally located distribution/launch point, and exposure to odder and more esoteric media are all benefits of Steam. Except when something goes wrong, which based on my experience is a fairly regular occurrence. That game you've owned for years that suddenly won't launch because Steam gets stuck in verification mode? Send them an email, and you'll probably hear back in about a month or so, and then with a request for more information.
I assume your post was self-referential, in which case: hilarious!
Great! Now I can run Stream on Windows in a VM on a box running SteamOS, and say that I play games on Linux.
Indie games are often DRM free.
"Iterate in the living room"... I love marketing-speak.
Come to think of it, if I remember correctly, "iterate in the living room" is something my wife and I used to do before our daughter was born.
You are welcome on my lawn.
No, Half-Life 3. ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Only broad generalities are being stated on the promotional page, but are they trying to fuse the best of both PC and console worlds? (and then some?) My overly optimistic side interprets it as something like this:
For the user, you have both the reliability of it "just working" (like a console, standard hardware) and absolutely no limitations on customization (e.g. run your own linux applications, install a different linux distro, run the OS on different hardware altogether, change the hardware, run an indie game that is not on Steam but still conforms to the standard hardware, do that thing you've always wanted to do with your PS3/360 but couldn't because they're greedy fucking assholes and/or are afraid of getting sued). And just as important for console users, you also have simplicity beyond "just getting things to work": a standard UI tailored to gaming (where everyone is connected, voice chat, a marketplace, "cloud", etc etc).
For developers, you have consistency (meaning no more custom tailoring your game to tons of different hardware configurations, controllers, etc etc, and also the ability to milk the most out of the hardware), a partially community-run marketplace owned by people that aren't assholes (and the ability to, if necessary, operate outside of it while remaining on the same platform), flexibility (nothing stopping you from adding in Oculus Rift support or whatever else), and an OS specifically optimized for gaming.
That's quite optimistic though. But if this is what they're going for--or at least something close to it--it could change everything (and upset a lot of established interests). And supposing this ideal were to come about and SteamOS gains traction, this could put a lot of power in the hands of a single company. The temptation to be greedy could be too great--especially as management inevitably changes. In other words, I'm hoping they'll proactive about putting in safeguards against their future selves, because my optimistic side (which, I must say, is usually wrong) says this could be big.
I was looking forward to the Valve box, but all this talk of linux has put me off. The reason a wanted a valve box is to break free of the proprietary xbox sony console paradigm. A valve flavor of linux is more of the same.
Intels new NUC coming out in a month or two is an appleTV sized PC with an i5 proc and onboard intel graphics capable of running all valve's source games in HD. Yeah!!! No rebuying anything, it'll work on the network nice, great web access / music choices. This thing is gonna be awesome.
This company is very greedy. They have a non existent technical support team that replies to support tickets after 2 weeks. No phone number to actually contact them through and there return policy is horrid.
I wouldn't touch this with a 10ft pole.
As I suspected, a complete circle jerk about the second coming of Linux on the desktop for the 23rd time. Oh Gabe!! I Love you so much!!! Please sleep with my wife and take my car!! I love you I love you I love you!!!
Give me a break.. This is worth about fuckall in the long term. A handful of zealots cumming all over themselves for a dead end because "It has teh linux d00d!!" How's that Auya box working out? Oh? A dismal failure? Here is Ouya v2. This isn't different enough or innovative enough to change anything. If you want to run any PC game, guess what? You can use your PC. Want a console? PS3/4 or Xbox/Xbone ring a bell? Want a clamped down, specialized OS on x86 hardware or the worst of both? Get a Steambox. Fucking waste of time.
No more console exclusives, no need to buy three consoles anymore! No need for Windows, OS X or Linux! So long Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft and Apple!
Yeah, that's not going to happen. I do hope, however, that it will help lower the number of Windows-only titles in the future. As a Nintendo gamer and OS X user, I'm tired of seeing Microsoft-only and Sony-only titles.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Um, no. It has been in living rooms for over a decade. TiVo runs linux. Now get off my lawn!
The last 20 years have been the years of Linux on the desktop, but 2014 will be the year of Linux in the living room!
From TFA:
"Hundreds of great games are already running natively on SteamOS. Watch for announcements in the coming weeks about all the AAA titles coming natively to SteamOS in 2014. Access the full Steam catalog of over nearly 3000 games and desktop software titles via in-home streaming."
"You can play all your Windows and Mac games on your SteamOS machine, too. Just turn on your existing computer and run Steam as you always have - then your SteamOS machine can stream those games over your home network straight to your TV!"
My question is simple, can I stream diffrent games from one box to multiple SteamOS box's. (You know assuming your "game server" is fast enough.) becuase that would be awesome :) it would allow my wife and I to run diffrent games
SteamOS = vapor ware
I think steaming game video is absurdly ridiculous. You can't be a "computer dude" and not be offended by the shocking waste of such a thing.
But for similar reasons, I also think Netflix and Hulu are absurdly ridiculous (they're nowhere near as good as local disk playback).
And the market says those things aren't ridiculous at all.
Which just goes to show you: common sense, questions of efficiency and performance .. none of it matters! If people want to use the Internet like that, then we're going to have an Internet with that kind of traffic on it. Get used to it. It reminds me of bloat in the 1990s. The idea that most people could ever fill a 500 Megabyte hard disk was just plain silly, but then there were the Windows users, totally dominating the market, filling up their drives, creating economy of scale, etc, so by 1999 here we all were, with a supply chain of cheap huge 20GB disks where a non-Windows install was so empty .. that it made people think of PVRs as being viable. Wow. What a ridiculous use of disk space ... no wait, awesome, not ridiculous.
The same crap is happening with Internet bandwidth now. It's being wasted on such collossal horrifying scales by people who just don't give a fuck, that they're changing the world, creating market forces that cause the expensive to become cheap, simply through popularity. It's so weird.
On the bright side, think of how fast your MUDs will become.
The Ouya has a horrible touch pad; it's terrible. Great idea, but terrible implementation. And the new Nexus 7 has an absolutely horrendous touch screen (I think the company is something like Elan) so it better not be any of that crap. I'm still waiting and hoping for a controller with a good solid touch pad that works. Spend the extra money and pick one of those old school Japanese companies, they know how to do it. If the controller sucks, I don't care how good the other hardware is, it'll still be a bad experience.
Good luck running the 25 foot HDMI cable from the room with the PC to the room with the TV, as adolf pointed out.
"How the fsck do I start notepad on this crappy excuse for a GUI?"
There's more than one way to solve that: "Go to classicshell.net and click Download Now. That'll give you your old Start menu back."
Very little games actually use DirectX-specific extensions (primarily because DirectX is not inter-compatible with platforms such as the PlayStation or Mac and these days a lot slower than GL).
But DirectX is more inter-compatible with Xbox family platforms. This is supposed to make Windows/Xbox 360 dual platform releases easier, and in fact, Xbox Live Indie Games on the Xbox 360 was pretty much the only way for small companies to get games on a console during the seventh generation.
My parents have been using Firefox for web/email and whatever default photo software comes with ubuntu at the time. They never touch the command line. I haven't had to fix their computer in years.
A modern console isn't that far removed from a PC shoebox with liquid cooling.
Hardware-wise, this is correct. Marketing-wise, the difference is that "a PC shoebox with liquid cooling" ships with a mouse and keyboard but no gamepad. This means PC game developers are less likely to spend time==money on even the most basic gamepad support in PC games or on porting games in gamepad-heavy genres to the PC.
the source code [...] doesn't come with the meshes, textures, maps, audio, and scripts to actually run the game
Making the engine itself but not the art assets available in source form accomplishes that.
A lot of "assets" include scripts for NPCs and set pieces and the like. Are those code or art? And besides, how would one discourage mass unauthorized copying and sharing of the assets if said assets are accessible to a piece of free software running on a computer that the user controls?
You can study it, modify it, and fix bugs that crop up.
Is the fact that the player can't see around concealment a "bug"? In online multiplayer, making other players' concealment ineffective would give a player an unfair advantage.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Apple sold NINE MILLION iPhone s in a couple of days. Apple is the future of computing not linsux.
Close; it was actually Cedega (a commercial and somewhat closed fork of Wine that focused on game support; these days Wine is better than Cedega at most games) on Linux and Cider (Cedega for Apple) on OS X. The Cider port is still active (and I think it's actually a port, i.e. they recompiled the game client through Cider rather than using Cider as a translation layer the way Wine/Cedega are usually used) but the official advice for running Eve on Linux these days is "just install it in Wine." They found there weren't enough Linux players to make it worthwhile to provide commercial support, but there's plenty of unofficial support and the game runs well.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
http://s14.directupload.net/images/130921/m6gqcywx.gif
Can someone reproduce this?
Are they going to share their patches to stuff like the open source radeon driver, the open source nvidia driver, and mesa to upstream?
They might just say 'we will give you all the source for our linux distribution, except the steam client(obviously), the streaming client, and any in house made performance enhancements.'
You've still given up on the best feature provided by *nix shells: pipes. Sure Alt-Tab may require more keys than hitting the Windows key, but try listing a directory, filtering out all files older than X, moving them, and showing their first lines in a text editor.
A little contrived, but try. Only your resident neck beard could pull that off in a single shareable one liner.
While it may well flop, this seems like a very credible challenge to Microsoft's dominance in gaming. Given a very specific subset of hardware like a steam box will represent, linux can run flawlessly and offer great performance. Valve can throw together tremendous functionality very cheaply by bundling existing applications like XBMC or VLC, not to mention WINE. As with linux in general, many of WINE's configuration problems and glitches go away when you start thinking about a very specific subset of hardware.
The question is, how does Microsoft respond to it? Do they start looking to pursue intellectual property claims against WINE, or against Valve for using it? (or is this the very reason that Valve is pushing for native ports of games?) What else can Microsoft to to put the brakes on Valve?
Insert comment here ...
I'm pretty sure that my 8 core i7 counts as an 8 node cluster.
It certainly does for this meme.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
Steam for HURD?
SOS? From my experience users tend to like abbreviations. ;)
Valve seems to feel really threatened by MS/Win8.x.
I'm getting 0.2ms to a server on a different subnet via two switches and a gateway with multiple network cards. If your relatively short connection is 45 times slower than that something is very wrong, maybe a damaged cable.
Not one comment voted 3+ has spotted the potentially hideous ramifications of this.
All new PC games will be console ports, because you'll be playing them on your TV screen over the SteamOS streaming feature. That means console UIs.
I hope to fuck they include a toggle for a PC monitor UI.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
The fact that you can plug a Knoppix thumbdrive into almost any system and get booted to a working GUI with sound shows that Linux hardware support is not only good, it's amazingly good.
Use Windows To Go (assuming you have an Enterprise license) and try getting anywhere near the hardware compatibility you get from Linux LiveCDs.
A lot of people think Linux has relatively more installation problems because it might have some install quirk on their hardware. Windows has quirks too - they've just been worked around by a 3rd party before and built into their recovery disk/partition. God knows I spent way too long getting reference drivers for wifi chipsets and printers back when my kids wanted Vista.
Maybe in 2002 but I suggest you take a look at what is built into video cards now - it's not just 3D acceleration but encoding and decoding of video as well right up to full on h264 even at the cheap embedded side of town. Wireless is probably going to be at least in the order of 10Mb/s in most places if that's the connection used so the amount of compression is not going to have to be much anyway.
everyone thinks it's about the streamibg, but it's much bigger than that, it's designed as a linux gamung os, but you'll also be able to stream windows games with it, valve alreaddy said they are working with many developers to make native games on the os, and there are already 100's of games working (aka all the steam games available for windows) so it will be more like gaming in a environment designed for gaming instead of running it on windows and all the overhead and performance loss that comes with it, developpers will have lower level hardware access to make games run as smooth as possible on it
Have you played a modern game, recently? They are all designed around gamepads.
Is this true of consoles, or is it also true of PCs? You mention "gamepads", plural, so other than Street Fighter IV, which popular PC games allow use of multiple gamepads?
Crunchbang works fine with out the commandline.
If you live in a block of flats and several other residents each use their own wifi networks you will not get 10Mb/s
SURELY NOT!!!!!
"Gamers are empowered to join in the creation of the games they love"
Huh ???
Hype of the Type from a bad taco ??
How is running it on your existing PC and regurgitating the outpt to your TV supposed to change the PC based games running (other than complicate it into some generic TV interface) ???
Running the game ON your TV machine ???(opening up the spectrum of hardware it can run on ???)
For what games ?? Only the dumbed down ones that limited hardware can process and which you probably could run on a tablet computer ???
Again, a spurt from that bad taco.
Now Linux running on PC to make gaming PCs cheaper (no blood money to the Master of $hoddy) isnt a bad thing, But WTF does this article mean - if its simply 'consoles' generations will get a faster improvement rate .... then just say that.