Torvalds: SteamOS Will 'Really Help' Linux On the Desktop

nk497 writes "Linus Torvalds has welcomed the arrival of Valve's Linux-based platform, SteamOS, and said it could boost Linux on desktops. The Linux creator praised Valve's 'vision' and suggested its momentum would force other manufacturers to take Linux seriously — especially if game developers start to ditch Windows. Should SteamOS gain traction among gamers and developers, that could force more hardware manufacturers to extend driver support beyond Windows. That's a sore point for Torvalds, who slammed Nvidia last year for failing to support open-source driver development for its graphics chips. Now that SteamOS is on the way, Nvidia has opened up to the Linux community, something Torvalds predicts is a sign of things to come. 'I'm not just saying it'll help us get traction with the graphics guys,' he said. 'It'll also force different distributors to realize if this is how Steam is going, they need to do the same thing because they can't afford to be different in this respect. They want people to play games on their platform too.'"

Comments

Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy

[CastrTroy]

Drivers are probably about the biggest problem that Linux has right now. It's the main reason I'm not using it on my laptop. Last I tried, about 6 months ago (2 year old laptop), I could not get accelerated graphics working on the desktop. It still looked good enough, even without accelerated graphics but I suspect this also had the other disadvantage of greatly lowering my battery life, by running everything in software. Battery life was about half of what it was on windows. Also, because there was no accelerated graphics, I couldn't play any games. Well, that and Netflix. I don't understand why I can run Netflix on Android, but I can't run it on Linux. Personally, I don't even want to run in a browser. I'd actually rather run it as a separate application. And they can make it closed source for all I care.