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SteamOS Will Be Available For Download On December 13

Posted by Soulskill on from the year-of-linux-on-the-steambox dept.

sfcrazy writes "Valve Software, creator of Half-Life and Left 4 Dead, has announced that SteamOS will be available for public download on December 13. That's the day when the company will start shipping Steam Machines and Steam Controllers to the 300 selected beta participants. The company said, 'SteamOS will be made available when the prototype hardware ships. It will be downloadable by individual users and commercial OEMs. (But unless you're an intrepid Linux hacker already, we're going to recommend that you wait until later in 2014 to try it out.)"

5 of 211 comments (clear)

  1. Gaming controllers by jones_supa · · Score: 5, Informative

    I browse Linux commit logs every now and then and these days there are surprisingly many various game controller patches flowing in. Good.

    1. Re:Gaming controllers by WrecklessSandwich · · Score: 3, Informative

      Doesn't make sense for a laptop, but it's a common paradigm on mobile devices. There's flight sims etc. for Android/iOS where you steer by tilting your device like a little kid making racecar noises.

  2. Re:GNOME? by GreatDrok · · Score: 5, Informative

    "Are they providing a sensible version of GNOME? I very want to shuck Ubuntu, and this would let me have my Steam games *and* a usable desktop system."

    This isn't the Linux you're looking for. This is stripped down and intended to run Steam in Big Picture mode all the time. No desktop at all. The standard Steam client on a Linux system is what you're looking for.

    Personally, I shy away from the bleeding edge Linux systems and stick with CentOS.

    --
    "I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
  3. Applications and apps are the same thing by tepples · · Score: 4, Informative

    Applications were called apps for short long before iOS 2 introduced the App Store. See, for example, Unleashing the Killer App by Downes and Mui, first published in 2000.

  4. Re:GNOME? by RoboJ1M · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/04/valve-steam-machine-hands-on/

    "Anyone who uses Steam's Big Picture Mode is already intimately acquainted with SteamOS, as they're very similar. SteamOS looks and acts like Big Picture Mode, except it's the basis for the entire hardware system. It's controller-friendly and easy to navigate. The same Steam splash page washes across the screen when it launches, and the same tile-based layout of games and the Steam store are visible at launch. As promised, the OS is built on Linux (not based on Ubuntu, we're told, but entirely custom), though you'd never know it as the only interactive layer is all Steam.

    That means it also has the limitations of Steam: SteamOS is not the replacement for Windows 8 you've been waiting for. Beyond basics like browsing the web, there's little in the way of standard OS functions."