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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.)"

6 of 211 comments (clear)

  1. Electric demons in love by crioca · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There's been a lot of hype and misconceptions about SteamOS within the gaming community especially. SteamOS isn't a desktop OS, it's a console OS and needs to be understood as such. It won't be a whole lot of use unless you're planning to set up a PC for use as a console.

    1. Re:Electric demons in love by Dega704 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Hence why I plan to replace XBMC with it eventually. I can't wait to see what it matures into.

    2. Re:Electric demons in love by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Or install Steam on whatever Linux distribution you want...

  2. I'm there!!! by BLToday · · Score: 3, Insightful

    No, seriously. I can totally justify spending around $350 for a HTPC with gaming to experiment with. Cheaper than my wife's purse.
    $150 - AMD A10-6800K (with mobo over at Microcenter). Yes, I know Intel is faster and it's not the fastest GPU either but for $150 it's hard to beat the combo.
    $80 - 8GB of RAM
    $100 - 3TB hard drive
    and I have a bunch of old ATX cases and power supply.

    It's Linux, if I don't like it I can always put something else on like Mint.

    1. Re:I'm there!!! by Mashiki · · Score: 4, Insightful

      No offense but that "rig" is hardly a gaming one. As a PC and console gamer, spending more less than 800~1000 dollars on a gaming PC, specially if you're only gaming on a PC, feels like you're building a machine that with the worse of both worlds

      Yeah you should just stop right about now. Here's some fun facts, a 3 year top of the line PC is more powerful than the current generation of consoles. My 2 year old PC, which I build for $600 was ranked 3rd fastest in the world in the Phenom II X4 965/560ti category with WHQL drivers for roughly two weeks, without any baseline tweaks. I haven't benched out my current one, but that one ran me right around $500. And with that $500, I'm playing at 1080p, getting a nice steady 40-60fps, on a AMD X6 FX-6300 w/ Sapphire 7950.

      Now, if you're dropping $800-1k on something, and not beating the current generation of consoles you are: Buying from the wrong places, or live in a part of the world with massive import tariffs.

      --
      Om, nomnomnom...
  3. Re:GNOME? by 0123456 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I see no purpose for this distro. My applications require a DESKTOP environment. Why limit user’s options?

    Because this is Valve's game console.

    Just like my Xbmc front end boots into Xbmc, and not a desktop. Xbmc is all it's meant to do.