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SteamOS Will Be Available For Download On December 13
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.)"
Kind of want to try this in Virtualbox.
If you want to be seen, stand up. If you want to be heard, speak up. If you want to be respected, sit down and shut up.
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.
I browse Linux commit logs every now and then and these days there are surprisingly many various game controller patches flowing in. Good.
Mint comes with multiple window managers, personally I like cinnamon. But anyway you can install it yourself on your ubuntu box, it is easy.
"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!"
I cry and whine that no one cares that I don't like this and want it to go away
FTFY
...if you're doing Linux gamedev or are already using Steam on Linux...you may well be ready for that.
Me?
BRING IT
If you're serious about gaming on Linux, you're probably already doing that, actually... with a standard system. Unless you weren't actually planning on hooking it up to a TV in the first place (I wasn't).
I can state, for example, that my USB XBoX controller works perfectly on Linux, and is supported by all but one or two of the games I have bought on Steam for Linux. It also works in Steam itself, for Big Picture mode. I also know for a fact that the HDMI out on my desktop/gaming system supports audio and 1080p to the TV. From there it's really trivial to set a desktop up to automatically login and launch Steam at startup, to launch Steam in Big Picture mode, and put it on a TV.
The beta is U.S. Only, and that's a shame. I was hoping for the world wide beta test. But I guess they had their reasons. But at least the SteamOS will be downloadable so I can build my own device. I probably won't be investing too much time or money into it. If I buy Antec ISK300-150 and make a ~400€ AMD APU powered indie game device it would probably serve its duty well (and afterwards be a nice tiny server box). You people can probably recommend something better if this idea seems bad. Or share suggestions for others to read.
Good to see who the mature one is(n't) here.
"Personally, I shy away from X and stick with Z."
everyone has an opinion. ::yawn::
And as soon as Gentoo finishes compiling they'll post their responses.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
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.
Gentoo?! Bah, real Linux hackers roll their own from source.
I made an app! Shoutium
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.
If you use a normal PC, nothing but inertia prevents the system from dual booting steamos and the desktop of your choice.
If anything, running steamos beside a desktop linux with a shared /home would offer a great many perks.
Just pick a default, and roll with it. When you want the other, just press one of the arrow keys on the grub(or whatever loader you like best) menu, then press enter.
The purpose of steamos is not to replace the desktop; it is to replace a dedicated windows install, that exists only to play games on, but still eats up ginormous amounts of disk, requires constant mothering to protect it from malware, and does not play well with chained bootloaders.
A stripped down linux for games only, akin to a console grade OS, would eat up considerably less disk than a windows partition, would not require the MS tax, would benefit (theoretically) from the improved securty *nix offers, and as a bonus could use the same data volume for /home as the desktop distro it dual boots beside.
I play windows games with Wine on my Mint running i7 in the living room all the time. If I could keep my linux desktop more or less "clean" from wine and other library clutter, i'd be totally down with it. Having a maintained distro specifically for that purpose makes keeping it running well an easier task.
If you use a normal PC, nothing but inertia prevents the system from dual booting steamos and the desktop of your choice.
And it is inertia that makes it so inconvenient. I mean this literally: a desktop computer at rest stays at rest unless acted on by an outside force, such as by being carried into another room. Most people don't want to have to move a desktop computer from the desk to the TV to play a game and then move it back to surf the web.
my Mint running i7 in the living room
You happen to have your computer desk in your living room. Not everybody else does. Some people keep the computer desk in another room in order to preserve some level of peace and quiet.
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.
You know you can just use a 'sensible version of GNOME' on Ubuntu if you want right? It's really easy.
I think the idea is basically to start freeing the entertainment PC industry from Microsoft's clutches, especially as the trend towards "App stores", centrally DRMed software, and hardware lockdown is making it's way to the PC - both Microsoft and Apple are moving that way, and that puts Valve at a distinct disadvantage as an app store, why go to them when your OS vendor has their store built in to the GUI? So instead they package their own OS streamlined specifically for gaming. After all last I heard Valve isn't looking to sell "Steam Boxes", they're giving the existing PC vendors a new sales front on the PC market - a label they can slap on the box telling consumers they can expect a certain kind of predictable experience, like "Windows Inside" except probably with less vendor expense beyond probably certifying that their boxes conform to certain conditions - i.e. all hardware is compatible and working drivers preconfigured, etc. Maybe even some standardized benchmarking.
So - just want a gaming rig? Go ahead and buy a prebuilt Windows PC if you like. Or buy a "Steam Box" labeled PC instead, which works just as well without adding a "Microsoft Tax" to your purchase price, and quite possibly comes in a considerably more stylish case and is probably much quieter than most PCs as well - after all it's targeted at the living room, not the office. As an added bonus the Steam Box will probably perform better than the same hardware running Windows. After all a stripped-down gaming-focused OS is going to have a lot less of the uneeded (for gaming) general-purpose overhead that Windows has. And that's going to be worth a lot, both at the low end where every frame counts, and at the high end where people are paying hundreds of dollars in premiums for hardware that only gives them a couple percentage points extra performance.
Will it cost more? Maybe. But maybe not. There is likely going to be some unavoidable extra overhead for the tighter thermal and acoustic requirements, not to mention any "bling factor" on the case, but that should be at least partly offset by the lack of a Windows license. And it's in both Valve's and the hardware vendors interest to keep prices competitive with Windows PC - after all Microsoft's stranglehold on the consumer OS market puts them in a position to engage in "unilateral negotiation" with hardware vendors, grabbing a larger slice of the profit margins than they would in a free market.
And let's face it - a lot of these consoles are going to be bought for kids by parents /grandparents/etc, and which are they going to rather buy - the locked down " strictly a toy" Playstation/Xbox/etc, or the slightly more expensive unsubsidized Steam Box that can become a real PC at the flip of a switch, because it is after all basically a standardized PC in a nicer box. In fact I truly hope Valve integrates a graceful multi-boot option directly into their normal boot routine. Or perhaps even better a full desktop environment that runs as a "game". Whatever allows people to gracefully access the flexible power of the box they have sitting there instead of having to get a whole separate box that's basically another version of the same thing just with a different OS and standard controllers.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Cinnamon is a fork of Gnome Shell/ Gnome 3
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."
Because it's not aimed at people who want a desktop. It's aimed at people who have a device sitting under their TV and want a simple navigable interface to play games or do other activities of a similar nature (e.g. streaming content).
Same here. What I need is a sharp axe to split firewood with. Why would I use a console OS for that? This product is clearly worthless.
sudo ergo sum
a problem. I must have missed people hating on their Xbox, Playstation, Wii and more generally pc's.