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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.
"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!"
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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."