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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.
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
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.
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...
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."