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Valve Releases Debian-Based SteamOS Beta
An anonymous reader writes that, as promised, "Valve has put out their first SteamOS Linux operating system beta. SteamOS 1.0 'Alchemist' Beta is forked from Debian Wheezy and features its own graphics compositor along with other changes. Right now SteamOS 1.0 is only compatible with NVIDIA graphics cards and uses NVIDIA's closed-source Linux driver. SteamOS can be downloaded from here, but the server seems to be offline under the pressure."
An alternate submission links to another article about the use of a Debian base system as well as an unofficial torrent.
Probably because Nvidia was shamed into better supporting Linux before AMD? Because Nvidia has been working better with Valve on this project? Because the optimization for those AMD cards isn't done?
Had you been paying attention, even in the slightest, in the past few months, you would have known what has been going on and what the plan is for SteamOS. Perhaps you should actually do some reading on it instead of just saying that Valve is "screwing a large group of people."
Not required, supported. The list is supported hardware. I would assume standard BIOS is supported as well but they wanted to point out that newer UEFI only boards are also supported.
Seems you got modded up, despite being WRONG. UEFI booting is required for the installer, which is why UEFI Support was listed as a hardware requirement in the FAQ you looked at. The requirement is also mentioned further down in the FAQ. Also reference:
http://store.steampowered.com/steamos/buildyourown.
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamuniverse/discussions/1/648814395741989999/
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/12/valve-releases-steamos-beta-early-build-your-own-system-requirements/
One benefit to this is that people won't be trying to install this on an old piece of crap and then complaining it's slow.
Son of a Bitch. They do say it's required in the FAQ. It appears they are using it to simplify the boot from USB installation process based on the FAQ. I'd imagine if your board supports booting from USB you are probably ok but they may have hardwired support for UEFI in the installer (such that it will only look for UEFI instances for installation media) so you won't know till you try.
My bad for misleading you.
I'll wager that this compositor is temporary until Debian ships Wayland and Nvidia has drivers that work with it. This thing is still running Xorg, just using a customized compositor.
If Steambox succeeds it will have to be despite you god damned AMD buyers, as always.
Oh, but haven't you heard? AMD are the good guys now because they occasionally trickle out some of the information you need to make a half-assed open source video driver which supports some of their older cards.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
nVidia has already taken notice because they are one of the companies working with Valve: https://developer.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/akamai/gamedev/docs/Porting%20Source%20to%20Linux.pdf
New things are always on the horizon