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Valve's Steam Machines Are More About Safeguarding PCs Than Killing Consoles
An anonymous reader writes "CES has come and gone, and we've gotten a chance to see many different models of Valve's Steam Machines. They're being marketed as a device for a living room, and people are wondering if they'll be able to compete with the Big-3 console manufacturers. But this article argues that Valve isn't going after the consoles — instead, Steam Machines are part of a long-term plan to keep the PC gaming industry healthy. Quoting: 'Over the years, Valve has gone from simply evangelizing the PC platform — it once flew journalists in from around the world pretty much just to tell them it was great — to actively protecting it, and what we're seeing now is just the beginning of that push. Take SteamOS. To you and me, it's a direct interface for Steam based on Linux that currently has poor software support. To Valve, though, it's a first step in levering development, publishing, gameplay and community away from their reliance on Windows and DirectX (and to a lesser extent Mac OS), systems that cannot be relied upon in the long term. ... As for Steam Machines, they are a beachhead, not an atom bomb. They are meant to sell modestly. ... The answer is that Valve is thinking in decades, not console generations.'"
So all you're looking to do is meet the absolute minimum requirements and *maybe* match the performance and experience of a console, but with a PC box? What is the point of that? The only reason I would want to build a box to put the SteamOS on and attach to my home theater is if I could replicate the true PC experience on it. That means high resolution, high framerate, high graphical fidelity. I'm not going to accomplish that on $500 worth of parts.
Sorry, but Linux is not a serious desktop OS.
Yes, it is. I've been using it as my sole desktop OS since 1999. Many governments have adopted it as their sole desktop OS as well, including Munich Germany. It works great, as long as you keep in mind its limitations (just like any OS, or anything at all for that matter). If you're trying to use it as a clone for Windows, it's going to fail; it simply isn't going to work well if you try to run it in an environment that absolutely needs to be 100% compatible with Windows software and standards. However, this is true for Mac OSX too, and I don't ever see anyone saying "Mac OS is not a serious desktop OS".