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Re: 3 Steam Announcements

I'll be interested to see the details. How they balance these two things.

I may be missing something, as I don't mess with Apple at all, so no idea what they offer in the line of "cheap games that are easy to buy and install" but Steam has pioneered the online download of PC titles. Having it instantly available (well, after download time) is a large boon to many PC gamers, and the model has been copied or piggy backed upon Steam itself, by a lot of companies. Couple this with (and this is where I think the larger difference comes into play) the offering of AAA titles / Indie titles / Classic titles at often reduced (eventually) prices, the ability to have access to those games, and often the saved data associated with it, and you get an all in one package that steam is able to deliver, and do it quite well. And it isn't just Candy Crush Saga or whatever...it's full blown titles with minimal DRM intrusion. It's a big deal.

As far as the walled garden being okay, keeping piracy locked down, etc...I think Steam has a fundamental understanding of why what they do works. It's often been said across the interwebs, and I agree with it, that when consumers have a an easily accessible, reasonably priced outlet to turn to for the items they want to purchase, I think more often than not, they'll take the legal way, if it's easy and convenient enough...and the price is right.

Steam does all of this with ease, so I don't think people are looking to this OS as being a hackers / pirates delight, but more of an avenue that will tie all of Steam's offerings together in to one place.

Too bad the **AA's can't figure this out.
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The bad thing I see with this is that Linux drivers are not all that great or most times non existent for newer hardware.

Is Valve going to be able to remedy this?
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I didn't really notice any difference between the driver updates for either one (HTPC is on Nvidia, PC is on AMD.)

My only issue with AMD drivers is that I had a lot more trouble with older games on the PC than I did on the HTPC and had to revert to an older version a couple of times... but AMD has been flawless with all the new releases so far.

As for SteamOS and drivers... while Valve probably won't be releasing it's own drivers, if it gets popular and people start using it, it will be only a matter of time before the manufacturers start taking Linux driver support more seriously or lose business, especially for GPUs. The biggest market share comes from gamers, and gamers are really good at picking out hardware based on little things like that and then sharing it with everyone. And furtunately, PC hardware manufacturers pay attention to these things and usually follow the trend pretty quick.

Gabe said it before, they are going down this route because he believes that MS is going down the route of Apple with Windows 8. They want an app store where every software sale gives a commission to MS instead of letting companies to be able to freely sell their software themselves.

Besides, it's a good move. It's hard to have a beast machine in your living room without it taking up too much space, being noisy and expensive to have enough power to run new games. Running the Windows games on your main PC and then streaming it to a small, quiet and inexpensive box in your living room would be a very good solution for many.

I used to have Linux on the HTPC up until about a year ago, Windows only now as I stopped bothering to reboot it to Linux when I didn't play (as much as I loved the stability and the small clean install of Linux, it's not worth the hassle just for movies and music.)

And I had recently re-installed Linux on my main PC, but also used it daily up until about about 4 years ago.

So I didn't have Linux on both at the same time, but from memory, I did not notice any big differences in the updates from either company and found both of them working fine.

OK good to know, your HTPC had an Nvidia card though, and I don't really have a problem with Nvidia's Linux support, they offer closed source packages but they're relatively easy to install and get updated regularly.

There's been a lot of complaining about AMD's Linux GPU support, and they recently fired their Linux devs, so currently AMD GPU support appears to be weak, unless you're confirming the contrary.
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How recent did that happen with the firing? I actually heard the opposite, that AMD really picked up their Linux support ever since Steam released a Linux version and started converting their games to Linux.

While I haven't been using Linux on my PC with the AMD GPU extensively, I did use it to try out and play the HL series, TF2, X3 and a few indie games and they worked as good as it did in Windows.

This would have been around November of last year (right before the Steam for Linux launch) so things may have changed for the better in the meantime.
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Yeah, I found the news of them picking up their Linux support came around this summer when I was looking into the different distros before installing it on my PC. I guess they are taking their Linux support a lot more seriously now that there is a possible market for it.

If SteamOS succeeds, I imagine that both NVidia and AMD will only continue to improve their Linux support now..

OK, I'm actually a little confused on what this all actually means. Are they trying to compete with Windows basically? Are they saying that gamers in the future should be installing this OS on their rigs instead of Win7/Win8? Or are they saying this is just the new software for their new fancy little Steam box they are going to announce in another day or two?

But it's not 'just another distro'. It's Steam. It's practically the king of gaming for PCs where there are 5-6 million people logged in at any given moment, and more than 50 million users total (as of last year). Even if only 2% go with this, that's already 1 million users right there.

And these are users that spend serious money on hardware, not just someone having fun and installing linux on an old PC box to try it out.

Just because it is Steam doesn't mean those millions of users will jump ship to Linux, a lot just will not. Some of us may be excited and give it go but the winblows masses will not and slapping the Steam name on it won't change that.

It will end up being what many other distros do. Fall on the wayside with people saying "One day it will compete with Microsoft" where in reality, it will only be attempting to compete rather than actually doing so.
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Many other distros are open source projects with limited budget and with no particular purpose or anything special in it.

Valve is a multi-billion dollars corporation that has a very specific goal in mind, and has the resources and influence to make it happen.

And I didn't say everyone will jump ship. I said that even if a tiny 2% do it, it's already more than 1 million users to start with. In addition, they are releasing their own hardware that will probably already include SteamOS.

And Steam doesn't even need to compete with MS over the PC market, Steam is concentrating on the living room/HTPC part instead, where Linux is already very popular.

I consider myself a fairly hard core PC gamer, like most others here.

But regarding this Steam Box thing, or whatever it is, I have no reason to use this, ever. My Windows PC already plays every game I need it to. It already streams Netflix and plays movies perfectly. Why would I use this?

I'd gladly put this on a pc and never fire up windows again, if possible.
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