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SteamOS

store.steampowered.com

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Re: SteamOS

#121

Post by hamburglar »

rkalla wrote: post #26

This is effectively the software-only equivalent of a console launch. Is anyone else skeptical that they can motivate publishers to spend time/money porting their games to the Linux platform? Valve certainly has a better chance than most at pulling this off (and likely enough user/market data to make this seem like a valid investment) I am still super skeptical that these publishers are going to spend the time portin…

I'm skeptical that they can convince regular people to put PC hardware in their living rooms. Microsoft and manufacturers made a ton of effort in this direction last decade, and it wasn't half bad: Windows Media Center was a pretty decent user interface for TV-watching, and lots of "living room PC" form factors popped up (remember the ubiquitous Shuttle case?). But nobody cares. It was just too weird and clunky for the average consumer to put OEM PC hardware in his AV stack. Hard core geeks will do it, but that's not a big enough audience. Maybe that's changed enough to make this work, but I kind of doubt it.

Re: SteamOS

#122

Post by xpose2000 »

"In SteamOS, we have achieved significant performance increases in graphics processing".

I assume they mean in comparison to other Linux OSs. Beating windows drivers seems a bit far fetched?

Re: SteamOS

#123

Post by siphr »

rocky1138 wrote: post #106
siphr wrote: post #15

The idea itself is not novel as such. Just like every other company the difficulty is having to disassociate yourself from Windows. As it stands the store relies heavily on Windows titles. The real feat would be if they managed to get the whole catalog across to SteamOS by under the hood cross compatibility layer.

It would be an amazing boon to Linux and gaming on Linux if Valve bought (or heavily funded + added resources to) Crossover/WINE.

Exactly what is going through my mind :)

Re: SteamOS

#124

Post by viraptor »

th0br0 wrote: post #109

As someone who's had a lot of fun writing game hacks for ET:QW and QuakeLive back in the days and while I greatly enjoy seeing this move to Linux, I'm quite worried about game hacks on SteamOS. There are so many attack vectors on Linux and, currently, VALVE's Anti Cheat (VAC v3) does not, as far as I know, cover any of those. You can still inject your hack via LD_PRELOAD + detouring dlsym/dlopen. Even were that not p…

Is there even an expectation that anti-cheat utilities can work? They're worse than DRM - unless the anti-cheat software is certified and your system can do hardware trusted execution, it's going to be worked around. (it's most likely also possible in case of trusted execution...)

Re: SteamOS

#125

Post by venomsnake »

jknt1164 wrote: post #103

I'm not a software dev, so this might be a really dumb question, but how hard is it to port/co-develop Windows/Mac games to Linux? From what I can find out, PS3 is based on FreeBSD and WiiU is a heavily modified version of Linux, possibly Android. XBOX obviously Windows. Would it be that much harder to also have a SteamOS version in the mix too.

According to John Carmack its a few weeks worth to port, and maybe even less to extend wine.

But that is like saying that according to Superman going to the moon is a few minutes of flight.

Re: SteamOS

#126

Post by div »

johndavidback wrote: post #98
JonSkeptic wrote: post #52

How long till we see the "SteamOS on Raspberry Pi" threads?

Ha, the first thing I searched for on this thread was "raspberry". I just got mine last week. However, there's no way in the world that thing will be able to run modern games.

I have a spare Pi laying around, and I'm hopeful at least. According to the SteamOS page there's a streaming mode where you basically do the processing on your Desktop / Server, and SteamOS just takes care of input and streaming.

Fingers crossed !

Re: SteamOS

#127

Post by Mikeb85 »

xSwag wrote: post #45

So what is the chance that Gaben will make everything proprietary? Releasing games for the SteamOS with license restrictions to make them unplayable on other Linux distros? What if he makes a deal with AMD/NVidia to make drivers only for SteamOS which won't be available to normal Linux users? I don't want linux to go towards that direction.

Remember, Gabe used to work at MS. He knows how they work, and knows the pros and cons of the way they do business. Nowadays, you have companies like IBM, Oracle, Google, Amazon, and many others embracing Linux, none of them have ruined the 'open-ness' of Linux, they've all contributed. Gabe should be smart enough to know that all he needs is a platform on which his ecosystem can run. Chrome is a platform, Steam is a platform - it's in their interest to make their platform as portable as possible - in otherwords run on any Linux base...

Re: SteamOS

#129

Post by dzddd »

alisnic wrote: post #11

The biggest benefit as I see it, is that the users won't have the hassle of setting something up: just install the OS and login. No drivers ppa, no recovery console, no xorg.conf patches. If this is true, Valve will do something very big for the gaming community.

I don't believe that they'll even focus on users installing the OS, just like 99% of Windows users don't install their own OS. Valve will provide the reference SteamBox and encourage other manufacturers to release their own SteamOS-preinstalled boxes, giving users hardware options.

Re: SteamOS

#130

Post by zurn »

kaolinite wrote: post #82
rkalla wrote: post #26

This is effectively the software-only equivalent of a console launch. Is anyone else skeptical that they can motivate publishers to spend time/money porting their games to the Linux platform? Valve certainly has a better chance than most at pulling this off (and likely enough user/market data to make this seem like a valid investment) I am still super skeptical that these publishers are going to spend the time portin…

Tonnes of AAA titles are 'available' on FreeBSD - the PS3. Publishers won't be bringing their games to Linux, they'll be bringing them to SteamOS.

Has there ever been any confirmation for the "PS3 runs FreeBSD" rumor? I've just seen FreeBSD mentioned on Sony's page listing open source components, along with stuff like expat and freetype. They've probably just lifted some bits from FreeBSD.
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