Clearly intellectually ambitious. I just hope their reach doesn't too far exceed their grasp. It'd be disappointing if they're all "The Questions Of The Ages" and then the answers turn out to be cliche ho-hum. But that's surprisingly hard to avoid--the thing about the Big Questions is that, y'know, lots of very smart people have speculated about 'em for a long time; coming up with cooler answers is very hard.
But I give them kudos for guts!

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Quoting: dubigrasuI think many of you are disappointed in SteamOS status because you are actually disappointed by the Steam Machines.
But remember that the purpose of the SteamOS in itself (as a distro) is only to run the Steam Client, which it does fine. Other than a newer Mesa for AMD users (and maybe more frequent updates) there's not much you can ask from it. It already does its job.

Actually, I think most of the discussion has been about Steam Machines, not about SteamOS. Your point about the purpose of SteamOS, as in just the OS itself, is quite accurate . . . but that's why there isn't all that much point talking about SteamOS and I don't think anyone much has been doing so. Basically SteamOS itself, not including user experience issues involved in the Steam client/Big Picture, is pretty boring.
To the extent they have been talking about SteamOS, they've actually been discussing a broader definition of "OS" to include the user experience it gives out of the box (and so things like integration of multimedia sources, in the way that consoles today tend to provide). This broadening is not unreasonable IMO. It's true that in SteamOS technically the OS is separate from the main user interface, the Steam Client, which can be used outside of the OS. But SteamOS is envisioned as a competitor to console OSes for which this is generally not true. So if you're going to talk about the things that PS4 does in its OS versus the things that a machine running SteamOS does not do, it's going to get pretty persnickety to note that the things SteamOS doesn't do wouldn't technically be part of the "OS" in the case of SteamOS. So for a lot of purposes I don't think it's a really useful distinction to insist on, in that it would lead to more confusion rather than less (and I think is actually doing so in this discussion thread).

All that said, I think there is actually room to criticize SteamOS at the OS level. There have been some decent updates just lately, but overall Steam OS has been lagging behind in its use of relevant drivers and other infrastructure relevant to graphics and gaming. This is a bad thing in something whose main purpose (absent actual Steam Machines) is to act as a reference OS for game developers. I suppose there might be arguments that SteamOS should stay fairly conservative to increase the chances that, if something works on SteamOS, it will work on many distros. But the improvements in Linux graphics-related abilities has been fast, making it worth taking advantage of them, while adding newer versions is fairly easy in most Linux distros. So I think it would be useful for SteamOS to be more up to date.

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I too have placed money in position of mouth. This interview was only a mild prompt, though--I've been intending to get this for a while.

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I like Car Wars, but I have to admit that green-and-black outliney retro-futuristic look would probably drive me nuts after a while.

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The lurking downer here is just that clearly Linux numbers in China are really amazingly low. China is huge, and probably will continue to gain influence over time; there being zip-all Linux there is a Bad Thing. We know some of the reasons behind it, I knew there wasn't a lot of Linux use in China, but I never realized we were wiped out this completely there.

As to the survey results themselves, I really have no more faith in this uptick than in previous more gloomy results.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: GuestGNU/Linux users can afford to ditch Valve. Something else would fill the void, quite easily.

It was literally decades before Valve filled the void in the first place. If we abandon Valve, how many more decades will we wait before someone else replaces them?

Valve only did anything as a backup plan. Gaming was growing before they did anything, even desura was there first. If Valve get uppity, I would simply go elsewhere. Power is with the users in the end, and it's good to remind companies of this sometimes.

I think you're a bit naive about this. Microsoft does not retain a desktop monopoly more than 20 years after Win95 because power is with the users in the end. Well, maybe "in the end"--as Keynes said about market equilibrium in the long run, "In the long run, we are all dead".
Monopoly power exists. Perhaps equally important, network effects are powerful; every major network* that the Linux platform is shut out of reinforces its status as a second-class citizen. Steam is a very major network; deliberately shutting ourselves out of it would reinforce the status of Linux as a second class citizen. That would be a really stupid strategic move if one wants Linux use on the desktop to prosper.

Not that any of this matters. Vanishingly few people are going to leave Steam because of something like this; calling for a boycott is an irrelevance.

* "Network" should be taken very broadly here to include any software ecosystem thingie that people on other platforms can and do use a lot. So for instance, MS Office, or DirectX. That's why it would be good if Vulkan supplanted DirectX 12, and it's good that Office runs on Wine (even though I personally don't like Office and never use it outside of work).

Microsoft may dominate desktop right now. They did so in the server space once upon a time. Funny what happened there.

You are mistaken. MS never had a server monopoly or even very close. Unix was always big; Linux just gradually became the biggest Unix.
The major reason MS were unable to establish such a monopoly was that they sucked so bad as a server for a number of years that the differences were readily measurable in money. That's much more difficult to establish on the desktop.
The situations are not remotely comparable.
But if you want a comparison, server Linux did not prosper by doing things like reject Samba. Desktop Linux will not prosper by doing things like reject Steam (or for that matter GoG's Galaxy if we can get our mitts on it). Not that you personally should use it if it doesn't fit your needs.

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If it's cheap I'd consider getting a copy just to see all the different doodles characters.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: GuestGNU/Linux users can afford to ditch Valve. Something else would fill the void, quite easily.

It was literally decades before Valve filled the void in the first place. If we abandon Valve, how many more decades will we wait before someone else replaces them?

Valve only did anything as a backup plan. Gaming was growing before they did anything, even desura was there first. If Valve get uppity, I would simply go elsewhere. Power is with the users in the end, and it's good to remind companies of this sometimes.

I think you're a bit naive about this. Microsoft does not retain a desktop monopoly more than 20 years after Win95 because power is with the users in the end. Well, maybe "in the end"--as Keynes said about market equilibrium in the long run, "In the long run, we are all dead".
Monopoly power exists. Perhaps equally important, network effects are powerful; every major network* that the Linux platform is shut out of reinforces its status as a second-class citizen. Steam is a very major network; deliberately shutting ourselves out of it would reinforce the status of Linux as a second class citizen. That would be a really stupid strategic move if one wants Linux use on the desktop to prosper.

Not that any of this matters. Vanishingly few people are going to leave Steam because of something like this; calling for a boycott is an irrelevance.

* "Network" should be taken very broadly here to include any software ecosystem thingie that people on other platforms can and do use a lot. So for instance, MS Office, or DirectX. That's why it would be good if Vulkan supplanted DirectX 12, and it's good that Office runs on Wine (even though I personally don't like Office and never use it outside of work).

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These do seem to be cases of copyright infringement, but for the most part don't seem to be cases of open source code being ripped off. Rather, in the summaries and linked posts I see again and again references to proprietary non-commercial code, which I take to be closed-source blobs with licenses which allow sharing but not resale.
Thus the problem is mostly people violating closed source licenses which do not allow commercial use. I had been intending to ask whether these folks have talked to the Free Software Foundation, who might be able to help and/or give useful legal advice--but if the issue is non-Free software, that might not be a relevant question.

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I want to build the boat from Waterworld. It was a crappy movie, but that sailing boat was by far the best character.

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