It's frustrating, I understand that, but it's a necessary move for Valve. Steam Machines are meant to compete with consoles, they have to have the same level of idiot-proofing and convenience as consoles. Anything and everything that's external to the base SteamOS system libraries that's necessary for a game to run needs to be included in the game setup itself. Plain and simple, mom needs to be able to pick a Steam Machine off the shelf at her local Walmart, and when Little Johnny unpacks the Steam Machine and plugs it in, every single game that has a SteamOS icon needs to work out of the box with zero extra steps, period.

As for the multiple icon idea, a tux icon if the game works on Linux and an additional SteamOS icon if the game works on SteamOS out of the box, I'm all for that, provided that Valve makes that abundantly clear on their storefront so that there is no confusion.

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It's surprisingly good as a mouse on the desktop. It's not as good as my trackball, but it's shockingly competent. The haptic feedback is really good. It's subtle and... it's hard to describe, but it feels "right".

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I imagine there will be growing pains in the first few months, as with all new hardware. Heck, it's not even officially out yet. We're pioneers, trailblazers, intrepid explorers creating a path for future generations to follow, just like Lewis & Clark, Vasco de Gama, Ferdinand Magellan, and Zheng He.

Okay, that last part might be overblown a bit, just slightly, though. :P

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Mine just arrived!



As a Xubuntu user, this guide will be useful. Thanks, Liam.

Edit: Sexy hardware pics!

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Quoting: GuestI can't even understand why they leave AMD.

Q: Why do the majority of people leave one job for another job?

A: Money.

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I don't care about this game in the slightest bit, but if this leads to Tales from the Borderlands coming to Linux then this is awesome news.

Funny thing, I don't care for playing Borderlands at all, in terms of gameplay. I picked up Borderlands 2 when it first made its way to Linux and wound up hating the game. I hated the gameplay, hated how the weapons handled/felt, hated the bullet sponge bosses, and hated the skill trees, but I really liked the world and the characters. So when Tales from the Borderlands was announced, that got my attantion. A story-driven game in that world without any of the crappy FPS gameplay and weaksauce levelling was music to my ears.

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I wonder if the wildly different experiences on Linux could have anything to do with window managers and/or compositing. What are folks here running? I'm using Xfce 4.12 (Xfwm4) here with compositing turned off (I never run compositing, don't care for it).

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These are sad times for AMD, how far this company has fallen. The last thing we need is a monopoly, that would be a terrible situation for everyone not named Nvidia and Intel. I used to be a big fan of AMD. Not only did they keep Intel honest for years, they introduced new technologies and pushed hardware barriers. I miss the golden days of the Athlon64 era. My Opteron 160 was such a beast (overclocked by 800 MHz on stock air) back then and served me well for many years. Then the Phenom fiasco happened and AMD started going down hill. For a short while, it seemed they were going to right the ship when Phenom II came out (coincidentally my last AMD desktop CPU was a Phenom II), a respectable step in the right direction. Then Bulldozer happened, a disappointment so deep it made Phenom look mild by comparison. They've fallen so far behind Intel that Intel has stopped bothering investing in advancing IPC and has concentrated almost fully on power efficiency in their quest to push into the lucrative mobile market currently dominated by ARM. An i5 or i7 from 4 generations ago is barely slower than a comparable i5 or i7 from today, in part because Intel has no competition in mid-high end desktop CPUs, they are competing with themselves (hitting hardware limitation walls is also to blame).

AMDs one saving grace with their recent troubled times on the CPU side has been their GPU division (formerly ATI), which has generally been competitive with Nvidia (sometimes superior). Recently, I've heard reports of their marketshare slipping, and now they're losing developers to competition.

I really hope they right the ship on both CPU and GPU. Zen better be a home run.

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It's running well for me so far. A good number of people are reporting that it crashes a lot. For me, it's only crashed once in over 4 hours of play. That's once more than I'd like, but much better than for some people. Maybe the game is more stable on Linux? It couild just be dumb luck on my part. Anyway, I hope they get it patched soon so it's stable for everyone. Other than that, no problems to report outside of a weird custom portrait bug that can easily be worked around by changing gender then changing back during character creation.

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Quoting: GuestI’ve been following their blog for a while, and the game sure looks good, but I still have no idea what the gameplay will be like. Walking simulator? First person puzzler? Action? Adventure?

I feel the same way. Visually it's striking and we know it's first person perspective, but beyond that, how does it play? What do you do? Is there combat? Is there stealth? Are there puzzles? Is it mostly exploration?

If I had to guess, going on what I saw in the video, I'd say walking simulator, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. People tend to use that as a derogatory term, but I can totally be down with a walking simulator provided the story is interesting enough and/or there are plenty of interesting places to explore off the beaten path.

I hope it's not another survival game. Lord knows we have enough of those already.

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