To illustrate what I said earlier about the slight gain in performance with SteamOS session (steamcompmgr):
http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1504257-DE-STEAMOS5526&obr_sor=y&obr_scalar=y&obr_hgv=steamos-session [External Link]

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Quoting: KeyrockThanks. Good to know. I'll still stick with Xubuntu for now, I see no compelling reason to switch when everything works fine and there are no significant performance advantages to SteamOS right now. I'll probably give it another look in a year or so, when it has matured some more. It would be cool if someone made a SteamOS fork with Xfce as the default desktop rather than GNOME. I'm rather partial to my mouse logo desktop.

Most games are running better and smoother in SteamOS-session (using Valve's compositor) but not by much. That's the only advantage I can think of.
Oh, and there's no tearing.

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[quote=Keyrock]

Quoting: dubigrasu

Quoting: Keyrock

Quoting: dubigrasuThere is a FPS counter included, but for whatever reason still hidden and it takes some minor tweaking to activate it (min 1:10):
How does recording in SteamOS work? Last time I checked, almost a year ago, Big Picture Mode and the desktop were separate sessions. Is it still this way? If so, does that cause any issues with recording?

BPM and the desktop are still separated.
Video recording is not something included by default in SteamOS, you need to add it yourself (two ffmpeg scripts basically).
On my system (while on Big Picture mode) for recording I press a combo on my gamepad and press it again to stop. The video recording goes directly to RAM and moved to disk when finished.
The recording is done with the CPU so it does alter the performance a bit, but you could use NVENC (for Nvidia cards) with minimal impact though.

Okay, so it's doable but requires jumping through some hoops. I'll stick with Xubuntu. Thanks for the info.

There is a community version of SteamOS called Vaporos which has all this (slightly different implementation than mine though) and some other goodies (like KODI) included by default.
https://github.com/steamos-community/vaporos [External Link]
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/vaporos [External Link]

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Quoting: adolsonThe reasons I'm not using SteamOS primarily yet are to do with non-gaming needs. When/if they get apps for Netflix and YouTube and streaming from a MediaTomb server built into SteamOS, without having to use the browser or hack around at the system level, then I will use it. Until then, I'm more comfortable in a real Debian environment.

I'm still waiting for Valve to add a Netflix app for SteamOS but with minimal effort you can add them already to SteamOS-session.
I'm using Google-Chrome for this but you could probably use the built-in browser since is Netflix ready.
View video on youtube.com

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[quote=Keyrock]

Quoting: dubigrasuThere is a FPS counter included, but for whatever reason still hidden and it takes some minor tweaking to activate it (min 1:10):
How does recording in SteamOS work? Last time I checked, almost a year ago, Big Picture Mode and the desktop were separate sessions. Is it still this way? If so, does that cause any issues with recording?

BPM and the desktop are still separated.
Video recording is not something included by default in SteamOS, you need to add it yourself (two ffmpeg scripts basically).
On my system (while on Big Picture mode) for recording I press a combo on my gamepad and press it again to stop. The video recording goes directly to RAM and moved to disk when finished.
The recording is done with the CPU so it does alter the performance a bit, but you could use NVENC (for Nvidia cards) with minimal impact though.

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Quoting: morbiusWhat I would like to know is weather SteamOS has a desktop-like interface and wealth of different purpose software in the repositories, so it can replace me Ubuntu on the desktop.

It does have a Desktop interface (you need to explicitly enable it) but is pretty barren in repositories unless you add Debian repositories.

At this point you could just install two SteamOS packages and get a somewhat similar SteamOS experience while keeping all the Ubuntu software you're accustomed with.

I'm not talking here about starting the BPM from your steam desktop client, but installing "steamcompmgr", which is the SteamOS compositor used by SteamOS like described here:
http://www.webupd8.org/2013/12/install-steamos-session-in-ubuntu.html [External Link]

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With that said I am hoping to at least see the Linux marketshare on the Steam Hardware Survey to be around 1.3% by the end of 2016.

Unfortunately you don't get the survey in question in SteamOS (session), so whatever Steam machines out there they don't participate in those statistics.

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There is a FPS counter included, but for whatever reason still hidden and it takes some minor tweaking to activate it (min 1:10):
View video on youtube.com

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Quoting: XzylI maybe alone in this respect but since I have been using Linux since the mid 90's I got my jollies playing things in Wine, the few native games or on other emulators just because I thought it was so cool to be able to do things on Linux (as far as gaming goes and was usually floored it worked) , now that it has come so far people are comparing it to Windows and in Window's last bastion. How wicked is that?

Not alone in this regard, I remember having my first game working in Wine: Shadow Man, which at that time (1999) was "hot". It was more of a slideshow, but hey, it worked.

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If that wasn't enough SteamOS (2.0) performs worse than SteamOS (1.0) itself.

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