Quoting: s_dOne the second count, that's a pretty big bullet to dodge, for sure!  If SteamOS is functional & speedy enough for my other games as well, I might ditch my Ubuntu LTS gaming install.  That is, as long as the Steam client can be easily shut down and such, i.e., if it's truly free, SteamOS should be a great Linux gaming distro even minus the Steam bits.

Yeah, that's a good point -- I have room for another root partition or two on my SSD in addition to the current ubuntu and gentoo, maybe SteamOS will be next!

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Bah don't say Starcraft-like fix -- the frantic micromanagment always irritated me too much to play it. Uber promised to not do that, and so far all the gameplay videos have looked promising. I'll find out for myself soon, after the email with beta download link arrives!

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Quoting: s_dHaha, well last week, with the exception of one "hedging my bets" version of my third prediction, I've pretty much called the majority of this week's announcements.  The only prediction that hasn't been fulfilled is my HL3 prediction :)

The streaming thing is their alternate to wine, so it doesn't seem like Valve will be pushing wine ports. For high-end games, they want native ports for optimal performance, so I think we dodged that bullet. It all sounds promising so far, and I'm looking forward to seeing what the Steambox offerings will be next year. 

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Quoting: rick01457I need 5 more steam friends (sad isn't it). Please add me - rick01457

PM me for an add if you don't collect enough from this post; I don't know how fast it will get buried with a flood of other comments

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Can I hack this box? Run another OS? Change the hardware? Install my own software? Use it to build a robot?

Sure.

Can I download the OS to try it out?

You will be able to download it (including the source code, if you're into that) but not yet.

I think this sounds about like what we were hoping for. I'm a little disappointed the public hardware won't be available till next year, but the open beta first does correspond to how they released Steam for Linux with a call for beta testers. Will be interesting to see the lineup of hardware coming out next year.

Next announcement really does sound like a controller one like people were speculating earlier.

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As already noted, Valve is still pushing native ports with this strategy. Streaming will need to have good performance, but top performance would be native games. Won't matter for slow games, but there are plenty of AAA titles where it does matter.

My take is that Valve has a good record so far of telling upstream developers what they have found, so this is a good thing for Linux overall. Also should be a new source of nice Linux-compatible hardware from manufacturers who otherwise wouldn't care about Linux, like Chromebooks where you can install another distro on it if desired. 

I think SteamOS will be another debian offshoot, and ubuntu will diverge off by itself until they give up on mir. Or, maybe mir will have some graphics performance breakthrough that will lure Valve over into their corner, who knows ;)

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Going the ChromeOS route to partner with various hardware manufacturers instead of designing their own does make sense for a software company. Wonder what the price range is going to be?

I hope the streaming feature does help Steam boxen gain traction with non-Linux gamers, though it will be of zero use in this household.

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Ran some SSR tests today - convenient and great results, what a nice app

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It's going to be awefully ironic if Gabe Newell gives the LinuxCon keynote talking about how PC gaming is out-innovating consoles because the hardware is much more open, saying that closed systems are not the future of gaming, bringing up open source Linux as being able to unify the PC/console gaming experience with an allusion to the upcoming Steambox ... and then Valve comes out with a locked-down Steambox that only runs ValveLinux TM.

Is Gabe Newell known for making public announcements that make him look like an idiot? Not to my knowledge! I think Liam is right to be optimistic about openness of at least the first couple generations of Steambox. Not "Free" as in FSF, but open as in normal Linux gaming hardware with binary graphics drivers.

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Quoting: BumadarI think its naive to think they will put a generic ubuntu/fedora/opensuse on that box with the opensource drivers and steam pre-installed.

Don't you think they might be working on a low-end model of Steambox with the latest-greatest onboard Intel graphics? It would explain why Valve was working with Intel on mesa fixes. However the first model will indeed be nvidia with binary drivers, the model that will go out to all the reviewers and have performance compared to the big consoles.

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