Quoting: Quote from n30p1r4t3Unless they upgrade the graphics, there's really no point in this for me. Granted it would be better played on a pc, but I've already bought this game twice (ouya and phone).

If it's an Android game why such high CPU requirements? Ultra bloated Java?

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The previous iteration showed that it was using off the shelf parts, with the only custom thing being the case which was modified to mount the GPU at a at a 90 degree angle by way of a PCIe riser card just like the old ISA risers in your ancient 386 desktop boxes.

It makes for a more efficient use of space, though on a modern mobo it does obstruct the rest of the expansion card slots, hence why the original Steambox used an ITX based system as ITX mobos usually have a laptop style miniPCIe card slot for wifi and a 16x card slot for a full size GPU.

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Quoting: Quote from QantouriscAlso on top of the not-getting-survey: how accurate are these tests ? Are they accurate to 0.03% ?!?

In your Steam client go to

Help > System Information

This is the data sent to Valve for these surveys. Why they don't just gather this data at login I'll never understand.

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Quoting: Quote from ShmerlDistrowatch is not reliable for any estimations, they write so explicitly. All that you mentioned above aren't comprehensive statistics. It works by the method "if you talk about it enough, people will start accepting it as such". That's how I see the claim that Ubuntu is most used, and until some solid numbers can demonstrate it, I'll keep it as unproven in my view.

Console OS by definition needs to be optimized to the maximum like crazy, that's what all PlayStations and Xboxes do, so actually Gentoo which is bent on optimization makes all the sense for Valve (I'm not using Gentoo, just showing an argument).

Ubuntu won't remain (and isn't, the way I see it) a fattest target, thanks to their shortsighted Mir decision, which will essentially severely isolate them from everyone else. So, from system design perspective, betting on Ubuntu is simply bad. Canonical can of course come back to their senses and drop this Mir obsession, but why should Valve wait for that to happen? Even downstream users of Ubuntu, like Kubuntu and etc. were pretty concerned with it, and contemplated how they are going to maintain Wayland integration on their own. So, why should Valve getting involved with this headache to begin with? Just thinking out loud, we of course don't know what Valve actually plans to do.

I say this as a Mint Mate edition user.

Again, wrong, there where plenty of overly hyped desktop distros over they years, am I the only one here that has been around long enough to have used Lindows and Mandrake? Neither gained more then a passing mention by anyone because while they where easier to make into a workable desktop distro then Debian or SuSE they where still quite broken. Every nerd out there hates Ubuntu for getting things right enough that you could sit anyone in front of it and they could use it.

Not true about console OSs, the only thing that the console does is allow a stripped down OS with a lower level access to the GPU hardware to get more out of it then higher level languages like OpenGL or DirectX can allow.

The history of consoles is one of custom hardware to have a captive market and to extract licensing fees from the game devs. You want your game on the Wii? Cough up the cash for a dev kit and the Wii logo on your box or prepare to be sued.

The last thing SteamOS needs to be is tweaked for performance and as such suffer a loss in compatibility. The whole point is that it's an open platform running on off the shelf hardware. That hardware is already plenty fast. Will it have the longevity of an unchanging set of hardware that determined and talented devs can squeeze blood from a stone with in 5-7 years? Probably not, but that isn't the point, the point is that in 5 years if your CPU has the beef to handle the game you want to play but your GPU doesn't you can order a new one off Newegg and keep the same box chugging along for year to come.

Again, if everyone is already using Ubuntu how exactly are they going to lose anything by going to Mir? The only thing that is going to happen is that as time goes on the rest of the distros will lose compatibility with commercial software and as such slip ever further into irrelevance.

Who cares about down-stream? They will patch it if they want any kind of relevance. Remember, even Mir is open source.

So yeah, this is my last and final post on this topic. You can't see your own hand in front of your face let alone the big picture. Hit me up on IRC if you can come up with an actual argument, but it had better be well thought out.

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So netstats, download counts, hundreds of magazine and web articles and hundreds of thousands of Youtube videos all backed up now by Valve never happened?

I take it you think Distrowatch is the only reliable metric?

So, killing 2 birds with one stone is a foreign concept to you? What is the biggest problem facing the indie developers and the biggest complaint of the AAA game devs? The cost of having to test against so many distros. If you are Valve you want to mitigate this to increase sales not just on SteamOS or on Linux but on both. So you base SteamOS on the fattest target and thus minimize the testing requirements needed between the 2 platforms allowing for increased profit.

Wayland, Weston, Mir, it's all open source and nobody with a clue give a god damn what one comes out on top at the end of the day as the code will just be copied and pasted into your pet distro that only 5 people have ever used.

Google switched to Gentoo because it's source based and they are building for various ARM platforms. To get the most out of these platforms they need to compile from source.

Argument over.

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Sure they did, Ubuntu has been by far and away the most popular desktop distro for nearly a decade.

Are they as widely used as Red Hat/CentOS or SuSE are in terms of total number of systems it is installed in? Probably not, however, Red Hat/CentOS and SuSE are not desktop distros, they are server and dedicated workstation focused.

They are most defiantly not what the vast majority would pick to use as their living room computer for the kids to mess with.

And YOU think that Valve wouldn't just say that SteamOS isn't Ubuntu based just to avoid THIS SPECIFIC ARGUMENT FROM RAGING IN THE FORUMS FOREVER then you are just naive.

Because that is exactly what I and anyone else in their position would do, lie to the belligerent end users, to save time and money on duplicating effort needlessly.

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Quoting: Quote from liamdaweOh look I started a distro war by going slightly offtopic in my article, have people still not grown up in the community yet?

It doesn't matter if I stated what I believe is the most popular distro, there isn't a single measure to determin it, it's just what I believe, I will try to not go so off-topic in my editorials in future.

Seriously though, distro wars have to stop, it's pathetic.

Agreed. Theres still way too much nerd rage in the OSS community and it has never once served us well.

Until that nerd rage is finally extinguished Linux as a Desktop OS is destined to languish forever in the 1% bracket. And I say this as someone who has been using Linux for 15 years, it's not as bad as it oncewas where the reply to half of my questions was "RTFM n00b" but thats the attitude that killed the first wave of commercial gaming on Linux, lets not repeat the mistakes of the past.

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Quoting: Quote from ShmerlAbout why Valve could drop Ubuntu - it doesn't make any sense from practical point. When Ubuntu can remain the only isolated distro using Mr, why should Valve risk making it their primary base?

Simple, if 80% of the Linux gamers/Valve Linux customers are using Ubuntu and therefore will be using Mir then not supporting it is shooting yourself in the foot.

If you don't like that situation do something about it, until then Ubuntu is THE target to build Linux native games against and other distros will have to adapt to Ubuntu if they want to keep their gamers happy.

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Quoting: Quote from Joe

Quoting: Quote from n30p1r4t3One word: Apple.

"Hi I'm a mac," "and I'm a PC."

This! I've written it a while ago on this site that it was Apple who got this nonsense started. It irks me as well that this has become the marketing standard now as it is just plain wrong from a technical perspective. It was pretty smart however on Apple's side, as it made them look positively different while at the same time lumping the other options (Windows, and preemptively Linux) together and then making this group look bad.

Kids these days... Not everything in existence happened in the las 5 years and Apple is not to blame for this one, nor most of the things they are used as a scapegoat for.

Thus a history lesson is in order.

As was pointed out before. PC has been used to describe every x86 box running DOS or Windows ever since IBM created the first PC, the IBM Personal Computer 5150 32 years ago. Though the term "Personal Computer" goes back at least as far as 1972, possibly older.

It stuck because every knockoff used the claim that it was "PC compatible".

TL;DR Blame IBM or Compaq.

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But it would help the casual PC gamer at large to use the same icon as the case badges. If the sticker on your laptop looks like this your OS can run this game that has been tested to run on stuff as weak as Intel GMA IGPs.

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