SteamOS | Hacker News Reader

SteamOS

store.steampowered.com

1,436 pointskmfrk513 comments

This is effectively the software-only equivalent of a console launch.

Is anyone else skeptical that they can motivate publishers to spend time/money porting their games to the Linux platform?

Valve certainly has a better chance than most at pulling this off (and likely enough user/market data to make this seem like a valid investment) I am still super skeptical that these publishers are going to spend the time porting their AAA releases to this platform.

A good chunk of the console games barely make it to PC/Windows as it is, let alone a PC/Linux platform... seems like a tough sell.

If the goal is an entertainment OS with streaming and DVR capabilities in addition to the few Linux compatible games on Steam, that's a bit different of a story but not a huge commercial win I don't think (unless they having some amazing partnerships planned with Netflix/Amazon/Vudu/Hulu for streaming that I am not thinking of).

If the goal is to make Steam into an entertainment platform (not just games) it is interesting to watch all these platforms converge on this "entertainment delivery pipeline" solution.

Unity has made good strides in making developers think about linux as a viable target for development (and streamlining the process).

I'd say there is hope. Especially as most (and I'm guessing here) PC revenue comes from Steam anyway.

There were some rumors about Crytek and Unreal guys wanting to support Linux, too. With these latest announcements, I'm sure they will now, if they weren't going to do it before.

Exactly. And why not put the players and developers on the same platform? It's a match made in heaven!

Moving toward an upstreaming, open-source, GNU/Linux platform means that not only do they have more fine-tuned control of everything, but also that there are _many_ more sets of eyes and hands to find/fix problems and to help contribute to the gaming and Linux ecosystem as a whole.

After seeing nVidia's CEO making his keynote for a new line of video cards on a Ubuntu powered laptop[1], I have no doubt that there are many companies other than Valve that see the great potential in this.

[1]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kIQWWJs_po

The announcement page claims all 3000 titles are available via streaming, similar to the OnLive service but only for your internal network, I'm guessing. Effectively working around the porting issue.

The streaming works if you have a beefy Windows machine in your house already, it's not a solution for people wanting a dedicated "Steam" console.

Granted it's a stop gap measure until they have more developers developing directly on OpenGL rather than Dx. But most people that are excited about this do have a fairly good gaming machine in their house already.

It is a brilliant tactic to migrate the considerable Steam base to the Steambox. It is transitional, of course, but brilliant for it.

Okay I have 1 beefy PC. I want a second machine upstairs.

Old Way) I have to spend all the money for equally good hardware. I also need a copy of Windows.

New Way) Just get something that can render YouTube videos well. I now have a second Gaming PC. No copy of Windows!

This opens up all the platforms depending on how they play the streaming thing. If they make this work well and release client apps on the mobile side, suddenly Steam has a domination of the whole home on a level that Microsoft has been playing at for years.

If you don't have a beefy machine, then you're probably not using Steam much anyway, which means you're not in their target demographic. (And if you were playing old games or small indies, you won't need a beefy machine to stream them).

It doesn't seem crazy that their target demographic might be people who'd otherwise buy a PS4 or Xbox; and they don't necessarily have a beefy gaming machine.

It seems to work like the nVidia Shield's streaming. Another computer on your home network handles the heavy lifting and streams the video output to your SteamOS box.

I've never had good luck with streaming a game, even on a local, wired connection. There's just way too much input lag.

That doesn't make any sense. If you can handle ~20ms of latency from your TV itself, how is <1ms of latency from a local ethernet connection a problem?

I really doubt an ethernet connection can push a full HD video frame in 1ms. The <1ms is for ping, which uses a really small network packet. Pushing 1080p HD video is a totally different matter.

ping uses whatever size packet you tell it to:

    $ ping -s 1450 192.168.11.10
    PING 192.168.11.10 (192.168.11.10): 1450 data bytes
    1458 bytes from 192.168.11.10: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=0.646 ms
    1458 bytes from 192.168.11.10: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=0.478 ms
    1458 bytes from 192.168.11.10: icmp_seq=2 ttl=255 time=0.469 ms

1080p video is nowhere near 1458 bytes.

For raw 720p RGBA you'd send: 1280 * 720 * 32 = 29,491,200 bits but obviously you're not going to do that. Suddenly you're not only sending data but also encoding / decoding it.

Indeed.. assuming 60fps, that works out to around 1.8 Gbps. Well within the range of HDMI, but well out of the range of your off-the-shelf router on ethernet.

..though 802.11ad is supposed to be out early 2014, and that maxes out around 7 gig, and has cooperation from the HDMI consortium to use it for streaming. I wonder if some kind of some kind of ultra-high-speed wireless dongle is in Steambox's future..

>1080p video is nowhere near 1458 bytes.

It doesn't matter, that's the point. Your MTU is almost certainly 1500 bytes. You are sending 1500 byte packets at the most. That does not cause latency. If you want to argue that we're incapable of encoding or decoding video with acceptable latency go right ahead, but doing it in response to me correcting a misconception about network latency doesn't make much sense.

Having worked on the particular issue of streaming real-time video over wireless, I can say that the main issue is not link latency.

The main lag comes from encoding/decoding. If you do it naively you encode frame-per-frame (encoding slices is more difficult), and the encoder does not only outputs iframes: you get partial frames that depend on both previous and future frames. Also the decoder does not always output frames in order. So you have to expect something around ~10 frames of latency, maybe less if you optimize everything well enough. That still means easily more than 100ms of lag.

The network is really not the main issue here.

What about scrapping the conversion to streaming video entirely and replacing it with a networked graphics protocol that allows one PC to draw on another's graphics natively?

It seems to me, intuitively, that the only ways to do that are:

1. Essentially equivalent to streaming, or

2. Essentially equivalent to normal CPU->GPU communication but over the network (and, thus, needing the bandwidth that local CPU->GPU communication has if you want to avoid slowing things down -- GigE wouldn't seem to be enough, much less WiFi, even if you consider only bandwidth and not latency.)

Well that would simplify things greatly of course, but then it means bit hit on the bandwidth.

I mean, a 720p60Hz stream in 4:2:0 (12 bits per pixel) still amounts to 663Mbits/s. You won't get that out of a gigabit link realistically (at least not over IP). Of course you could use a lightweight compression algorithm, but you'll have to divide this bandwidth by at least 5 to make it manageable for the average home network I'd say (I have absolutely nothing to back that last number, but 100Mbits/s doesn't look too scary...). And that's only for 720p remember.

I think if you plan to stream HD video over the network you have to encode and be clever about it.

>You won't get that out of a gigabit link realistically (at least not over IP)

I just got more than that using scp with no compression. Yes, you absolutely can get that realistically from gigE.

I would think that the people at Valve would be able to find a solution if anyone could... or are you claiming that this is a hard nut to crack and SteamOS's streaming solution won't end up being that great for high-resolution TVs?

Oh I'm sure if they put their minds to it they can make some improvements and clever optimizations. The thing it becomes exponentially more difficult the lowest the latency you want to achieve, obviously. <300ms? easy. <100ms? manageable. <50ms? hey, very good! <10ms? uh, I want to see it with my own eyes.

Also, you have to remember that steam won't control the encoding end of the pipeline (and if the "steambox" is third party hardware with steamOS installed, no control at all on the hardware). Which means that in the end the observed latency will depend a lot on the hardware and drivers of the desktop PC and there isn't much Valve can do about that.

So in the end I'm sure it'll be more than fine to play Civilization or Torchlight, MMOs and most RPGs but maybe not Counter Strike or Quake III.

Why are people acting like this is impossible even after it has been done? Remember onlive? Notice how the latency was entirely the same as your network latency to their servers, and there was no problem with encoding adding any (noticable) additional latency?

It would be insane to do this, but you could shove ATSC between boxes over ethernet by shoving each 188-byte MPEG transport stream packet in an ethernet frame and skipping all the layer 3 stuff. Or UDP it, if you want to route it. They probably like the idea of a difficult to route protocol keeping data on one ethernet segment.

My HDhomerun ATSC receiver certainly has no problem shoving a couple megabits of high def video over ethernet. Nor does my mythtv setup, or even just plain old NFS shares to watch videos.

You're kidding. This is perfect.

This is genius. All you need now is a micro box running windows with appropriate video card that you can stick in the corner next to your router and never have to look at again. Assuming the streaming and UX works half as well as they're playing at, they've just managed to commoditize hardware compatibility.

I don't think the importance of this can be understated.

You could do this already for years with Apple TV and Airplay mirror. The real problem is that of controls, mouse and keyboard don't match well with couch

The difference being that i can see Steam releasing the applications to make this work everywhere, while Apple has traditionally been hostile to this kind of interoperability.

It's true that Apple is hostile (= doesn't release spec, but doesn't actively make the protocol hard to reverse-engineer either, eg: the DRM stuff is limited to DRM content and not part of the protocol proper), but the protocol has been reverse engineered and there are many implementations of AirPlay nowadays.

What is the precedence on which you base your belief that, whatever protocol Valve has come up with to replicate the video stream, it will be open? I'm not that much into gaming, but Steam is a closed-source software that includes mandatory DRM for the games, it doesn't really set a precedent of openness and interoperability.

Couple of reasons. First off, Steam is the only DRM I can think of that actually adds value and makes my life easier instead of the reverse.

Second, keep in mind that they've already announced streaming inside the LAN. Having mobile apps would be a natural extension of that. (Note I didn't say that it would be open, I said they will probably release mobile apps).

That streaming is also completely not a threat to their system.

I'm not fully following you: what should these mobile apps allow you to do? Stream the video of a games running on your phone to the steambox to get to the TV?

Function as another endpoint for the stream. Instead of a TV, you have a tablet or a phone. Onlive already does this.

Many, many PC games support a controller these days.

My living room is perfect use case for this. Has an older PC just for simple games. Now it could stream my entire Windows/Steam library of games, powered by the more beefy hardware in my home office rig.

As you say, if the streaming feature works well, this is a huge win. At the very least, it should save me from running 60+ feet of HDMI/USB cables which was my original plan.

I don't know if they are going to attempt something like onlive, but this streaming is on your local lan from your Windows or Mac box.

Sure that's what I meant, I edited my comment to be more clear.

They are almost definitely going to use some sort of streaming similar to OnLive. If OnLive can beam playable game streams across the internet and all its attendant issues, then they definitely can manage to stream it across your in-home wireless/wired network.

http://store.steampowered.com/search/?os=linux

Valve has been planning this for a while, and has had pretty good success motivating a lot of smaller publishers to target Linux, even though the base isn't there yet, and of course have moved their own incredibly valuable games to Linux. Major game engines (Unreal 3D, Unity, among others) already support Linux as an equal target.

Dennis, maybe you are right... this is a long-game and they are just getting ahead of the inevitable (engines supporting Linux natively, eventually more and more releases for the platform).

I suppose this is the curse of the first-mover, it always seems to be risky/nonsensical until it isn't... then we all see it as an obvious move in hindsight ;)

Yeah, this reminds of the initial launch of Steam back in 2003. At first it seemed like an annoying hoop to jump through. As the years went by and it got more dependable, more games, and more features, it became easier and easier to forget how annoying it was in the beginning.

I wonder if the same thing will happen with SteamOS. At best it will initially seem like a novelty, then 10 years from now a huge group of customers will have forgotten what it was like to never have had it.

in fact, microsoft should be scared of this move - because the gaming scene is basically what keeps a whole bunch of machines installed with windows.

For home users, yes. But in the business world, it's the Microsoft Office Suite, especially Outlook + Exchange. Sure, MS Office has been ported to OSX, but it's more expensive to go with Apple Hardware than commodity PC + MS Windows.

If Microsoft flipped their lid and ported Office to run on common Linux distributions (Debian/Fedora), you'd see a lot more corporations switching.

Microsoft does have their Office365.com, which is a web-based version of Office. I haven't tried it myself, but from what I've heard, a lot of its advanced features rely on Silverlight and using browsers other than IE on Linux or Mac OSX puts you in a sort of basic mode. The advanced mode is very comparable to running the desktop version while the basic mode is akin to the Google Docs editor.

Valve has three announcements this week: http://kotaku.com/looks-like-well-hear-about-valves-new-hard...

One of the announcements is widely believe to be the long-rumored Steam Box hardware...

Why would they announce the software separately from its #1 use case?

Casual vs Hardcore gaming. If they announce the console first, and it's not able to run the latest and greatest games on their highest resolution they stymie the idea of being able to run SteamOS on a high end gaming rig.

This way people are thinking about how they can run SteamOS on their existing hardware before thinking they need to run it on a Steambox.

well, the next icon on this page http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/

sure looks like a box enclosing the circle that turned out to be the OS. It's not really a separate announcement as this is all part of one unified event.

Third one is more interesting since they already announced streaming from Steam to SteamOS.

Maybe this? But who really knows, with Valve:

"SteamOS will be available soon as a free download for users and as a freely licensable operating system for manufacturers."

Same reason Android was announced before the first phone: because surfing the wave of rapidly improving hardware is part of the plan.

Valve likes to escalate announcements. It would be very "Valve" to announce the OS, which can run anywhere, and then next announce the box they want you to run it on.

...and then announce the game that you'll be playing on the box?!?

No, it's not half life 3. The logo for the 3rd announcement wouldn't make any sense then.

My thought is to temper disappointment. If they announced the steam box today and it ran a flavor of Linux it would be a disappointment. If we know about steam OS for 48 hours before the steam box announcement, we would all expect the steam box to run steam OS.

Yeah, but you know that we'll only get two announcements and the third will be delayed indefinitely.

From the iconography on the main page I'd guess the second announcement will be Steam hardware and the third one will be Half Life 3 (second circle indicates software product again?). Pure speculation on my side here.

http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/

We know that the circle represents the SteamOS. The brackets int the second announcement must represent SteamBox. The third announcement has two circles with a plus sign in between which has to do something with connectivity to other players. Probably an equivalent of Xbox Live. ( My bet for the name is SteamPipe :) )

If Half-Life 3 was represented it would have to be a sign inside the circle as it is mainly a singleplayer experience. Also a single game as a third announcement is way too narrow-minded as Valve already has the one of the most popular games (Dota 2).

The SteamPipe name is already used for their content distribution system: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/SteamPipe

Steam already has most of the xbox live functionality. Friends list, messaging, voice chat, online store. I think the only major missing piece is probably 'parties' though maybe that's in there (I've never had much of a need for it personally).

Why is the circle off to one side of the box. Maybe I'm reading too much into it... but perhaps it could be a game controller and not a set-top box?

That could be interesting... but I must say, the Xbox360 controller is fantastic, inexpensive, and easily integrates with a PC. Sort of a solved problem, if you will, so unless they have significant value to add, I'd hope they'd focus elsewhere.

but microsoft can simply make the xbox360 controller difficult to implement in other games (tho i don't know how they'd do that…), and would effectively stop indies from supporting it. Having a proprietary controller, but coded using an open library (akin to what the steam workshop does), might mean that it's easier to have games implement controller support that's not fragmented.

It's a standard USB HI device, you don't need any kind of MS code to use it. Changing it would make it incompatible with their existing xbox360 install base and games for windows. I guess they could stop selling the xbox360 controller, but why would they when it's making them money?

Valve took out a patent a while back on a gamepad where the fixed D-pads were replaced with sockets that could accept a D-pad, a trackball, extra buttons, etc: http://gamerant.com/valve-console-controller-hold-137072/

I will be so Goddamn happy if they're actually making that thing. I love modularity, and a trackball gamepad would flawlessly combine the convenience of a gamepad with the precision of a mouse. Several groups have tried to bring one to market, and studies have shown their superiority, but apparently they were too weird to get enough preorders. Hope hope hope...

The third icon could be O: Steam OS + O: Orange Box 2. Orange Box 2 may include Half Life 3 and more.

Damn now you got me exited..., No! Half-Life 3 is still far far away.

We now know that the circle is SteamOS. Then, the second announcement would be "SteamOS in a box", and the iconography of the third announcement is "two SteamOS". This probably has something to do either with playing or sharing with friends, or more details on streaming games from another machine on the network.

Come to think of it, Dota2 just mentioned recently an update that either just came out or is coming out in a few days that would allow you to play a Dota2 LAN game. Perhaps the third announcement will be more along the lines of sharing a game only you own with friends on your LAN, for that sort of purpose?

Back to the halcyon days of yore, when a single copy of Starcraft was all you needed for a great night of LAN gaming for a number of people. Allowing 'spawned' copies for friends to share for gaming would make co-op games so much more fiscally bearable.

Steam doesn't properly support sharing games still. You can share your entire library and if you aren't playing anything at all, your friend can play a game from your library. Which you could do already, you just had to give your friend your password. Currently me and my brother share a library just fine by having one of us set steam to offline mode and then we can all play at the same time. It's less useful than the old behaviour, but without sharing your password. Oh and you can save in the cloud and earn achievements personally for yourself. Excuse me while I vomit.

Useless.

> iconography of the third announcement is "two SteamOS".

Two Steam OS added together. I think it means if you get two devices running steam you can combine them to increase the available resources for playing a game. Possibly some kind of build in clustering API that steam games can use.

As this is as good a place as any to record my guess, I'd go for some sort of virtualization.

O = SteamOS

[O] = Hardware partners Steam box (in tiers inc. an inexpensive stream target box for $99)

[O O] = Being able to run a SteamOS game on your Windows system. Think DOSBox or HyperV.

If they could do this then really it's a case of convenience vs performance, and a few exclusives or two would push people to dual boot rather than VM it.

It could also be the way they plan to stream, i.e. a self-contained mini-OS that runs under Windows but streams out/in visual and inputs. The 'local' version fits ok with that, in that you can run a SteamOS title in Windows by localhost'ing it really.

Just speculating, but it's interesting to think about.

A 99 dollars havfdware? That would stink bad in terms of performance.

I was just thinking a dedicated OnLive / ChromeCast like wee box for the LAN, perhaps with a Valve designed controller (i.e. an analog something). All real processing would be on the host SteamOS PC really, with dedicated hardware to help reduce lag on the stream.

I think you didn't read the announcement correctly. Sure the box can do streaming but it is also expected to run "native games". So, for streaming maybe a cheap box is OK, but for actual gaming on the box, you'll need something way more powerful than what you can get for 99 dollars.

That's why I used the word 'tiers' if you read more carefully. The bottom tier may be an inexpensive streaming box, the highest tier may be a high performance dedicated gaming PC running SteamOS.

Got it. Then I agree, such tiering is possible.

The controller is the most interesting hardware component, the rest can improve over time much more easily.

Steam OS needs to be on the Public Domain like an Opensource Project..Which it will most likely be..

In addition to that the Hardware should also be opensourced, like how to build the most optimal gaming console to work on Steam OS...

But It will all come down to the gaming pad, how the gaming pad will be designed and how it will integrate with build your own systems

Steam OS needs to be on the Public Domain like an Opensource Project..Which it will most likely be..

Steam is a DRM platform with a few user features on top. Releasing an open source platform would be as uncharacteristic as suicidal.

Have to think about it like android, FOSS linux base that in most cases ships with a non-FOSS storefront application from its primary contributor.

I don't think game publishers would trust their cash cows to an Android platform either.

If I were them I'd make Half Life 3, Portal 3 and whatever next versions they have of their own games, exclusive to their own Steambox, at least first months or so.

They might not get as much money on the games themselves initially, but they'd make so much more on the hardware (they don't need to all Blu-ray and all the extra crap, so they could be profitable on it), and it would also be a great way to seed their console into the market, so developers target it.

Alienating their main user-base for the sake of promoting their own console seems like a high-risk play when most people already are aiming at spending their "console-allowance" on the PS4 or One. The Steam Box is supposed to be modular (upgrade-able), while being strictly plug&play, this alone gives it a huge edge over existing consoles. Now we know SteamOS will be Open Source, and we know both Nvidia and AMD are commited to improving Linux drivers. What that means is AAA-titles don't even need to be ported, the Wine layer is able to provide 1:1 performance as proven with for instance World of Warcraft. The Wine devs don't even have the luxury of source access like game developers to.

All in all, if Valve does this right they're sitting on a potential goldmine.

Too bad PS4 wasn't based on Linux, too. Both could've helped Linux games a lot more.

1. Steam

2. Steambox

3a. some VR peripheral (looks like a VR goggle/headset to me)

3b. some special cross-play between Steambox and Windows/Mac/Linux

3c. cross play between steambox and PS4

I hadn't thought about the possibility that day 3 could be about their VR stuff. Abrash has been beavering away on all that stuff for some time now. It has also been a fair while since he posted anything up on his blog (July 26, 2013): http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/

I am sure it will be just 3b or 3c. a VR peripheral would be a long shot but I would be glad to be wrong. :)

1. SteamOS

2. Steambox

3. It looks like two sets of wheels from side on. Gaben is giving us all A NEW CAR!!!

A large part of it may be covered by this functionality; "You can play all your Windows and Mac games on your SteamOS machine, too. Just turn on your existing computer and run Steam as you always have - then your SteamOS machine can stream those games over your home network straight to your TV!"

Exactly. Gigabit ethernet in the home (or really fast wireless) should make this pretty feasible even with twitch-based action games (we can hope!)

With twitch-based games you'll have to convince twitch-based game players of that. These are people that look up latency specs on wireless keyboards because they think that makes a difference.

And I would bet that they are enough of a minority that it financially doesn't matter. They will keep playing on their finely tuned rigs with old CRT monitors anyways.

But the average person who wants to play the latest Assassin's Creed or Grand Theft Auto over that kind of streaming system? There are lots of those (including me).

It's a dual-edged sword, as being able to stream windows titles doesn't give much incentive for game devs to fully support linux, does it?

But it gives the users a reason to switch which is important. The idea of forfeiting 300-400 games is not pleasant.

It's a stepping stone.

Valve has a lot of power. They can offer discounts and say that instead of taking 30% of every game purchased through steam we will only take 20% if it supports steam os. I'm sure developers would consider it when they can be making 10% more from every sale.

It's not a tough sell. Valve can offer a massively higher cut then Sony and Microsoft will do.

Well, there is some teasing along those lines there:

> Watch for announcements in the coming weeks about all the AAA titles coming natively to SteamOS in 2014.

But more importantly, control of Steam gives Valve a lot of leverage in this. It's easy to see the reasons for Linux support in indie games. But harder to see why mid-tier developers like Paradox or Eugen started to port their latest games to Linux. It's a good bet that some kind of a Steam-related carrot was involved there.

Juho, great call-out with the "Steam-related carrot", I hadn't really thought down that path but you are absolutely right. Valve could easily offer big discounts in their split with the publishers for the first few years for Linux sales.

My (possibly very incorrect) assumption was that the profit from the Linux sales were so low as to not matter, but maybe they can provide a catalog-wide carrot... something more significant (as you suggested) to motivate the publisher en-masse.

This was my thought also. Offer $100 in games with the console, or release hl3 only on the console.

I'm really glad you guys pointed out this was a console launch because I tried to point it out on reddit and got shut down...

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1mywq0/steamos_annou...

Argh, that can be frustrating. I for one certainly agree with you :D

This is likely to be coupled with some manner of hardware launch, as well. I am skeptical that the name "Linux" will be a particularly useful term in that context.

Couple that with my skepticism that they're actually shipping much if any traditional Linux userspace software, and it's even less useful to compare potential SteamOS users to traditional Linux users.

Other than that I agree that with Valve as a patron there's a lot more credibility. Steam was a long-term move, and it paid off. So Valve has a good track record and solid momentum. If they can help make it easy for game companies to port their work, taking out a significant or non-trivial amount of work and offer the carrot of sales & paying customers, I could see this taking off.

I was skeptical of Steam back in 2004 but I wasn't thinking long term enough. Launching your own operating system isn't a short term move. It suggests to me that this will only get better and more impressive over time, if Valve is as committed to this as it seems.

What are your definitions for "traditional Linux userspace software" and "traditional Linux users"? Do you consider Android to be "Linux"?

"Traditional Linux userspace software" is an informal definition, but let's say something like X. Or your average window manager. Or, say, almost anything from GNOME.

"Traditional Linux users" is another informal definition, but if you use a distro, you're probably a traditional Linux user. Contrast this with an Android user. They run the Linux kernel but the software they interface with is an entirely different breed. The statement "Android is Linux" is true, definitely, but it's inside baseball to anyone but us nerds. The Linux-y aspects are more or less invisible (by design).

I'm not trying to slight either desktop Linux or Android or SteamOS or whatever, just to be clear. I think it's a huge win for Linux, at least in some sense.

I think it's misleading to read "Linux" and imagine "desktop GNU/Linux with all the trimmings." I can't imagine there won't be some way to get that on a SteamOS machine. My skepticism is directed at the idea that Valve will ship anything which, out of the box, resembles a traditional desktop Linux experience. I expect it will be more like an Android experience than Ubuntu, with rather limited access to OS internals, filesystem, package management, etc.

Does that make more sense?

The closeness of the SteamOS experience to that of a typical desktop Linux distro is irrelevant. If it runs on the Steam Box, it will run on a Linux desktop of compatible architecture.

Considering there is already Steam for Linux, its probable that Valve will ensure Linux games run on both platforms equally well.

In any case, if there is no need for "all the trimmings", if Valve just wants to make an entertainment pipeline, then that's fine by me. It's the same kernel; this is a huge win for Linux by any measure.

> on both platforms equally well

But if they are optimizing a number of things in their own distribution, it's not far-fetched to think that games would run marginally better on the SteamOS.

I expect optimizations will come in the form of:

- GPU driver improvements (they've already been working with nvidia, amd, and intel) which everyone benefits from

- kernel patches (maybe they fiddle with the scheduler or something) which anyone could pick up

- new/improved subsystems (perhaps they do some low latency input or audio layer), which (assuming they open source it) distros could choose to adopt or not

- improving porting techniques for bringing games or game middleware to Linux based platforms (everyone benefits)

It's possible that some stuff could be foreign enough to the way it has always been done on linux that it may take some time to make it upstream (see wakelocks from Android finally turning up in the kernel under a different name and a different implementation but providing the same functionality), but if it actually improves things, eventually I suspect the mainline kernel or distros or whomever will come around.

e: fix formatting

I think you misunderstood the point of my comment.

The context was whether or not "Linux users" will pay money for software. In this respect, the closeness is only relevant insofar as it is useful to discuss "Debian users" in the same breath as "SteamOS users."

> but let's say something like X. Or your average window manager. Or, say, almost anything from GNOME.

This doesn't apply to embedded Linux, or Linux for servers, which could be argued to be just as "traditional" a use case as Linux for desktops.

Additionally, for the desktop use case, nearly every distribution uses a different window manager anyway. There are such a wide variety of window managers, I wouldn't know how to compute an "average" between them in a meaningful way. Although I use Linux for a desktop everyday, I don't have GNOME installed, and I would barely notice if X was missing and replaced by Wayland or a different component.

> I think it's misleading to read "Linux" and imagine "desktop GNU/Linux with all the trimmings."

Right. It's not Linux for the desktop, or Linux for the phone, or Linux for embedded devices, or Linux for servers, it's Linux for the living room. My point is that due to the diversity of the Linux ecosystem, there really wasn't such a thing as a "traditional" or "average" Linux Desktop in the first place, and that we can't even say Linux for desktop is the "traditional" or "average" use of Linux. Anything running the Linux kernel should be able to call itself Linux, without qualification.

That's fine, but the context was whether "Linux users" will pay for software or not. I basically agree with you in terms of the facts, but speaking primarily in terms of user behavior, each of those platforms is manifestly different.

I think it's pretty unlikely that Xorg won't be a part of it somehow. X+extensions is basically the only meaningful, portable, direct interface to video hardware that exists on linux. At least if you want the hardware vendor's own drivers (which steambox obviously would, Nouveau is not up to the challenge).

It would also mean that all the 300+ games that currently work on Steam For Linux would have to be retooled for whatever proprietary windowing layer Valve would have to invent. And Valve would have to convince nVidia to come along for the ride.

My guess would be anything that runs X.org + Gnome/KDE/XFCE ... (and the list goes on)

My guess is that SteamOS is a rather specialized flavor of linux ... akin to Android.

... Just my 2 cents.

Yes, this is a more succinct phrasing of what I meant. :)

Android is Linux, but very clearly not "traditional Linux".

"Traditional Linux" suggests to me the traditional distributions like Fedora, Ubuntu, SUSE, Debian, etc.

It'll be interesting to see how much SteamOS will look like a traditional Linux. Considering the many Linux offerings on Steam, I suspect they'd like to have executable compatibility on that level, which Android probably doesn't have. But will it be as wide open as a traditional Linux? I suspect not.

It'll probably be along the lines of Chrome OS, where you do have access to the full Linux system, you just have to work for it...

Even if the market is small, it's critical to be "first" than later. That way you get a bigger share of the market instead of being drowned in an ocean of software like on many app stores these days.

A steam-related carrot with lower fees might be a huge incentive. But when we are speculating a gaming company in the business of selling $60-$100 games might be more worried about their ability to differentiate their products from sub-$10 games. If they believe steambox could provide that then it might be an easy sell.

Remember:

The PS4 and Xbox1 both are literally built on top of DirectX11, meaning that games for next-gen consoles (read: AAA) will be DirectX by DEFAULT but will certainly not be OpenGL by default.

And OpenGL is a requirement for Linux support of these games.

How Valve is strong arming manufacturers into writing the graphics code for their games in BOTH frameworks is beyond me. I'm not sure the major engines out there support both either.

But Microsoft won a massive coup this generation with all consoles being Win7 developer kits + Visual Studio 2012 + DirectX 11.

With Microsoft providing the major tools for AAA-games, it's going to be harder going forward, not easier, for the Linux proponents to make their case and win.

> The PS4 and Xbox1 both are literally built on top of DirectX11

I'd love to know where Sony said that the PS4 uses DirectX.

They discussed it at length at GDC: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/sony-dives-deep-into-t...

That doesn't seem to say the same thing: the article says it has the feature set, but it doesn't say it uses DX11.1+.

Edit: oh, just read MLR's comment.

Both PS4 and Xbox One are now on the X86 architecture. They also share the same GPU (with minor differences).

PS4 runs a BSD derived OS with a Sony-specific graphics library called RSX (very similar to OpenGL, but much lower level).

Xbox 360 and PS3 games threw away the fixed function graphics pipeline. Everything was done with shaders. With Linux graphics drivers nearing OpenGL3 compliance, it is much more feasible to target Linux in addition to Windows and Consoles without needing to re-architect the graphics architecture of your engine.

It will be trivial for next-gen developers to target PC/PS4/Xbox One/SteamBox.

Some clever folks might even be able to compile once and dynamically link against platform-specific graphics/platform libraries. :)

edit: this was directed at criley2 - not McGlockenshire

Isn't RSX (Reality Simulator) was just a name for nvidia graphic chipset in PS3? Oh wait, it is.

PS3 used libGCM and PSGL, which is pretty much OpenGL ES 1.1 + Nvidia Cg. Don't forget the fact that OpenGL ES isn't OpenGL.

XBox never used DirectX neither, because why would you need such abstraction if all of your target market has the exact same hardware inside? (I'm omitting fact that guy above compared Direct X and OpenGL which is retarded). It used something similar, but not the same.

So RTFM or STFU.

I certainly did confuse the RSX (ps3 GPU) with libGCM (the ps3 GPU library). I haven't forgotten that OpenGL ES isn't OpenGL - it's OpenGL minus all of the garbage.

It's also true that Xbox 360 did not use DirectX. But they DID have an abstraction in the form of the XDK (Xbox 360 SDK).

Comparing OpenGL and DirectX is not retarded - they are both competing graphics libraries that are slowly converging on the same feature set.

Just FYI the PS4 low-level library is called GNM, and their higher-level wrapper is GNMX.

(source: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-how-the-cre...)

I was wrong re: ps4's library name. Thanks for the article. I left the games industry just before the transition to the new consoles.

With Nvidia drivers you can use OpenGL 4.3 (the most recent version). It's only the Intel drivers which are limited to OpenGL 3...

"Sony is building its CPU on what it's calling an extended DirectX 11.1+ feature set, including extra debugging support that is not available on PC platforms. This system will also give developers more direct access to the shader pipeline than they had on the PS3 or through DirectX itself. "This is access you're not used to getting on the PC, and as a result you can do a lot more cool things and have a lot more access to the power of the system," Norden said. A low-level API will also let coders talk directly with the hardware in a way that's "much lower-level than DirectX and OpenGL," but still not quite at the driver level." http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/sony-dives-deep-into-t...

Is what I was going on, but I can see that "DirectX feature set" is not the same as "DirectX", so I apologize for misleading.

The PS4 does not use DirextX, they use their own system, people are getting confused because they said it had features equivalent to 'DirectX 11.1+'.

Most major engines, such as Unreal/UDK, already allow export to Linux and consoles, so what the console supports isn't the limiting factor it was when everyone had to code directly to the metal.

As other have pointed out, you are obviously wrong about Microsoft Direct X being available on Sony's Playstation 4.

But you are also wrong in the larger picture. Direct3D and OpenGL are first and foremost abstraction layers to access the GPU. Since in a console the hardware is immutable, you can gain a lot of performance by skipping (or trimming the fat of) these abstractions.

The XBox 360 version of DirectX is very different from the PC version: it's much much closer to the metal and exposes pretty much all the GPU functionalities.

Here is a thread talking about XBox 360 dev: http://beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=62049

There's no reason to think that it will be any different for the XBox One. Hardware-wise it's a very average PC: its sole advantage versus an actual PC is this ability to get that much closer to the metal.

So, dev tools for PS4 are still bad?

I suppose they could plug the hole a little including a dalvik vm and get android games running too. In theory they would be able to get a large amount of games working and kill the OUYA. I'm not sure that's in the best interest of the Steam store unless they plan to start selling android games.

I hope not. Dalvik is terrible (a legacy of Android's roots in circa 2004 Java-mobile land), I'd rather see native games, and then maybe that can help Ubuntu Phone and Sailfish OS take off on mobile...

Some of the Valve documents explicitly sell the porting to Linux/OpenGL process as a stepping stone to mobile. And given their talk of breaking pointless silos I can imagine a steam store on Android that can play any Steam game you've got the horsepower for.

link to said documents?

https://developer.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/akamai/game...

Thank you.

Any console has its own platform to target. When that platform happens to be Linux-based, this magically becomes an onerous and unlikely requirement.

This has nothing to do with Linux and everything to do with who wants to target Steam's pet platform (vs Xbox pet platform, etc.) Comparing this to Windows is nonsensical.

Any developer has an addressable market to target. I don't think we really care what the OS is (Win,Xbox,PS4,iOS,whatever). If there is a market opportunity, we pounce. There simply has not been a Linux market opportunity that has inspired any real business. Will SteamOS change that? Time will tell....

There are a good chunk of games that barely make it to the consoles... (or just simply never do). I think it is much more rare to not make it to PC/Windows.

A hunch I have is that developers are unwilling to target linux because of its diversity. By providing SteamOS they are providing a stable target for developers to release games against instead of trying to support all Linux distros.

Sure, but I would argue that one AAA title is worth the entirety of those games that aren't ever making it off of the PC as far as sales go (thinking from a publishers POV).

Absolutely agree with you on the unifying effect of SteamOS being a single target for devs; that by itself, as you are pointing out, will drive more development for the platform. Gives everyone a target to aim at.

As far as sales - yes. As far as profits, or at least ROI is involved - no.

Tonnes of AAA titles are 'available' on FreeBSD - the PS3. Publishers won't be bringing their games to Linux, they'll be bringing them to SteamOS.

Except that the PS3 has a dedicated SDK... Up until now Steam has instead allowed games made with any technology AFAIK

that means, among others, Python (Analogue: a Hate Story) and Mono (Bastion)

As long as they let developers have freedom over their tools of choice, I don't think we risk any embrace/extend/extinguish outcome

Has there ever been any confirmation for the "PS3 runs FreeBSD" rumor? I've just seen FreeBSD mentioned on Sony's page listing open source components, along with stuff like expat and freetype. They've probably just lifted some bits from FreeBSD.

Hell, it could be the old Win NT thing of using the network code. That hardly constitutes "using BSD".

PS3 runs FreeBSD likes Android runs Linux.

That is, they may share a kernel and some tools, but the user spaces are mostly alien.

PS3 ran on Cell CPU Architecture. Now PS4 run FreeBSD 9.0 modified BUT x86 architecture!

Android = Linux Ubuntu = Linux they both run the same exact kernel! BSD != Linux because they are 2 different kernels.

Why do people always try to say Android is not Linux?????

if you want to go down this road Android !== GNU Linux || Android !== Linux as the first compare two OS, and the second compare an OS and a kernel. Sure they share a lot of libraries that are in use in those sort of application (more so than GNU Linux and Windows variant) but still, those are not the same.

Mind this is begging a question: with all the TV box running Android, are manufacturer going to target Android or SteamOS (More and more so called smart TV are running some version of Android)? And what about indie developer? Right now you can pick up an Android TV Box for anything in between 50 and 100 GBP.

Android uses the Linux kernel. But when one talks about Linux, one usually means GNU/Linux: that is, the kernel and the unix (or rather, not unix) userspace.

Android has little, if any, of that user space. That is, assume I have a dynamically linked Linux program: I'd probably won't be able to run it on Android, even if cross-compiled to the proper hardware, because much of the libraries and tools one expect a Linux distribution to have are missing there.

Because you don't run just a kernel. It's fairly obvious a lot more things go into an operating system. Calling Android and Ubuntu under the same "Linux" umbrella is like calling bread and pasta as "Wheat" since they use the same raw material.

Absolutely. This is my point. The fact that SteamOS is Linux is basically irrelevant to publishers, just like Android being Linux is irrelevant to app developers.

The interesting thing is that convincing AAA publishers to port merely requires them to think it'd be profitable.

20 years ago, if someone asked to raise a quarter of a billion into a video game, they'd be laughed out of the building. Now it happens often. Over the years, increasingly big-budget games got funded and created.

So, all they need to do is to replicate a similar process. First you move all the indie games and source engine games to linux to "bootstrap" your market. Maybe make them free or a few bucks. Once you have a paying userbase from that, you show financials to bigger fish in an attempt to draw them in. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Even better is the fact that publishers love "free money" that doesn't require them to gamble. A port of an already successful game is much less risky than a new game. And (conditions permitting, like engine support) it costs a very small amount compared to the actual budget. So they can work on smaller margins to still turn a healthy profit.

I believe Humble Bundle has a partnership with a consultancy that will take care of porting a game to other platforms to enable their Mac/Linux/Windows value proposition. Valve could probably do something similar (though I imagine it's a lot more work to port a AAA game than an indie platformer).

If you're using an off-the-shelf engine (Unreal engine, say), it's probably somewhat easier, as some of the work would be one-off, at least in theory. But I don't honestly know how that breaks down.

Most off-the-shelf engine support Linux.

This include all Quake engine variations (including Source, and GoldSource) and Unreal variations.

and probably the branched version from activision used in their `call of duty` franchies.... -_-''

Don't forget Unity, and C#/XNA support via Mono/Monogame.

I can't speak for recent Humble Bundles, but the linux experience of earlier ones was inconsistent to say the least. Some games were as if they were intended to be native. Others just didn't work or actually didn't exist. Others worked, but were buggy... and never got the update fixes. Maybe they have become better?

Yeah in the recent bundles it has been much better.

Interesting, where did you hear that?

Total production costs of the famous Atari's E.T. (1982) were $125M according to Wikipedia. It's more than $300M in 2013 dollars.

Which works out to $25 million to get the E.T. license, $100 million to make millions of cartridges to bury in the desert, and $200,000 on actual development.

That ratio explains a lot.

I think I have read somewhere that the cartridges being buried in the desert is just a hoax.

http://www.snopes.com/business/market/atari.asp

Next Generation Magazine reported that Atari earned US$25 million in sales, but netted a loss of US$100 million.

Doesn't seem like it was a good idea, though.

Not so simple nowadays.

Games are not fire and forget anymore. Now it's all about downloadable content and In-Game-Currency (which is basically a way to allow gambling legally)

Just being profitable initially doesn't mean jack. I think everyone learned that from the emails from Jobs and the Printing industry (and what i'd give to read the ones with the music industry...)

Pfft. Most big ticket games continue to be the familiar standalone titles without any in-game purchasing models. Sure, DLCs and 'season passes' and the like are more common. But the vast majority of money that a big AAA title is going to make continues to be made in the first few weeks of its release. Being profitable initially still means a great deal indeed. It's still what franchises are made, or broken upon. You have to really be drinking the kool-aid to believe that the fundamental economics of gaming have been upended by a few obnoxious trends du jour.

Not true. Most big AAA games and the higher quality Indie Games you just buy once, and you get the whole version. Examples are Minecraft, Braid, Fez, for indies, and pretty much all AAA titles are buy-once... Even many of the higher quality Android titles are a one-time purchase.

I'm pretty sure those titles do not have much leverage on the deal discussed there.

It's far more trivial to port now that PC and Next-Gen consoles are all X86.

I'm skeptical that they can convince regular people to put PC hardware in their living rooms. Microsoft and manufacturers made a ton of effort in this direction last decade, and it wasn't half bad: Windows Media Center was a pretty decent user interface for TV-watching, and lots of "living room PC" form factors popped up (remember the ubiquitous Shuttle case?). But nobody cares. It was just too weird and clunky for the average consumer to put OEM PC hardware in his AV stack. Hard core geeks will do it, but that's not a big enough audience. Maybe that's changed enough to make this work, but I kind of doubt it.

AppleTV sells reasonably well, and GoogleTV would probably be thriving right now if the major networks didn't discriminate against its UA. I don't follow gaming that closely, but I believe most of the consoles released since the Dreamcast use a variant of the PowerPC chip that used to power Apple's computers.

Silicon is silicon; it's the UI that makes a difference. People have been paying money to have gaming systems in their homes since the 80s, and entertainment-center computers have been popular since TiVo in the 00s.

Moreover, these manufacturers are all working on "smart TVs," which is what has been keeping GoogleTV alive in spite of the entertainment industry's hostility towards it. With the right UI and licensing, I could see an LG or a Samung (or a Vizio for that matter) releasing a SteamOS-powered TV.

Microsoft had trouble getting people to run Windows in their living room. They had no trouble getting millions to put PC hardware in their living room as evidenced by the XBOX.

Calling the XBox "PC hardware" is really picking nits and missing the point, in my opinion. The problem with PC hardware in the living room is that no matter how you dress up an HTPC to resemble a piece of consumer electronics, it's all cosmetic, and it's still a PC in that it's not a fixed hardware configuration like a console. This makes the software more complicated, adds driver issues, support costs, hardware reliability is unknown, etc. The result is a tradeoff in how polished the product can ever really be. Geeks will put up with it. Regular folks probably won't. Again, my opinion.

This is alot closer to an xbox than a pc. Value just doing it via slightly different (and smarter) process. This is still aimed squarely at the gaming market it's just a bigger pass at it.

Consider all the PC-only titles. It's safe to assume that many of them make the vast majority of their sales via Steam. If steam promises massive takeup of SteamOS, then it's in their best interests to make them available for it.

From the demand angle, lots of games are console only because they fear piracy on PC versions. But if all these console users are offered a cheap new platform they can use just as easily as their consoles, it's safe to say that many of the users who buy a steambox would start buying games on it too. Console gamers aren't going to suddenly turn into torrent junkies because they wouldn't need to. This would make the PC platform profitable again. And if they start pricing games cheaper, like Steam games are liable to be, piracy would go down even further. Lots of indie PC titles are making money after-all.

Overall, I think once it hits a critical mass it would be a fantastic idea for all parties involved.

In-home Streaming seems to be backwards compility answer.

This means they don't start with empty plate like Android for example.

To keep cheap rig in living room for stream playing and media center, does not seem to be so bad idea. Most gaming will happen still whereever main rig is, but when you have friends over, you can just move to living room. And knowing steam(compared to others), I think it will be decently out of the box working thing.

Anyway, I support linux gaming, I would love to ditch windows at last.

I'd love to see Linux get 1st class graphics driver support from vendors. I pay as much for my Radeon card as anyone else, but the fglrx drivers STILL don't support X composite.

But other then gaming I never boot into Windows these days anyway.

I'd love to see them just publish docs so we can get good drivers instead. Bluescreens from video drivers are still a problem on windows, it is an even bigger problem on linux with fewer resources going into making the driver, and fewer people using them to serve as paying testers. Nvidia and ati/amd have both made it very clear that they either do not have the desire or they do not have the resources to make good drivers. So let the open source community do it for you.

I'd love to see them just publish docs

They have in the past, and got nothing but flak.

No, they haven't. They have released bits and pieces under NDA, but never actual complete docs. That's the problem. Maybe you should have listened a little closer to the "flak" to see if it was actually legitimate problems.

I wasn't nearly as involved in Linux news at the time, and it's too late to go back and change that now. Apologies for not knowing the complete details, and I'd appreciate it if you'd link me. Been having trouble finding the historical details.

ATI has released (almost) complete specifications at this point, NVIDIA has released nothing.

http://renderingpipeline.com/graphics-literature/low-level-g...

All you get is register dumps. Compare the ati and intel info on that site. Intel has released full docs. Ati has done as little as possible to be able to say "we released stuff" for publicity purposes.

Depending on who makes the hardware in the upcoming Steambox, we might finally get some decent drivers for 3D hardware acceleration. I would imagine Valve has the pull to entice AMD, nvidia, or maybe Intel to devote additional resources to it.

AMD had been releasing documentation for their Radeon GPUs, as well as supporting development of the open source radeon driver for linux (http://www.x.org/wiki/radeon/ and http://www.x.org/docs/AMD/). The open source driver just has nowhere near the resources devoted to it that the proprietary drivers have.

I wish I could do that. At the moment I still use wacom tablet and photoshop+gaming, so I spend most of the time in Win7 :/

Nvidia's Linux drivers are at feature parity with their Windows drivers. And perform at least as well...

Meaning they randomly lock up the system about once every three days?

In my case, yes. But the performance is good.

My Linux system with Nvidia graphics easily gets a month uptime; I only reboot every now and then for updates and changes to the system. Never had an issue with the drivers, even when using them for 3d gaming with Steam.

Now, don't get me started on AMD's awful attempt at graphics drivers.

I don't have any instability problems, with neither AMD or NVidia (I have a computer with each).

What kills those drivers is ongoing support. Since they aren't at the mainline kernel, they lose sync, and upgrading the kernels turns into a lottery where sometimes I have to uninstall the newest one, not a big deal, but anoying.

Are you running beta releases of drivers?

Anyway the reason NVidia has had strong Linux driver support for such a long time has nothing to do with desktop Linux and certainly not Linux gaming.

It's because Linux is huge in 3d and special effects (mainly movie, tv) and of course dominant in hpc.

However, Steambox is likely resulting in NVidia improving their Linux video drivers with focus on game performance.

No, I'm running Windows x64, so it's possible that Linux drivers don't have the same problem. I was being somewhat facetious, but the fact is that I can't run any nVidia driver after 314.22 on my system for more than a few days without occasional temporary freezes and some that require a cold restart. This isn't an isolated complaint. They have a bug, somewhere, that's been there for a few months now.

I see, I would point out that for production work you are very unlikely to be running the latest release of any video driver due to it being largely untested in the wild, no matter if you run Linux or Windows.

So the official SteamBox will come with very stable drivers for it's hardware configuration, and the same goes for third-party 'Steamboxes' aswell I'm sure.

For Steam users running on their own machine configurations it's another thing of course, but that's no different from the way PC gaming has always been.

One possible difference is that the official Steambox will likely function as a 'confirmed' hardware configuration so even if you 'build you own machine' or look to buy another offering you can use the hardware setup of of existing Steambox(es) as a hint of what to buy for the best 'Steam-experience'.

it all depends on how many people will use SteamOS. Costs of porting games to other platforms will also go down with the next generation as xbox one and ps4 are basically standard PCs.

"porting their AAA releases to this platform"

Play Station 4 is running a modified a Free BSD 9.0 on x86 architecture. So the work to go from a BSD base to Linux I imagine is MUCH easier than what it has been in the past in my opinion.

Actually an excellent point; just dug up some info, didn't realize Orbis was based on FreeBSD. Would absolutely agree that for both the engine companies (Unreal, Crytek, Unity, Frostbite, etc.) since they are already going to FreeBSD, being able to target SteamOS as a secondary platform with minimal effort would be huge. Then hopefully abstract that effort away from the publishers as much as possible so if Capcom/Microsoft/EA/Activision decide to go SOS, it is minimal work.

I think the point is that AAA titles are at a low time low of market share. Indie titles could carry this platform by itself.

I hate commenting in extremes, but I am willing to bet a large volume of the blood in my body that this is false and the platform would be a total failure if this was their only play (indie games).

One GTA 5, for example, is equivalent to the sales produced by every indie game, combined, multiple times over. Even Minecraft with some $30-40mil is a miniscule fraction of what GTA 5 did opening _day_ and will eventually do in its lifetime.

Definitely chose extremes here, but I imagine the equation looks the same with any other AAA title compared to the entirety of indie titles combined.

I see Steam's long tail being more on the Indie side of things, giving the little guys a way to monetize their hard work without needing huge budgets. As long as they come along for the ride I think the platform can be grown organically. That said, Valve's own AAA titles alone will be good for the platform, so if they can get a handful of other major players on board I think it can be very compelling.

Aren't games pretty damn portable these days? It seems like most non-firsty party titles are all multi-platform now. I don't know anything about game development but they must be developing with portability in mind.

Almost every major engine out there (ie: IdTech, Unreal Engine, Unity, Frostbite) is cross platform off the shelf.

As suby mentioned, off-the-shelf I think these engines support multiple platforms, but it is surprising (to me) how many big, non-1st-party games don't make it across all the platforms in a timely fashion. That signals to me that it isn't as easy as we might think.

Isn't part of the reason there are not a lot of developers working with Linux because there isn't near as big of a demand from the Linux community? This, if it becomes a popular option, it would/could increase that demand.

With the streaming support, I'm assuming you'll get immediate access to everything that's playable on your PC. It's not a perfect solution, but certainly helps with the adoption issue.

Ultimately, what other choice does Valve have? Every single other company is coming out with its own "App Store" - few are exclusive at this point, but the tide might turn that way (already I believe Microsoft and Apple have taken steps that have made it more difficult for Steam).

That said, OpenGL is an increasingly relevant player due to WebGL, mobile devices, Apple's growing market share, etc. It is also possible to simultaneously target OpenGL and DirectX with things like ANGLE. If your game is written in OpenGL, it is relatively easy to port to different operating systems, assuming you don't rely heavily on platform-specific libraries (and if you already support Mac, it is typically even easier to port to other *nix-based platforms). If the XBox One is OGL capable (via its Windows layer), porting could get even easier.

To top it off, I'm pretty sure it will get support from at least of the few big engines: ID Tech, Unreal, Unity, and CryEngine all seem to be potential candidates. 90+ percent of games use one of these engines.

Targeting DirectX is a waste of time because Windows can run OpenGL, and players can use the latest OpenGL features on every version of Windows (ie. not have to update to Windows 8.1 just to use a newer version of DirectX)...

"In-home Streaming"

This one is going to be the killer I think - it means two things to me.

1. Not everything has to be ported to Linux straight out of the gate.

2. Its going straight on my living room machine! I've been waiting for the ability to use my beafy gaming PC (which is at a desk, with a keyboard and mouse) to drive games on the TV for a long time.

I don't know if that means intra-home streaming or inter-home streaming. Basically i'm not sure if that means Valve/Steam is doing what nVidia, AMD, MS, and onLive are doing or if they are doing something else.

Porting old games no, porting new games yes.

Using the word easy liberally, Unity makes it easy to develop multi-platform games. Unreal is going the same direction.

In the past each platform had its unique limitations. Now all devices down to a tiny smart phone are very powerful. The mobile market is gigantic. Users go from device to device.

Take a look at Occulus Rift + the wireless devices used to control it. The days of sitting down with a keyboard and mouse are passing, even for the desktop users.

Google, Apple, Amazon, and others are gearing up for what are in effect micro-consoles. Other than Apple they are all Android. Its as good of time as ever for Steam to move forward.

> A good chunk of the console games barely make it to PC/Windows as it is, let alone a PC/Linux platform... seems like a tough sell.

True today but both the PS4 and XBone are now 8 core x86 platforms with desktop style GPUs. I would imagine most developers already abstract away the OS/graphics APIs as much as possible to facilitate porting to both consoles, adding a third platform for a 'PC port' should be much easier this console generation, particularly given that the relative pain of coding for the PS3 cell processor is now gone.

Honestly, I think that what Valve's going for here is they're trying to generate hype around a "new platform" that's actually an existing platform that's underutilized. Valve sees that there's a lot of what's effectively free RND work going into Linux as a platform for gaming, but that no one's taking advantage of that.

I think SteamOS is just going to be a highly tuned distro, since Valve really doesn't have the man power (or the internal motivation) to build an entirely new platform. However, they are trying to make it seem like a new and different platform so that the distributors and studios will take notice and say "Maybe we should develop for this." In doing so they'll be developing for Linux at large, they just might not know it.

Valve has the resources; it's more a issue of internal commitment, which I agree they don't seem willing to make. To make SteamOS a serious contender to NXE Dashboard or CellOS they'd need to:

* Develop a XrossMediaBar like UI

* Devote resources to Wayland or Mir to reach production quality

* Create a new audio subsystem, or bring OSS v4 up to date for Linux

If I heard something like Valve dedicating 5 programmers on Wayland and 2 on OSS, SteamBox could be a serious contender for my next console purchase.

> Develop a XrossMediaBar like UI

What's wrong with Big Picture? It's very usable and has replaced XBMC as the primary interface on my HTPC. It's already almost as functional as any console or media center's interface, all it really needs is a system settings area.

They don't really need Wayland right now, and OSS isn't required for gaming on Linux. I've been pretty happy with xorg + pulseaudio + alsa and their Steam for Linux client. I've been surprised at the quality this early in the game.

I'm still a bit amazed that they've released a Steam for Linux client that works as well as it does, and that they are iterating and improving it so quickly. They've done everything right so far, let's see where it goes.

According to an X11 dev, Daniel Stone, Wayland reduces the latency and eliminates tearing issues associated with X11.[1] This is exactly the kind of upgrade to Linux that will make SteamBox a viable alternative to PS4.

As far as audio goes, PulseAudio is fine for playing music, but a real PITA for many hardcore gamers[2][3] including myself. I found latency was terrible with Wine + PA and later saw the developers had an issue with PA too.[4]

I've been playing native and Wine game on Linux with for about 6 years now and by far the best experience I had was with OSS4 and my old SB Live. When I eventually "upgraded" to ALSA, I immediately noticed some latency in games like OpenArena.

I'd think that maybe this issue was just me, accept Steam said in their announcement, they were "targeting audio performance". If they do put some resources to clean up the linux audio subsystem, it will be a win for us all.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44

[2] http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/linux-and-open-source/pulse...

[3] http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=960195

[4] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyODM

If they announce Half Life 3 as an exclusive launch title for Steam OS, I think there are a lot of people who would give it a shot. Steam is a very influential and well-connected company, don't underestimate them.

It's an operating system, there are not going to be exclusive launch titles. Unless of course, you think Valve is going to release HL3 only for Linux users, but that idea is absurd.

Games run on operating systems. They revealed there are going to be some AAA titles coming to the OS. Of course if HL3 eventually is confirmed it won't be a solely Linux only release but that doesn't mean Valve won't release it for the OS though. It was an example.

The market is already there. Steam already has more users that both Xbox and Playstation combined.

Assuming you meant Xbox 360 and PS3, I think your stats are off:

    * Steam - ~60 million [1]
    * Xbox 360 - ~80 million [2]
    * PS3 - ~80 million [3]

If you literally meant the Xbox and PS2 from 11 years ago, then yes, you are probably correct :)

  [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(software)
  [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_consoles#Microsoft
  [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_consoles#Sony

That's an unfair comparison. It should be with XBox Live [1] and PlayStation Network [2]

    * Steam - ~60 million users
    * XBox Live - 46 million users as of February 2013
    * PlayStation Network - +100 million

although PSN includes PlayStation Portable and PlayStation Vita handhelds so the number of PS3 users is probably similar to XBox given the number of consoles sold.

Also, the Steam page you referenced says: "Steam has an estimated 50–70% share of the digital distribution market for downloadable PC video games"

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_Live [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Network

There is no "Linux Platform", unfortunately.

I think that's what Steam is doing here. Creating a platform that doesn't exist yet, to bridge PC and console gaming.

Also, even for games that do have a Windows release, it's hard enough getting a Mac release most days... Linux is an even tougher sell in the current market, but perhaps that'll change if Valve can start showing some serious SteamOS install numbers?

One thing people haven't mentioned in this thread is the Windows Store. Windows is already following OS X in creating a walled garden with signed software. Microsoft implementing more controls on the Windows software ecosystem could be catastrophic for companies like Valve.

Steam OS will ensure Valve has something to rely on, it will also force Windows to keep tabs on their software ecosystem.

Microsoft isn't killing the Windows Desktop (i.e. traditional windows apps) anytime soon. 99.9% of Windows users rely on it.

> Is anyone else skeptical that they can motivate publishers to spend time/money porting their games to the Linux platform?

no.

porting and refactoring tools are so good now you can even port a direct3d app to opengl in 2 days or less, you could use a d3d>opengl wrapper in a day of work.

libraries are also so good at dual platform it requires minimal changes (usually just a new build system).. afaik the biggest change is handling input (theres no directInput on linux - most games use directInput for mouse/kb).

theres also numerous benefits to a closed system economy like an app store - for example even if nobody uses it you are practically exclusive and will get more buys than other places you can sell your app.

I would merely make the point that if porting was as painfully simple as you suggest here, non-first-party publishers would be making their games available for every platform (in most cases) without a second thought.

Even though multi-plat development is infinitely easier today than it was even 5 years ago, I still think getting titles onto multiple platforms is much harder and time consuming than you are giving it credit.

> Is anyone else skeptical that they can motivate publishers to spend time/money porting their games to the Linux platform?

All they have to do is heavily subsidize (or give away) the console they are undoubtedly working on. Right from the get-go you can stream your existing PC Steam games to your TV which everyone will jump on. When the installed base is large enough, publishers will follow.

This sounds an awfully lot like: "To be rich all you have to do is make a ton of money and then you can buy whatever you want" -- yes... I absolutely agree, but there is an ocean sized gap of potentially company-crippling decisions between "heavily subsidize/give away" and "large enough install base, publishers will follow" :)

You can stream games from your desktop to Steam OS. That alone is awesome.

I wrote a response to your comment but it became rather long so I decided to make it into a blog post instead.

http://mortdeus.blogspot.com/2013/09/linux-core-component-po...

Game developers can just use cross-platform games engines (like Unity) that support Windows, Mac and Linux.

"In SteamOS, we have achieved significant performance increases in graphics processing, and we’re now targeting audio performance and reductions in input latency at the operating system level."

I'm really interested to see the trickle down effect that this will have on other Linux flavors. Having a push for standardization from a big name company like Valve should provide a better Linux experience for everyone.

Valve are working on improving Linux debugging tools too, which is great for developers.

What performance increases in graphics processing are they talking about?

I'm with you thought, I do hope all of their work will be landed in mainline kernel so everyone could enjoy the benefits, and we could play games (through Steam or other methods) on most Linux distros, without much hassle.

Phoronix has several articles about the work that Valve has done with Linux GPU drivers (open source and proprietary)

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=17823

That one is about how valve themselves got value out of debugging on open source GPU drivers.

This is the Valve blog port about that:

http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/

This is basically a similar approach Android took for phones. It leverages off Linux while replacing user facing pieces to give the user a simplified and consistent environment that they expect.

However as with Android, that isn't enough to get it to take off. Android had huge traction problems to start with until they managed to get the big device makers to train users and market the devices. SteamOS is going to have the same rough and long launch period, but the ultimate payoff is very big as the tech is all there and it's just a matter of getting the big game publishers to join up.

As with mobiles and Google, if anybody can succeed in the gaming industry, it's Steam. So I definitely wouldn't write this one off, I think it will take off in a few years time if they can get the big players - both software and hardware - to join up.

I suspect that like Android, they're going to leverage Linux-the-kernel, but have a user space that is alien to the one common in current Linux servers and desktops.

I can understand: I'd say good riddance to some parts of the userspace myself coughX windows systemcough, but having a few different userspaces is like having the UNIX wars all over again.

PS "The UNIX wars" has a modern space opera ring to it, like something out of an Orson Scott Card book (or JMS script. Or maybe your-favourite author. I don't read enough Sci-Fi to know). And now I have an urge to write a comics^W graphic novel adaptation of the UNIX wars. It'll be glorious!

That seems really unlikely. Steam for Linux runs on Ubuntu as it's platform of choice, and installs via apt-get. They're already running all their games under X and the standard Ubuntu userspace tools, with BigPicture, it would be very surprising for them to fork the platform at this point.

Android made sense because standard linux/X windows applications didn't work on a multi-touch mobile device for a whole host of reasons. PC games work fine on Linux and X.

X has a lot of baggage. And by lot, I mean a few metric tons. The protocol can do things you wouldn't believe, and do that in the most cumbersome way (it was all the range in the Eighties, or so I'm told).

Most of Steam and Steam games don't really use X as anything but a bootstrap for GL, and run full screen, so they could be easily ported to FB+GL (consider that there's already a GTK backend that renders to FB, no X involved).

I don't think so. It will be probably based on Ubuntu LTS

EA won't be there. Blizzard won't be there. Steam is increasingly becoming a great indie platform where the only AAA titles we see on it are Valve's.

In what universe are Grand Theft Auto, Borderlands, Bioshock, Skyrim, Call of Duty, and Saints Row indie titles?

Like Android had Google users, Steam has a user base already.

I think that will help get people onboard as well. Everything is already right there for you, your friend list, your games, your awards, your wallet.

Getting a box running SteamOS is just another piece of the puzzle for Steam users invested in the ecosystem.

Valve, a AAA developer in their own right, already has plans to release their own hardware & doesn't need to wait for a third party to make hardware for this to succeed. They already have a massive base of customers which have already invested hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, in their Steam libraries so they don't need to build traction. Game consoles, while a significant expense, are not an all or nothing commitment like a cellphone - customers can easily have a Steam box in addition to their PlayStation, Xbox or PC.

It's not really fair to compare this to Android. Android succeeded, not because of Google's user base but because of Google's financial clout. Companies thought that throwing in their lot with Google was a safe bet - there's too much money behind the project for it to fail. People are going to throw in with Valve because it's a smart bet - it's bringing what gamers want to the table.

Building their own linux is the right move to create the kind of end user experience it will take for the living room PC to work.

Think about the XBox 360 and the XBox One. They are both basically a windows kernel with a totally custom UI designed for the living room. It's about creating the best possible experience for the end user.

You can already get steam client with big picture mode on Linux, what this does is creates something analogous to ChromeOS, but purpose built for gaming instead of web browsing.

If linux gaming is going to have a mass market chance, SteamOS or OUYA a similar approach is going to be how it gets there.

Oh my god. This provides a genuine chance for year of the linux desktop in 2014, for gamers at least.

Gaming is one of the last legitimate refuges of Windows dominance. There are a lot of us who wouldn't care about (read: would be willing to switch) their OS if not for PC gaming.

Or people that dual boot and keep Windows around just to game.

I'm waiting a LoL for linux so i can uninstall windows.

>Gaming is one of the last legitimate refuges of Windows dominance.

What about pretty much all larger businesses in the world? Windows sure dominate the corporate space.

I think he meant in terms of being the best option available. You would have a hard time arguing that Windows is significantly better than competitors like RHEL in the corporate space. For gaming, on the other hand, no other OS comes close to offering the selection that Windows has, at least for now.

The corporate space isn't dominated by Windows because there are no other options. The main reason for that dominance is change aversion. I'll put it a different way:

When I buy a computer with an OS, I tend to pick Windows mainly because I intend to game on it. If I don't intend to game on it, then OS would stop being a major factor in my decision-making. I might spring for a Mac instead, or I might get a Linux box. It's no longer the point.

If I were buying a computer for surfing the web, I can get what I want. If I were buying it for word processing, I can get whatever. If I were buying it for photo manipulation, I can get whatever. For Door #1, I'd be looking at network connection options. For Door #2, I'd probably be looking for compactness. For Door #3, I'd want graphics and RAM, I think. For none of these is my primary consideration, "Well, the program I'm going to want to run isn't going to be available unless I get Windows."

That primary consideration exists for gaming. If I bought a replacement gaming rig today, I'd get a Windows box. Period.

Another big reason is Active Directory. It's very surprising to me that there isn't a full-featured FLOSS alternative to AD, because what it does is pretty simple, but it works pretty much out of the box, and it scales massively.

Two years ago I would have said another big reason was Outlook, because no other desktop calendaring app comes close (even though it sucks hairy balls as an email client), but nowadays web-based solutions, particularly Google Calendar, are as good if not better.

Also MS Office, Adobe Photoshop and a bunch of other Windows-only or Mac-only tools.

> or Mac-only

Libreoffice replaces MS office easily for me

You say a lot, what you really mean is <5% of PC users, that's a high end estimate.

Some years ago I was about to switch my home PC from the terrible Windows Vista to Linux, and the only thing that prevented me from doing so was Team Fortress 2.

Now TF2 runs on Linux, and the perspectives for Linux gaming are very good in general, but I no longer want to switch because I am happy with Windows 7, I hate Unity and Gnome 3 and their dumbed-down UIs that make me want to bang my head against the wall, XFCE is OK but feels like going ten years back in time, and KDE 4... well, that one is not too bad, but I still prefer Windows 7.

It's a pity that all this Linux gaming surge didn't happen back in 2008 or so, when Windows was in its lowest moments with Vista and most Linux distros hadn't yet been ruined by overbearing UI visionaries. I'm sure that desktop Linux market share would have soared in that case.

Cinnamon is quite good.

http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/

Isn't this specifically not a desktop system?

I assume he is implying that games coming to SteamOS should be able to run on any desktop linux that supports the Steam client.

Yes but it's virtually the same core software stack as on the desktop. So the linux distros get a huge leg up in that arena.

Are you sure about that? Why wouldn't this be more similar to Android than, say, Linux Mint? Who says they're even using any of the typical userspace bits?

I would bet a money (albeit a small amount) that, to a first approximation, they're really only using the Linux kernel.

Because they already ported Steam to Linux and have about 200 titles native on Linux. That fits quite well with "Hundreds of great games are already running natively on SteamOS." statement. I do not see why they would force game developers to do the work again.

The release of Steam on Ubuntu was a precursor to this. Valve encouraged developers to port their games to Ubuntu and ported their own games. It is unlikely that they would do that again. This will likely be a linux system with gnu userspace for now, even though they would have a custom UI.

As others have said, the important point here is that the core of Linux support is here. They've already ported all of their major titles to Ubuntu-based desktop linux, and I would be extremely surprised if SteamOS did not inherit greatly from that effort.

Even if SteamOS uses different toolkits or packaging (which it very well might), the amount of effort to get those titles to run on typical desktop linux distros should be relatively very minimal.

I highly doubt it would be more similar to Android than Linux Mint simply because they have already invested time and money into making Steam run on the Linux Mint family of distros (i.e Ubuntu), and (to my knowledge) none working on the android stack.

It will have the kernel and should have the same glibc userspace. It might use Wayland rather than X.

The rest is irrelevant; if a game runs on the SteamOS, it will run on my Linux desktop.

Your last thought is the big point here. It may be part of more of a horizontal strategy that is initially touted as a niche move.

When we actually see it, it may be either a desktop-less distro, have Unity/GNOME or some other desktop permutation. My best estimate of what best fits a maximum impact strategy is an OS with a desktop environment pre-installed (even if hidden from casual view) or easily installable.

I have a feeling that we may look back at this seemingly minor product announcement as a significant stepping stone.

My bet is a Debian derivative, running X, with no complete desktop environment, but with all the GTK libs required.

Maybe with added Wine.

It'll likely just boot straight into Big Picture.

Well they'd have to work real hard to stop people running everything else on it...

Depends on what you mean. It is specifically designed to be a "living room" OS, like steam's big picture mode not a desktop system. So yeah not a traditional desktop experience.

Nothing in the release said steam only or no desktop, and they call out the ability to create content on the platform specifically Users can alter or replace any part of the software or hardware they want. Gamers are empowered to join in the creation of the games they love. Rather sounds like what they are doing is going to be open source and allow non games to run. Even if they don't ship with KDE or Gnome by default it should be possible to get something up and running.

It does seem that way, but if it's possible to run SteamOS on some sort of custom Linux box, if not a normal Linux PC, for me at least that would be good enough (that way you can enjoy the latest graphics hardware, which is the main draw of PC gaming along with mods).

I am incredibly excited for this. This may well push Linux into the hands of everyday people.

The rumors of a Steam Box based on Linux have been circulating for a while now, but earlier Valve came out to say they had no plans to enter the hardware business.

I love this solution. Those of us comfortable with building our own Steam Box can do so easily, and manufacturers can also build their own models. In every case, the Steam store will certainly be sewn into the very fabric of the box, and Valve emerges a big winner.

This is what I've been waiting for to build an HTPC/PC gaming battlestation... I've (personally) always preferred gaming with a controller while sitting on a couch.

Valve, at one point, came out to say they had no plans to support linux.

Now they don't just support linux, they're using it to stage a mini coup against microsoft.

Since I spend most of my time in front of a computer screen and not a tv, I hope they also roll out some improvements to the steam client as well.

Things like the ability to tag my games with multiple categories; To see trailers and descriptions of the games I "bought and forgot"; Pause the game and read the user manual; and the ability to actually PLAY a game right now instead of being forced to wait for hours while it downloads and applies updates to itself and the game I already have downloaded, installed, and partly played.

I'd settle for < 4 second load times on the pages within their shitty web based interface.

The old steam was snappy and fast, new steam is a bloated pile of garbage by comparison.

That's cause the new steam browser uses a customized chromium engine, while the old steam just used the trident (internet explorer) engine that's part of windows.

That's very possibly the least important thing about Steam to me. When I want to browse the store, I just launch Firefox...

"being forced to wait for hours while it downloads and applies updates to itself and the game I already have downloaded, installed, and partly played."

The default is to keep the game updated, I believe. Do you have it set to not do that? But then, I also have steam set to start on boot up. If you rarely start the steam client then it's going to need to apply updates. Do you have it set to start steam on boot up?

You just have to click 'store page' on the right to see trailers and such for games you've bought and forgot.

Add in Netflix (or a competitor) integration and you've got the potential to put all 3 major consoles on the ropes in a few years. Given Halflife 2 launched steam my bet is HL3 will be used to launch this.

Please... No more HL3 fake launch announcements. Please.

If HL3 comes out as a SteamOS exclusive; well that would be quite the coup.

Kind of crazy to think that Valve has the power to make 2014 the fabled "Year of the Linux Desktop" simply by making HL3 a Linux exclusive.

In Gaben we trust.

I'm somewhat disappointed. While perfectly logical for Valve, it might end up being not very beneficial for other distributions. In worst case scenario, hardware manufacturers cherry pick specific devices ("steambox") and software ecosystem to support (SteamOS) while totally neglecting all other linux distributions.

My thoughts exactly. Currently, gaming on Linux was fairly on the rise, since Steam supported Linux as one target platform and advertised it fairly substantially. If Steam renames all "Linux" entries as "SteamOS" and pushes general Linux to the sidelines, all that progress is lost.

"Linux" isn't a platform, "SteamOS" is though.

Having an undefined "general Linux" is impossible for them to support, especially since there's no real definition of a platform, just a kernel.

On Steam, the games are labelled as "supporting Linux", by which they usually mean some version of Ubuntu, which Steam runs on now. Other distributions often work too, usually with some small tweaks that can be googled.

If "SteamOS" becomes a target in the Steam app, this general "Linux" label may be pushed to the sidelines, and since SteamOS may contain more proprietary parts than general Ubuntu does, we may find it much more difficult to run the games on any distribution other than SteamOS itself. That was my point.

Steam seems to install Linux games in such a way that it'll run on any Linux distro. I know Steam works on Arch-based systems, openSUSE, Ubuntu-based systems, and likely more...

Also, from the sound of the announcement, Valve plans on keeping the OS bits open, so I see no reason they'd break compatibility with other Linux versions (and it wouldn't be in their interest since Linux is becoming more and more significant).

Agreed. I would imagine they will continue trying to support major linux distros such as Ubuntu, but it's not plausible for them to make sure it work on other Linux distro. Interested 3rd parties though will probably try to keep most things ported to other Linux distros though.

Doubt it - most of the benefits - like sane drivers, optimizations and so on will trickle down.

And I think steam box will be set of requirements.

I hope you're right and we won't end up with even more incoherent binary blob dumps than we have now.

why would, say nvidia or AMD contribute their driver improvements upstream, especially if there isn't anything in it for them? unless there is some GPL clause requiring it of course.

Valve cannot magically produce a homogeneous experience across all Linux distributions. They need some degree of consistency in the environment in order for users to have a reasonable experience. It isn't their job to prop up every two-bit distribution.

Well, just perusing through the files in my computer's home/.steam folder, it seems as though the binaries are packaged with all required dependencies, so as long as the Steam client works, the games should work on any Linux distro.

Most games currently at Steam have no problems running at almost any modern Linux distro.

That's worlds away from certifying that all the Steam games will run on arbitrary Slackware boxes.

If the Steam client itself can be made to run on Slackware (I don't see why not, it runs on Arch just fine), the games will run as well. Steam installs all the dependencies, it's not dependant on distro-specific packaging...

Again, this is completely different from certifying or guaranteeing that all the games will run well.

Linux is Linux. As long as you have a display stack (ie. X) and graphics driver that provides OpenGL, Steam provides the rest of the dependencies. The Linux distro doesn't matter...

not just hardware, it might also lead to game developers forcing people to use steam to get/play their games which otherwise would have been free.

Even if that ends up being the case it should open the door for a competitor down the road with data and facts to get backing for their Linux-based system/distribution. This can be a big step in the right direction, regardless of how well this current iteration plays out.

Nothing new. Commercial software has targeted "Red Hat" since the '90s, forcing the entire Linux world to deal with RPMs and whatever nonsense Red Hat was doing at the time.

Really, I'm more optimistic. It seems like SteamOS is just going to be a tuned distro, but marketed towards publishers and studios as a new platform. The "new platform" part makes it easier for Valve to get AAA titles on board, but I doubt Valve has the manpower or the desire to make an entirely new (incompatible) fork that damages the potential to distribute games on other platforms.

Basically, I think it's a sly way to get studios and publishers to start developing for Linux.

Steam as it stands is officially focused on Ubuntu but I can run it on Arch without problem thanks to the work done by the Arch package maintainers.

SteamOS obviously differs since it's (by the sound of it) a whole distribution.

But I don't see why I wouldn't be able to continue using the Steam client just as I do now to play Steam games, the SteamOS is from what I understand the equivalent of a streamlined distro for Steam gaming, likely with optimizations for Steambox hardware configurations.

As an end user the choice is mine, use this streamlined distro for Steam gaming, or continue to use the Steam client from my distro of choice. I don't see the problem?

The biggest benefit as I see it, is that the users won't have the hassle of setting something up: just install the OS and login. No drivers ppa, no recovery console, no xorg.conf patches. If this is true, Valve will do something very big for the gaming community.

I don't believe that they'll even focus on users installing the OS, just like 99% of Windows users don't install their own OS. Valve will provide the reference SteamBox and encourage other manufacturers to release their own SteamOS-preinstalled boxes, giving users hardware options.

This is the end goal - but for the time being, it does seem aimed at tinkerers - the kind of people who already have a PC hooked up as an HTPC...

Keep in mind that this is the first of three announcements that they've, err, announced: http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/

The second is in 48hrs, and almost definitely something related to the SteamBox. So it's too soon to speak of their intentions "for the time being".

I think it's going to be more like what Google did with Android.

As someone who's had a lot of fun writing game hacks for ET:QW and QuakeLive back in the days and while I greatly enjoy seeing this move to Linux, I'm quite worried about game hacks on SteamOS. There are so many attack vectors on Linux and, currently, VALVE's Anti Cheat (VAC v3) does not, as far as I know, cover any of those. You can still inject your hack via LD_PRELOAD + detouring dlsym/dlopen. Even were that not possible, you could have fun with, e.g., ptrace.

I'm looking forward to seeing what VALVE's done to fight this, especially as I expect SteamOS to eventually be repackaged to run on any distribution...

Is there even an expectation that anti-cheat utilities can work? They're worse than DRM - unless the anti-cheat software is certified and your system can do hardware trusted execution, it's going to be worked around. (it's most likely also possible in case of trusted execution...)

They do have some limited success at deterring "script kiddies" and similar, however I think that this is far more difficult to do on Linux than Windows. Back when there were a few games around on Linux that used PunkBuster (America's Army, Enemy Territory), PB offered almost no real protection and, e.g., ET's mod developers decided to build in some anti cheat protection of their own into the mods which was superior to PB's. (Which, of course, also got bypassed eventually)

>however I think that this is far more difficult to do on Linux than Windows

You are mistaken.

exactly the same sort of tricks are possible on windows via debugging hooks and process injection. I don't see how Linux is any more problematic on this front.

Windows is closed source and offers some pseudo-"security" through that. Also, you can't just modify the kernel to suit your needs...

You can however load kernel drivers on windows and achieve pretty much the same thing.

> You can still inject your hack via LD_PRELOAD + detouring dlsym/dlopen. Even were that not possible, you could have fun with, e.g., ptrace.

This all works on Windows, too. It's what things like FRAPS use, or the half dozen game overlays that apps like Mumble offer (including Steam's for that matter)

Anti-cheat systems are just a constantly escalating game of cat & mouse like anti-virus systems where signatures and code patterns are recognized, game DLLs are hashed to see if they were modified, etc... There's zero, zilch, nada OS level support for these.

I don't like that Valve says that SteamOS is "freely licensable". They must know by now that the word "free" often means "libre" in the GNU/Linux community, but they've made no indication of what the license terms will actually be.

Presumably the GNU/Linux core is libre and Steam is freeware. Why would it be anything else?

The point is that Valve is using confusing language to claim that they are "open", instead of saying what they are really doing: writing proprietary software that sits on top of a free software operating system.

The word "open" (well, the derivative "openness") is only used once on the page, and the context is clear: It's not locked to any hardware (like Windows) but is freeware (like Android).

Free as in beer; not speech.

The streaming of other OS games from your other OS systems seems like a pretty compelling and surprising feature. I wonder if it will work with all games.

Can't see a reason why it wouldn't.

Main reason seems to be that while SteamOS can only handle games that have Linux support the streaming allows you to have "HTPC" SteamOS connected to TV and play anything that Windows machine would be able to play.

Of course there's the input lag etc which might be an issue in some FPS games etc (which they mention that they're trying to "reduce in operating system level")

It's implied that it will. I wonder if this is basically like having your own mini OnLive cloud deployment.

I was more curious as to whether it might present licensing issues.

I can't see how they'd manage to get twitch games like online FPSes to be playable with the addition of another layer of latency between the player and the game. A 100ms delay between input and response is death for games like that.

If you have 100ms latency on your LAN you have some serious problems.

There's latency for pings and latency for sending moves to a multiplayer server, those are going to be low on the LAN. Then there's user experienced latency for sending high frame rate HD graphics to another machine every frame and the input back from that other machine. That is not going to be without hiccups, even on a LAN.

In reality, most consoles are hooked up by WiFi nowadays which will make things even worse. Android manufacturers have struggled with smooth display mirroring over WiFi for a long time and the only time I've seen it work good enough for gaming is WiFi Direct connections via Miracast or wired connections via MHL.

Latency is a measure of the time it takes for a packet to travel to its destination. No part of ethernet networks cares what the payload in those packets are. You don't magically get more latency because the data in them can be interpreted as frames of video.

You can look up latency and it has a more general meaning. We're talking about a time delay. In this context we're not concerned about the time it takes to tranfer a single TCP packet, we're concerned about the time it takes to transfer a complete frame of video (under the assumption that a complete frame is required before the receiving end can display it). So bandwidth plays a role, and if you're sending larger frames then the delay from source output to destination display will be larger. This is latency.

>So bandwidth plays a role

Of course it does, but we're not talking 10Mb/s networks here. People stream 1080p content all the time, gigE can handle that no problem. The only latency concern would be the encoding step, not transferring the data.

Not packet latency, but total latency added by streaming the video and controller inputs over WiFi. It's not the ping itself, but the perceived delay between input and response that matters for the gamer.

Fair enough.

Latency on local network is at most a few ms most of the time. If they can squeeze input/output on 100 Mbps ethernet without much delay it should be good.

Online FPS haven't been twitch based since the times of Quake 3 and Painkiller. Because they had local lan. And CRT monitors able to deliver 120 FPS. The moment online gaming moved to hosted servers and TFT ... well I still find them too slow even with 50ms ping.

The biggest source of latency on the LAN would be encoding the video on the PC. If you're doing that in software it's going to suck for twitch games.

Google 'Gaikai'. It's a 'good enough' playing experience even when streaming from an internet server (though the server needs to be local to keep latency in check). Streaming over the LAN should be very acceptable.

Input latency is going to be <1ms. The payload is tiny and will fit in a single packet, and if your LAN's latency is more than 1ms your LAN is bad and you should feel bad.

Audio & Video, on the other hand, is more interesting. Let's assume everything is running at 60fps. Your encoder is therefore not adding any more than 16ms (if it was more, it wouldn't be keeping up and therefore not doing 60fps - it could definitely be less, though). Blu-ray is 48mbit/s, but for 24fps (youtube 's 1080p is ~8mbit for comparison). Let's take that same 48mbit/s, but adjust for 60fps instead. 1 frame would therefore be 0.8 mbit, or 100KB. If your network can do 48mbit/s, your video latency would therefore be 16ms. If your network is faster, though, the latency drops proportionally. Even a cell phone can do 100mbit/s on wifi, which would be 8ms of latency. A gigabit network would transfer that 0.8mbit needed in about a millisecond.

So your total latency of input, encoding, and transmission of the frame would be 32ms at most, and if you have a fast network & computer it could actually be down in the 5ms or less range.

The success and effectiveness of the console, I believe, is dictated by the following statement:

"Watch for announcements in the coming weeks about all the AAA titles coming natively to SteamOS in 2014. Access the full Steam catalog of over nearly 3000 games and desktop software titles via in-home streaming."

To me this suggests that they are actively trying to get developers to port and they have had some success. Also I believe that a lot of developers will not port and to handle those cases they've introduced the home streaming functionality so that you could stream your windows game to the steam box via a windows steam client running somewhere.

How long till we see the "SteamOS on Raspberry Pi" threads?

Ha, the first thing I searched for on this thread was "raspberry". I just got mine last week. However, there's no way in the world that thing will be able to run modern games.

I have a spare Pi laying around, and I'm hopeful at least. According to the SteamOS page there's a streaming mode where you basically do the processing on your Desktop / Server, and SteamOS just takes care of input and streaming.

Fingers crossed !

Or SteamOS inside a Docker container!

;-)

Why not, each distribution/DRM platform can go in its own sandbox... ;)

This actually isn't a terrible idea. It's been a _long_ time since I've gamed on Linux, but I remember playing Tribes 2 in aeons past, and had to patch a decent chunk of the libraries in my distro to get it working. Using something like Docker/LXC to define the runtime environment of a game would probably help to make life a lot easier.

As long as the use of containers didn't impact on performance too much, which ideally they don't compared to virtualisation. (I say having not personally had any significant experience of the different performance characteristics).

I wonder if they will white-list any games are not natively ported to linux that have good wine compatibility. SteamOS could manage the wine configurations for those games. With enough platform adoption, this should help game companies to start targeting linux natively.

So what is the chance that Gaben will make everything proprietary? Releasing games for the SteamOS with license restrictions to make them unplayable on other Linux distros? What if he makes a deal with AMD/NVidia to make drivers only for SteamOS which won't be available to normal Linux users? I don't want linux to go towards that direction.

What reason does he have to do any of this?

Valve makes money if you buy games on Steam on other distros too.

Also Valve is not scared of piracy. Steamworks have been a joke since day 1 and kept that way on purpose.

That would turn their most vocal supporters into enemies, destroy their plans to make Linux a viable gamming plataform (and Valve needs Linux to be viable, for keeping MS from destrying them), assure that nobody ever uses their new SteamOS (people that don't care are already doing similar stuff with Windows), and alienate everybody that is selling specialized Steam hardware.

Unless they get a MS-like world domination, the chances of that happening are near enough 0 that you'd better care about other problems.

in other words, they'll wait until they are fully embraced...;)

Don't be ridiculous -- Canonical has taken control of Ubuntu development and now they have a reputation for being authoritarian and secretive. There are fewer ways to alienate the open-source community than that and yet Ubuntu's popularity soars.

The more critical people are of Canonical, the more fervent Ubuntu supporters become. "How will they make money" will be parroted just as loudly, if not more-so.

And Canonical has GPL'd everything they've done. What proprietary bits has Canonical added? Free software isn't some hippie co-operative - it's about the ability to freely modify software the way you see fit. If Canonical's changes were worthless, people wouldn't adopt them. But Ubuntu is #1...

Ubuntus popularity is anything but soaring these days, mint has more or less taken over its former crown.

Hah. I'd wager that in real world installs Ubuntu has at least 20x-50x the installs (Wikimedia statistics support this assertion), never mind Ubuntu server installs.

How many people ever visit Distrowatch (the only statistic on the web that supports the idea that Mint > Ubuntu) once they settle on a distro?

I've yet to see this anywhere but numbers on the Internet. I hear people talking about Ubuntu, I see people using Ubuntu, and I see computers coming pre-loaded with Ubuntu. I've never seen anyone using Mint, heard anyone talking about Mint, or see machines pre-loaded with Mint.

I love Ubuntu. So do the 20 or so other people I know that use Linux--I have not heard of a single person sticking with mint; a few have used it for a bit and gone back (not sure why---I should ask). I have never used Mint myself, maybe it is great, I am just reporting the numbers I have seen.

Remember, Gabe used to work at MS. He knows how they work, and knows the pros and cons of the way they do business. Nowadays, you have companies like IBM, Oracle, Google, Amazon, and many others embracing Linux, none of them have ruined the 'open-ness' of Linux, they've all contributed. Gabe should be smart enough to know that all he needs is a platform on which his ecosystem can run. Chrome is a platform, Steam is a platform - it's in their interest to make their platform as portable as possible - in otherwords run on any Linux base...

Not much. They benefit a lot from the open image and maintenance model. Going proprietary on the platform side makes zero sense and would just increase the cost and bind a lot of resources better used for generating money with their core business.

I wonder if history will repeat itself, will Valve be the next Apple?

Apple took FreeBSD and makes it into OSX. > Valve takes Linux and makes it into SteamOS.

Apple makes iTunes for music, unifying digital music download > Valve makes Steam for games, unifying digital game download

Apple make IPOD for digital music playing > Valve make (SteamBox?) for game playing

Damn I wish I could own some Valve stock...

The differences in licensing between the BSD license and GPL are designed to prevent them from doing all of what Apple did with FreeBSD.

> what Apple did with FreeBSD

Please tell us what Apple did with FreeBSD.

> Apple took FreeBSD and makes it into OSX.

No, they took NeXTSTEP and made it into OS X. However much they may now have in common, the history of the codebase goes back years prior to the existence of FreeBSD.

Let's try again with facts:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-advocacy/2008-Aug...

I think this is Valve's answer to the chicken/egg problem of new platform/app availability.

Build it and they will come.

I would say that a lot of people are there already. A lot of developers are switching to linux as desktop os. Except the games everything in the toolchain works better there and windows tools work fine.

And the IT guys have long been the core of the PC gaming scene.

So ... it was not a chicken and egg problem but a demand that needed answering.

Even if this never gets majority traction compared to consoles, I suspect it will be worth it for Valve. Ever since Microsoft tried to cut them off with the Windows Store, Valve has been working to have an independent platform. Having alternative platforms gives Valve room to maneuver.

Some responses say SteamOS is not open source, in the press release, it says "Users can alter or replace any part of the software or hardware they want." So I'm guessing if not open-source, the user would download a disk image, then go in and change the configuration, install media-center front-end software, etc, after the fact?

Regardless, I'm very interested, but just curious how easy and flexible it will be.

So the Streaming functionality will be in both SteamOS and the normal Steam client? For both PC and Mac?

There might be a few interesting ways to utilize that. :)

I really hope that this will be seamless. I would love to keep a beefy windows PC in the basement as a headless machine to run windows only games from and stream them to TV or Macs from there.

Yeah, I see the streaming functionality as almost bigger announcement than the OS.

It's quite possible that one could stream into any other machine including tablets, laptops and even phones. This would enable playing your full Steam library from anywhere with decent enough connection (on both sides), especially games where input lag is not that big issue.

Open ecosystem (Linux, hardware) + gaming = well done Valve, sounds good, I like it!

Not open source, however. Not a dealbreaker, but an important distinction to keep in mind.

Very true!

Personally, I'm fine with Steam remaining closed-source, as this is both inevitable because of it being both a store and a DRM provider.

The key question here is whether Valve's future extensions to the graphics subsystems (which seem to be advertised, to some extent) will be released as open-source and be admitted to the (free software) kernel and libraries that exist today.

They have hired the head SDL developer and have greatly been moving the library forward, while keeping it open source, for instance.

Valve in a lot of respects is a strange company, they are relatively small and employee owned, and have a massive per employee profit margin, well into the "Fuck you money" bracket. I think their main driving incentive at this point is to make better games for its own sake. Based on the platform the chosen I think that means contributing back in a big way.

we are going to see a lot of really exciting stuff out of them

I don't see any reason why they would not. In fact, since they make money off the number of games sold, better graphics on all distros == more players == more $$.

Unless they want to advertise the "only Linux which runs games best!!!". But that seems unlikely

It'd be cool if Valve incentivized contributions to open source parts of their OS through Steam. E.g. if you fix a bug you get some sort of achievement, and if you fix several bugs you get something valuable like game coupons.

At the very least they should have some TF2 hats for code contributors!

Do we know it's not open source? Or are you talking specifically about steam and the games?

My opinion, for a long time now, is that I'm just mildly anoyed that my games are not open source. It's not an important enough problem to do something about it.

Yeah, I really care about my software being open source. The most important a piece of softawre is, the more I care about it. Games just aren't that important. They are nice to have, and losing them is a disconfort, but won't have any practical effect on my life. So I don't care that much about them.

That said, because they are not open source there are security problems that must be dealt with. But, even if they were open source, if I really cared about securing my LAN, I wouldn't trust them. Not much of a change.

I've always thought the place open source can really shine in the gaming world is in the tools developers use to make games. An open source alternative to something like Unity could go a long way, I think.

Users can alter or replace any part of the software

Sounds open source to me, or did you mean the games?

This press release isn't targeted at technical people so the jargon isn't there to definitively say one way or the other.

Yeah, I came to that conclusion just from reading it and ctrl-f'ing 'open', as I was in a rush. It looks like I may have been wrong.

This is easily the most groundbreaking news I've heard as a gamer (and from the point of view of an engineer/business geek) in the past four years or so. This will be a really tough blow for the windows platform since the gamer demographic drives a lot of spending. Also it points to a very deep strategic move by valve, vertically integrating the distribution channel and controlling a la Apple which and how games are experienced. I wouldn't be surprised if valve built strong partnerships with hardware providers to provide a fully vertically integrated, key-in-hand gaming platform experience. It is worth mentioning that valve also sells other types of programs through steam... and that it seems this will eventually mutate into it's application store, centralizing the money management for steamOS in general and fully capturing the platform value.

A new apple but instead of "think different", the idea will be "play different"

I'm not a software dev, so this might be a really dumb question, but how hard is it to port/co-develop Windows/Mac games to Linux?

From what I can find out, PS3 is based on FreeBSD and WiiU is a heavily modified version of Linux, possibly Android. XBOX obviously Windows. Would it be that much harder to also have a SteamOS version in the mix too.

According to John Carmack its a few weeks worth to port, and maybe even less to extend wine.

But that is like saying that according to Superman going to the moon is a few minutes of flight.

And while Superman might be a hell of a Super Hero, what he said doesn't mean much. Its heavily dependent on libraries/frameworks/engines and technologies used to make the game.

If you use something like C++ and SDL it shouldn't be too hard (if not automatic), but if you use something like C#/XNA it could be harder (if not impossible?), but anyway I think (hope) most C# game developers and ex-XNA users use MonoGame these days.

I don't think porting is the main issue, with Linux adoption. It's always been support. You extend to another platform, you're instantly responsibly for all the tech support of your game on that platform.

IIRC, id Software pretty much had a "you're on your own" type of deal, with people using Linux. They provided the Quake binary, gave a README and some FAQs, and then you're on your own.

Likewise, Blizzard does not allow people to run World of Warcraft on platforms other than Windows and OS X. They know people run under WINE and could prevent them. But they don't. They just don't support it. It's win-win for them. More users without doing anything.

Porting is pretty easy if you target OpenGL and keep everything (sound, input) generic. SDL also works on many platforms.

How is "Windows 8" NOT found on this discussion???

It is very unlikely, had Microsoft not decided to go nuts and release a dead-end train wreck of an OS that thew it's passengers/users into the ravine in the name of chasing MacOS and touchscreens that everyone wanted with the same enthusiasm as to 3DTV, that Valve would be so scared of the future on Windows that they would need their own Linux-based platform. Not to mention Mac support.

I am a huge Linux advocate, but this is much more about Valve being scared and running away from Microsoft Windows than it was the greatness of GNU/Linux.

I wonder how Steve Ballmer being fired will change the direction of Microsoft and it's products. What will be the future of Windows?

If they keep trying to actively throw their users off the train with wildly backwards-incompatible user experiences, you can expect even Microsoft Office to start supporting GNU/Linux for fear of the future of Windows.

So long as this box will play hl2 engine games, most notably DOTA2 it's going to be fine. DOTA2 in 2014 is going to skyrocket it's going to be the next WOW and it will secure valves revenue. This box is really just gabe saying fuck you to Microsoft and Sony - let me keep my TV open!

I have to say - after trying to simply play a 2-player game of Portal 2 with a friend over the Internet and having so much go wrong, I don't have a lot of faith that they'll be able to maintain an operating system.

We see constant problems just trying to download the same map. Sometimes the game just shoves us over to a screen with no options and the game has to be force-quit to exit it. Other times it crashes during loading. It won't download to both of our computers at the same time, so it downloads to one first, then, only after the first one has finished, to the other. On those rare occasions that we actually get into the game, there are lots of glitches. I mean, when it works it's really fun, but the number of problems that occur along the way is just phenomenal. It's like using software from the 80s again. It's terrible.

The idea itself is not novel as such. Just like every other company the difficulty is having to disassociate yourself from Windows. As it stands the store relies heavily on Windows titles. The real feat would be if they managed to get the whole catalog across to SteamOS by under the hood cross compatibility layer.

It would be an amazing boon to Linux and gaming on Linux if Valve bought (or heavily funded + added resources to) Crossover/WINE.

Exactly what is going through my mind :)

That's not going to happen any time soon. Wine is in active development by very talented people all the time and they get a lot of the latest AAA stuff running, but generally there are so many corner cases that it would be a support nightmare and financial suicide to attempt this as generic service. Plus they'd probably get some brain-dead software patent lawsuits.

The way for Valve (if you're reading this) to make SteamOS/Linux the top gaming platform overnight?

Make HL3 Linux-only.

Don't do a Windows/Mac port for 2 years. Watch all of us gamers scramble to dual boot at minimum, if not see the writing on the wall and do a wholesale swapout on our Windows gaming boxes.

As evil as this sounds, exclusivity works for the other consoles.

Speculation from over a year ago: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/08/16/heres-a-thought-w...

As someone mentioned this is just the first announcement of three: http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/

Announcement 1, SteamOS: is just a fancy way to say you can create custom Steam consoles by just installing some software. Make the box as good or a cheap as you want and everything will just workPretty awesome, but definitely this will be dwarfed by...

Announcement 2, people are guessing is a Valve distributed "SteamBox": a console that is presumably very cheap and linux based. This would give Xbox One and PS4 a run for their money and with the social aspects of Steam built-in, this could be a break out hit with a price of 50% all the other consoles.

Announcement 3, is the large unknown here. We don't know what it is, but if it is bigger (or equal to) SteamBox this could be a huge deal. Nothing really makes sense here. We know:

* SteamBox will support streaming from your windows/mac machine so it will be able to run every game at launch.

* SteamBox will likely have lots of publishers signed on. Probably as many or more then on xbox one / ps4. If they are already using an engine that targets multiple platforms (Unreal or Unity) they are definitely going to try to support it.

* SteamBox will likely support all the features of steam with friend lists, chat, voice, purchasing over the cloud, etc. So the + might mean sharing, but a new kind?

* SteamBox supports game sharing at a friends or family level. I see this as a kind of Netflix-like persona idea: an account gains separate personas that each have different friends lists and achievements. Very powerful and necessary once Steam hits the living room and multiple people are using the same box / account.

What it could be:

* LAN play for SteamBoxs on the same network (announced in Dota, this could explain the circle + circle graphic). Maybe you share the game between friends, and stream to the other boxes? That would be pretty awesome.

* Game streaming from other people's SteamBoxs? This would be an awesome way to share a game. It is like onlive but for distributed for everyone (seems unlikely. That kind of streaming would stop your friends from being able to play).

* A launch title like Half-life 3 (seems unlikely with the circle + circle logo implying you need multiple SteamOS instances).

* A new kind of social experience, maybe a built in way to be a part of the game creation process or improved social network experiences on Steam (seems unlikely to be big enough to be the final announcement)

* A new kind of hardware like a VR headset(seems unlikely, as cheap will be a big feature of this box)

This is marketing at its best. They hooked us good.

This is going to be great. I can't wait to have a steambox in the lounge room that has access to all my steam games and something like Plex

O+O

OS + Oculus?

That is a nice idea, however Oculus is not consumer ready yet.

> A launch title like Half-life 3 (seems unlikely with the circle + circle logo implying you need multiple SteamOS instances).

I think Left 4 Dead 3 (long rumored) is more likely.

Third announcement has got to be a controller of some type. The O + O probably = dual analog sticks and a d pad, or some other dual-thumb input controls. There's no way Valve is going to announce a living room platform and then give away the most visible part (the controller) to Microsoft's wired Xbox 360 controller (currently the standard bearer for PC controllers despite being from a console).

The first circle is SteamOS, the second will likely to be the Steambox: http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/

There's also a third circle there...

I'm surprised yours is the only comment I saw pointing out the incremental approach to this "living room" goal Valve has been using.

The steam box will obviously require some OS to run, and it seems perfectly reasonable to ship the OS, get feedback for it and it's features (i.e. streaming), and have it production-tested once the inevitable steam box is ready. Why take the risk of shipping all-new-everything when you can do it in smaller steps?

I've been asking for years why someone just doesn't make a XBMC-like os for gaming on commodity PC hardware. Glad to see it finally happening. I'm very excited for this. My son who is 11 will be too

This is the best thing to happen to Linux since Steam came (which itself was the best thing ever).

This gives developers even more incentive to use cross platform tools, to develop on OpenGL, and to make things work with Linux.

GTA:V Bundled Editions sold quite nicely over the past week. Seems like bundling your own console with your own game just became a reality.

Valve just got every major publisher to take a serious look at what they are doing.

Here's hoping that this effort is where they've been concentrating some of their non-game devs. There have been longstanding issues with Valve-produced UX once you look beyond the in-game aspects. TF2 server list couldn't sort properly on the first update for years, the Steam browser is often dog slow, etc. -- things that are front-and-center pain points for me. A perfect initial release isn't a reasonable goal, but I do hope that they'll be able to polish the out-of-game experience better than they have in the past.

What I'm curious of is most of Steam's users are probably avid PC gaming fans that prefer PC gaming over console gaming

At least that's true for me and various of my 'internet friends'

I am with you, but I am a PC gaming fan, not necessarily a Windows gaming fan. WHat I like about this is not the ability to put a Steambox into my living room, but to replace windows with SteamOS on my PC.

If I had a console with sane controls and games that fully support those controls (e.g. mouse / keyboard for first person games), I'd totally dig replacing my gaming PC with a console. Unifying your gaming PC with your living room hardware gives you a nice advantage in that you can maximize your budget for a nice HD TV / HiFi sound setup instead of buying all that stuff twice.

Let's hope they don't got the route of Android, which is perhaps the most successful consumerization of Linux to date, wherein they allow hardware vendors bog it down with crapware...

Given the current high-end game engines that seem to support all the popular platforms out of the box (Windows, Mac, consoles), how difficult is it really to ship a game with Linux support?

"In SteamOS, we have achieved significant performance increases in graphics processing".

I assume they mean in comparison to other Linux OSs. Beating windows drivers seems a bit far fetched?

I think they mean in comparison to Windows. They have previously reported getting better performance using OpenGL on Linux than DirectX on Windows[1]

1: http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/

Valve has reported better performance in Linux than in Windows 7 for at least one of their titles [1].

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/valve-linux-runs-our-games-faster-than-...

Depending greatly on your hardware. And there's the rub. And there's the reason it could be really nice to have Steam boxes and certification of hardware for SteamOS

Nvidia Linux drivers are very good, and are at feature parity with Windows drivers.

And in general, OpenGL is quicker than DirectX...

Lovely - this is what I had discussed more than a year back [1] This same OS can be repackaged for the desktop. I would think superb hardware compatibility, driver support and fundamental media library innovations would make it a compelling base on which to layer on a desktop UI.

I wonder what packaging format will they use for their games ?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3888472

So, this means I could build a PC with SteamOS, hook it to my TV, XBox controllers and play all the same games in our living room. Am I thinking about this right?

If you want to play any non-linux games, you have to have a capable-enough PC to stream the games from, it sounds like. But other than that, yeah.

If valve couples this to a reasonably priced htpc and sell it they could get nearly every game available on steam ruining on it using wine.

That's easy because like with consoles you have only one hardware configuration so getting a game to run properly on wine or even better than on windows would be a walk in the park compared to porting it.

Of course this trick won't work with the millions of hardware combinations in today's PCs.

This needs to be marketed to consumers the same way Windows was in the 90s and iOS/Android is today or else it has no chance of gaining any real... Steam.

The Linux or tech community alone will not make this happen. They need to do a Windows/iOS/Android and push this out on marketable hardware for the masses or else it will just be another niche tech product.

No cool commercials, no chance.

Exclusive period for HL3 on SteamOS. Done.

Valve doesn't need all the AAA titles initially. What if SteamOS were released to a group of perspective and current gaming hardware manufacturers à la Android? Despite the DirectX platform being incumbent on the mid to high-end x86 PCs, if Valve were to target the Wii/smartphone gaming demographic they'd stand a decent chance at commoditizing consoles.

I would disagree here. Nobody likes fragmentation. If Valve can't deliver AAA on linux right away, then this will likely go the way of Ouya. The most interesting thing here is the streaming which could act as a bridge until we see native Linux AAA games.

Lastly, DirectX is so widely used in game engines. I haven't seen any hard evidence (not coming from Valve) that OpenGL can meet or exceed DirectX capabilities. I'd love to see real data on this.

The Wii/smartphone demographic proved terrible for Nintendo and ouya. A dedicated box cannot compete with iPads and iPhones, no one wants to play Angry Birds on their 40"

How open will this be? Will game developers have to licence the right to develop for SteamOS? If not, it'll potentially be huge!

They never seem to define what a Living room machine is ? I wouldn't consider a desktop be a living room machine.

If only Valve would provide us with an exemplary device!

What if SteamOS were released to a group of perspective and current gaming hardware manufacturers à la Android? The DirectX platform may be incumbent on the mid to high-end x86 PCs, but if Valve were to target the Wii/smartphone gaming demographic they'd stand a decent chance at commoditizing consoles.

Having a machine boot into Steam will have an interesting effect on other similar services like Origin and Desura. It will no longer be sufficient to request customers install yet another download manager/DRM platform; instead customers would have to boot in to a different OS to play their Origin games.

So much the worse for Origin, which was a stupid idea anyway.

Desura runs on Linux.

Desura runs on Linux, but assuming SteamOS is akin to "boot to Stream Big Screen," users won't have a Gnome or KDE desktop to install it to. In such a case, Desura's existence on SteamOS depends on either inclusion in Valve's marketplace or users' willingness to venture off the map.

If you want to see that third announcement icon a little more clearly, the lit version is already up.

http://cdn3.store.steampowered.com/public/images/promo/livin...

By the way, anyone who's sceptical of Linux gaming needs to get on Steam, and see what's available for Linux - right now. There are plenty of AAA quality titles already, with many more to come.

Or, for anyone with an Nvidia card and the Nvidia drivers, just download a Unigine demo...

This effectively gives traditional desktop OEMs a relatively cheap and easy entry into the living room, and a new category of product to sell effectively and compete against Xbox, PS4, and the mobile OSs who will be trying to gain entry into the living room soon.

Is it based on an existing distro?

Does not say.

It's either OpenSUSE or Ubuntu based.

Most likely ubuntu as that seems to be their defacto test platform. If you download steam from their site it comes packaged in a .deb format. They have pretty significant investments in that stack, and even list it as their favorite flavor:

"Not running Linux yet? Ubuntu is our favorite version of Linux."

(at the bottom of this page: http://store.steampowered.com/about/)

I hope not. Going Ubuntu will mean (long term) Mir instead of Wayland, which will suck for other distributions and projects.

Likely, but of course just a speculation at this point.

Likely, but do you have a source for that?

wOOOOOOOOOO!!!

If that works on normal machines (like, my laptop), I will kick Windows for good finally!

Yeah I hear you, I thought that this announcement would hurt M$oft stock, but I guess Valve isn't on the radar at all in the mind of investors.

I really, sincerely hope they will get rid of the block that allows only one computer to be signed in at a time. I don't like the idea of having to relogin every time I switch computers (as is the case now).

Set your secondary machines to start in offline mode. That's what I do unless I want to chat.

Given the streaming feature they've mentioned I think it would be safe to assume that you'll at the very least be able to have two machines signed in.

Looks great! I'm really looking forward to see the fist SteamOS device.

"SteamOS will be available soon as a free download for users" - you can build your own device!

You can run Steam on Ubuntu today, if that's what it comes down to. This is for manufacturers.

I find it ironically funny that, after all of these years of having a near monopoly Microsoft is losing out to the open source it tried so hard to sabotage in the late '90s and early 2000s.

Then, while the MS boat is leaking and sailing haphazardly across the computing landscape, along comes Valve to put a stake in the heart of the MS gaming division...

Could this truly be the beginning of the end of this giant leech on the computer industry?

The combination of this "story" and this one from slate (http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/09/23/microsoft...) makes me wonder...

I see the drive by spineless downvoters are showing up here too...

That's one hell of a smart idea if they can pull it off. As an OS, it can run on a VM or dedicated hardware, which gives us users the greatest flexibility. Well played!

To me the big thing is "Music, TV and Movies". If they are able to get rid of the "This Show is not Available in Your Country" thing, that would be huge.

If only it were open source... This is great nonetheless, though. It'll be interesting to see what directions this takes off in, both in terms of hardware and software.

Will this be a game only platform or can I do work on it too?

According to The Verge, SteamOS will boot straight into Steam with Big Picture mode, and you wont see linux at all "unless you want to" [1]. So... for whatever that's worth.

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/6/3958162/valve-steam-box-cak...

The other thing SteamOS will end up doing that is super interesting is get good controller support on Linux/PC games, which can many times be real lacking.

So they are using an open OS foundation to build an OS that will allow them to effectively lock users into their store/environment? And geeks are happy?

Still an improvement over the other consoles which are completely proprietary and locked down. I think it's great that Linux is gaining a wider audience regardless of whether it's due to commercial, technical or ideological reasons. Some people will never be happy...

I sincerely hope the release the streaming client for use on other Linux dists as well. This would mean a welcome end to my current dual-boot setup.

Is it just me or does Valve still rock? These guys really keep powering along, steady pace, good going guys, best wishes with your new platform!

I'm guessing that o+o means split-screen gaming on the t.v., streaming from two separate Windows machines.

Now, if Halflife 3 becomes a SteamOS exclusive, then we might have a shot of a linux gaming environment.

Most Steam games require keyboard and mouse. I don't see how that can work in the living room

You'd be surprised at how many don't. I have a little Windows box connected to my TV right now, with a $10 Xbox controller wireless receiver. Steam runs in Big Picture mode, and I'd say that somewhere between a third and a half of my games play great with a controller. I've been doing most of my gaming that way lately, and it's a very nice experience.

> Most Steam games require keyboard and mouse. I don't see how that can work in the living room

If the issue is "how do you get control devices that work for that use case", wireless keyboards and mice with suitable range for living room use exist (I've seen them mostly used in large conference rooms, but the requirements aren't very different.)

If the issue is "how do you use control devices in that environment since they call for surfaces", lapdesks, coffee tables, etc., are frequently found in living rooms. If people want to play their existing keyboard-and-mouse focussed Steam games in their living rooms, its not hard to see how they can.

But I think that -- as with other consoles -- the games that are playable with more traditional "gaming controllers" will be more popular for the livingroom role than keyboard-and-mouse driven games. But plenty of PC games have, for years, been very similar to console games and support game controllers (even though they usually had KB/mouse support since that's what you could count on users having on the PC platform), so I don't think this is going to be much of an issue.

Keyboard/mouse peripherals have been sold as add-ons for game consoles as early as the original Playstation, if not earlier.

As a male 20-something tech enthusiast that is friends with others of the same, I don't visit many living rooms which don't have a keyboard and mouse as permanent fixtures.

Are they looking to sell their own hardware? How good are graphics card driver support in linux?

Does mac bootcamp only work with windows, or is it any OS?

Id love to have a macmini as a 'steambox'

It would be good for valve to project Rustlang as their programming language of choice :)

Will we see a USB device for Smart TV's later this week?

The end is near! windows should shake in its tiny boots

I'm not sure if you're serious or not, but I am. Steam has already started to offer non-game applications. If SteamOS gets a large enough installed base and provides a good-enough platform for desktop/couch-side apps other than games then things could get interesting.

EDIT: Of course, it would help if Valve had someone in charge with a record of success in desktop app platforms. Well http://www.computerandvideogames.com/172835/interviews/creat... fancy that.

What is it they say that caused Blu-ray to beat HD DVD? Gamers and porn.

Yep. Windows 8 isn't very popular amongst gamers. Also, remember Steam in 2003? It wasn't great, but Valve stuck with it and kept making it iterativly better. Also, nowadays most people can get their day to day functionality out of web apps if need be.

Can you sideload games that aren't on Steam?

Current Steam lets you add non-Steam games. No word yet (AFAIK) on whether or not that will continue when it becomes its own OS.

I sort of worry about that. As a userspace client Steam could never have hoped to lock out non-approved games, but as an OS it probably could. The HN commentariat probably skew pro-curation, but I for one think it would be bad for the future of Indie games if Steambox did not support side loading.

OTOH, I can totally see Steam allowing me to stream Minecraft (not available on Steam) to my TV simply to encourage me to use Steam for gaming.

Yay, the 80s UNIX wars all over again:

http://www.bell-labs.com/history/unix/wars.html

I told you so https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5186806

Can I still browse the internet?

Yes. Steam's Big Picture mode has its own web browser, as does Steam itself.

Sweet. I wonder how it will compare to XBMC. I'm looking to buy/build a media center PC within the month and been checking out operating systems for it. This is now a contender.

At last, all the unresponsiveness, bugginess, and ugliness of Steam in OS form!

the 3rd circle will be HL3

What qualifies as a "New" operating system? This is slightly modified Linux, with a slightly modified UI. Is that really considered new? How about calling it a new Linux variant rather than a new Operating System.

marketing

Because most of their target audience isn't pedantic existing users of Desktop Linux, it's people that are using Steam on Windows.

Furthermore, for most people an "OS" is not a collection of general purpose kernel and userspsace as components, it's a vertically integrated and holistic product + experience.

Since when did we start to call Ubuntu skins operating systems?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com