Is Valve’s SteamBox a contender for the next developer workstation?
radar.oreilly.com
radar.oreilly.com
Misconceptions the author appears to be under:
1.) Valve are releasing hardware. They are not, and do not plan to.
2.) Laptop steam boxes will come in the future. This makes absolutely no sense, the entire purpose of SteamOS is big picture mode for TV gaming. It's not even meant for desktop gaming, yet alone on-the-move gaming.
3.) Ironic that in his discussion of where Mac users might flee to he says "Dell and HP got nothin’." when one of those companies is creating one of the first steam boxes which Valve announced on Monday (Dell)
4.) Also ironic that in that same paragraph he dismisses Linux, without realising that if you close the gaming part of a steam box all that's left is linux. Not even a new OS based on a linux kernel, just linux.
Just a really poor article which didn't need to be written.
Disclaimer: I work in marketing on behalf of one of the steam box manufacturers, the above views are my own and do not reflect those of any company.
If you take a look at the beta box Valve released, it's based on linux and it looks sexy. If that's all the information you have then sure, Valve might threaten Apple.
But the author's job is to find out more information than that, and with all the recent press that isn't even 3 minutes of research to do.
It might be that in US, everyone jumped on Apple's bandwagon.
But most European developers I know are still on Windows/Linux/BSD systems on their desktop/laptops.
The purpose, as stated by Valve, is for gaming not development. I think that this article is reaching a bit far.
From the perspective of a developer, a Steam Machine is simply a Debian machine that is certified Linux compatible. People have been screaming for this for years. Even if you install Ubuntu or Fedora, you know that the components have been selected for Linux compatibility. That means something. Granted, 99.9% of standard desktop components are already Linux compatible so it's not a big deal, but it's one less thing to worry about.
How many devs dual boot to play games? Maybe not the majority, but there's a huge market there too.
Plus, don't underestimate the appeal of something that's not just another beige box.
From the perspective of hardware vendors, Steam OS makes a lot of sense too. If you want to sell a "Linux" machine, you'll have lots of demands to support Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, Arch, etc.
But now they can sell a Steam machine, and get away without supporting the other flavours du jour.
Of course, the ironic thing is that modern development is much more OS agnostic than it has ever been: as long as your machine can run Vagrant, you can run anything you want. Linux does run Vagrant better than other OS's (because you can use vagrant-lxc), but that's minor.
Lots of gaming is being done on laptops and tablets. If SteamOS does well on consoles, I do expect Valve to try and get a piece of that market too. That'll be at least a couple of years, though.
There does seem to be a closed app-store trend in OSs now, but I'm not really convinced that a 100% walled garden on OSX is a forgone conclusion.
Until OS X 10.7, it was a beautiful version of linux that just worked. "Less capable", ok, maybe, but I don't see it. My entire work environment (zsh+bash scripts+vim) seamlessly copies back and forth between linux and OS X. Most linux utilities are available via homebrew. Those that aren't I compile from source. It's just like any other linux distribution on that front. It's not perfect, but I get up and running a lot faster on OS X than on any linux distribution.
I'm on Fedora 19 now and in many way I have the same issues with linux I've had since I first installed Red Hat 7 in 2000. The lack of progress on certain fronts in the linux world is staggering.
I don't want to spend days (weeks!) fixing this stuff and never quite getting 100% there, yet that's exactly what I'm doing right now. Since 10.7, OS X has become insufferable to use, so I switched back to Fedora.
I'm not trying to say OS X is perfect nor that linux is crap. But categorizing linux as "just works" and OS X as "less capable" are provably false. There's also a real vacuum right now for a developer OS that's powerful, easy to use and graphically beautiful. OS X used to fit that bill, but doesn't anymore. Linux never will.
The developer migration to OS X started well before the introduction of Intel based Macs, although that really accelerated the trends.
In subsequent years Apple started pulling their OSX developers to work on iOS, started moving in the direction of locking down, and started changing in developer mindshare from "underdog" to "bully".
I know I can't, simply because the Macbook did not exist in 2003. The Macbook was only introduced in 2006. In 2003, it was called iBook.
And, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't remember "developers" being the lion share of those buying iBooks back in 2003-05.
Also this article is silly.
"So, yes, if you want to call this fantasy, pie-in-the-sky thinking, I’m guilty as charged. If you think the near-term future of software development will be based on some platform other than the laptop/desktop, I wish I could agree. All these “ifs” aside: if I were Apple, I would be looking over my shoulder. At Valve."
He sums up the ridiculousness far better than I can in his own article.
Not sure of the point of this article.
Now I'm just more stoked for it.
Yet is putting forward a move to SteamOS, an OS named after the app store it is built to promote...
It seems fairly clear to me that these boxes will stand or fall on their own merits.
[Edit: typo]
100 titles today. Seems to be building momentum slowly, but it's there.