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SteamOS

Mr. X

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

As we’ve been working on bringing Steam to the living room, we’ve come to the conclusion that the
environment best suited to delivering value to customers is an operating system built around Steam itself.
SteamOS combines the rock-solid architecture of Linux with a gaming experience built for the big screen.
It will be available soon as a free stand-alone operating system for living room machines.
 
Valve trying to do in the PC gaming area what google made with phones

but no directx can still be a problem.

curious to see how this will end
 
This OS sounds really interesting, especially with the fact it supports wireless streaming to TVs. I'm just wondering how that exactly works and do you need specific TVs to utilize the feature. That or maybe you'll need to buy hardware like the Steam Box or whatever the media has been hinting about which will allow you to stream games to your TV from your computer. To top it off I wonder if there's a noticeable latency while playing.

I've been using Big Picture lately to play my fighting games on a TV with my friends because I don't own a console, and I didn't realize of how much of a difference there was with playing games on the couch and in front of a computer monitor. Things like Big Picture, SteamOS, and the possible Steam Box will definitely help bring out an in-person multiplayer gaming experience, breaking away from the PC's common online networked multiplayer-only paradigm, which will be great for a lot of AAA games and fighting games since by they work best when playing with real people in-person.

but no directx can still be a problem.

Nah there's OpenGL so it's not like there's no option being on a non-Microsoft OS. Since Valve has been supporting Mac and Linux development there's been a major improvement for gaming on these OS's.
 
If SteamOS will be as viable for gaming as Windows is now then this could be a really great thing. Too bad older games will probably never work on it.

I'm especially happy because Valve has done A LOT for PC gaming, while Microsoft was trying to bury it as deep as it could.
 
Sounds like a cool concept, could become the third big "console" next to XBONE and PS4. Though I'd likely not use it much, since a separate OS loses a lot of the main reason to use PC ie. you can do all the other stuff on it, either while playing or switch quickly. Still, I'd probably build a HTPC for this just to have Steam games easily on big screen.

Regarding DirectX, that's a non-issue, PS3 has only OpenGL and almost all console games manage to release crossplatform. If anything, its a good thing as it cuts off microsoft's hooks into keeping PC games stuck on windows.

This OS sounds really interesting, especially with the fact it supports wireless streaming to TVs. I'm just wondering how that exactly works and do you need specific TVs to utilize the feature. That or maybe you'll need to buy hardware like the Steam Box or whatever the media has been hinting about which will allow you to stream games to your TV from your computer. To top it off I wonder if there's a noticeable latency while playing.
Provided its implemented properly, at least inputwise latency should be a non-issue. As an example, in my home GBit LAN, I use a network KVM to share mouse and keyboard to multiple computers. The isn't any latency noticeable in the input. The ping is actually less than 0.1ms :P

The video stream will likely induce a bit of latency, but that's going to be minimal as well. Maybe wouldn't play high level fighting games through it as the latency might be in the order of frame or two, but for the vast majority of players it should be "good enough" to not be noticeable.

The biggest downside would be visual quality, it would definitely suffer a bit, but most people don't appreciate quality Full HD graphics anyway. And it wouldn't be as godawful as HD netflix since it has much better bandwidth available.
 
but no directx can still be a problem.
It's not a problem, it's fantastic. If this means everyone will use OpenGL instead, this is the best thing valve has done for pc gaming in quite a while.
 
Works for the future, not for the past... loads of older games will not work on SteamOS :(
 
SteamOS being "a Linux computerconsole hydra" means that there's finally some actual, proper reason for some lesser known but still pretty fun games [OH LOOK SKULLGIRLS!] to get their 15 minutes of fame as "SteamOS Public Launch List".

Side-effect: getting moar games on standard Linux... I'LL TAKE IT.