It's Been Three Years Since Valve Announced SteamOS, Steam Machines

[phoronix]

Phoronix: It's Been Three Years Since Valve Announced SteamOS, Steam Machines

This week marks three years since Valve publicly announced Steam Machines, SteamOS, and the Steam Controller...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Three-Years-SteamOS

[lvlark]

In one word: meh.
Let me elaborate. I don't see the need for another Linux distro for the desktop, because I find Ubuntu (with different DE) serves my purposes. Gaming on Ubuntu/Debian/Arch (for the latter, I have to rely on comments from others) works well. I'm also not interested in gaming anywhere other than my desktop. So SteamOS isn't interesting for me, personally.
OTOH, SteamOS and Steam Machines can help Linux gaming along, and in doing so, can help Linux in general along.

[kyrios]

Steam Mach... what?
Who ever heard about that? I thought it was just some science fiction !

[johnc]

The whole effort seemed like a cluster-f because they quickly abandoned the thing and let it die on the vine, even before they officially released anything. It makes me wonder what their intentions were all along. One day they were hot, and then the next day they were cold.

But I think the bigger issue is that the whole company itself accomplishes very little, even looking past the Steam Machines endeavor. Their business model has been weened down to letting everyone else create the games and content, and them getting a cut of every sale. It's wise from a business / revenue perspective, but from a PC gaming perspective this company contributes nothing. They are essentially a glorified Amazon for electronic goods. And it's hard to get excited about such a company.

Valve used to have such dedicated fans and from what I've been seeing, most people are just moving on and losing interest.

Hopefully the GoG client will be available for Linux soon.

[kyrios]

By the way I just noticed that the Steam controller is also on sale on the Steam store (for those who can't buy on Amazon.com)

[PieterDeBruijn]

I truly think this is an amazing effort by Steam. They singlehandedly made huge difference by getting numerous studio's to port to Linux. They did their own part and then some. Valve is taken seriously by a lot of big organisations (Intel, AMD, Nvidia, game studio's, etc.) so the effect might not be as large as they had hoped, but it's steadily improving. There are now over 1.500 titles including a number of AAA-games running great. Only a fraction would have been possible without Steam's big-time support (others are joining in, like GOG). The community owes Steam big thanks. Even though the Steam Machines are (overpriced and therefore) not a succes. Even though SteamOS is not widely used. The effect is here, and I hope it's here to stay.
It gives us extra freedom and choice. That's always a good thing!

[Nille]

Gaming on Ubuntu works well. I'm also not interested in gaming anywhere other than my desktop.

It works so well, that steam is not starting with a recent Gallium3D Driver (e.g. on stock Ubuntu 16.04 ). You still has to delete manual some of the old Libs that Steam ships in its Package (and redo this after a update ... )

This Problem is not new and unfixed since month. So, i doubt that Valve has much more interest in GNU/Linux.

[slalomsk8er]

I own a ZOTAC ZBOX MAGNUS EN970 and installed steamOS on it.
A lot of games worked but I wanted to connect my 5.1 system and bought a Asus Xonar U7 and steamOS crashes into a reboot loop. Never heard any thing from the ticket I opened.
Now I reinstalled Ubuntu and the steam client and I can now finally game on Linux again.

My verdict: Nice concept but a half baked execution.

PS: It was a nice change from the other consoles to not have to buy all the games I own again

[philcostin]

3 years...

You know what that means....

The release of....


.. er.. Left 4 Dead 3?

[SpyroRyder]

A mismanaged and wasted opportunity. They could have done a lot with the devices but didn't lay the ground work. They didn't really make deals with any of the major game publishers to get games onto Linux, they didn't manage the hardware certification and conformance stuff properly, and thus they didn't really provide a good reason for anyone to use the platform. If they'd brought more major games over they might and if they'd given the hardware manufacturers a standardised set of Low/Medium/High/Ultra conformance levels so that the machines had goals to work towards, they might have made a bigger impact. But they didn't. Particularly with the hardware vendors it doesn't seem like they had much meaningful communication. Most of the machines have weird spec levels, or not cost effective spec levels. All this points to Valve not quite knowing what market they were going for: most of the machines were more expensive the current consoles so they wouldn't get any of that market and yet most PC players knew that for the same amount of money they could build similar spec'd machines running Windows and thus a larger game catalogue.