SteamOS offically released

By Snake89
in PC Gaming

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Grand Master

trooper11

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Indeed. Valve is working with media services behind the scenes, so we'll see movies, TV and music services being rolled out at a later date. Valve has also incorporated family controls into Steam, allowing parents to manage which games children are allowed to play and which services they can access (this is available in the Steam beta client on Windows). The company is definitely trying to expand its target audience.

well Valve reached a point where they felt it was time to try and make Steam its own platform, something that is not just about selling games and game services. They want to try and join the ranks of MS, Google, and Apple in offering a complete ecosystem. They see the potential success that those other guys are also pursuing when you can get customers locked into your ecosystem for everything.

It is starting out small and with baby steps, but they are clearly going to try and get there.

 

 

I don't think Steam OS will ever have any advantage over a gaming PC running windows. What advantage could it have over Windows ?

Performance ? I don't see that happening.

Functionality ? big picture running on windows will always have the same functionality as Steam OS.

Exclusive titles ? Valve would be dumb to release their first party titles exclusive to Steam OS.

Personally i see Steam OS more like a fire and forget OS for htpc/gaming pc. Anyway this is what Valve should be aiming at. It should be easy to install, manage, update and also control using a controller and a media bluetooth kb.

If they can achieve that i think they might have a chance to compete in the living room. It would definately be an interesting alternative at the very least. I personally really like big picture ui.

I agree that SteamOS might never be a real alternative to pc gaming, but as you said, it could offer a very nice option as an htpc/gaming OS. If they build up the media support, I could see myself building an htpc with SteamOS. Big Picture mode is pretty good, I agree UI wise, but I have to say that I have seen better ones, such as what the MediaBrowser team are doing for Windows 8. That is currently my favorite UI for gaming and media in a '10ft ui' or TV setup.

But its early and if Valve really wants to compete in the htpc gaming area, I expect Big Picture mode to improve. As more and more content is offered on Steam, especially the non gaming apps, Big Picture mode will need to be tweaked.

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Grand Master

Dotdot

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Early or not, there is NO excuse for such a shoddy build. The install and setup is already there, it's the base of every Linux distro and it comes packaged ready for them to use. Not being consumer ready would mean the used a dirty non customized and easy steps OS installer, not not installer at all.

And this isn't going to get any developers to start supporting Linux, if anything, this early release will make some rethink actually doing it or delaying any Linux support.

But its shoddy because its not a consumer build, this is merely Steam letting people get in and have open access from the word go. The OS they have up at mo is literally meant for 300 or so testers and ofc the no doubt few thousand enthusiasts who want to tinker. The installer etc can all be seen as a deliberate hurdle at present to keep the majority out, as they know its a shoddy half baked release thats, like I say only being released as an alpha version thats not meant to be taken seriously outside of testing it within one of there own steam machines.

Dial it back and lower your expectations a bit. We all remember the 1st actual release of steam and how god awful that was. No one expects Rome in a day.

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Grand Master

HawkMan

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That's not how it works, even with an installer, regular people wouldn't install this. The only thing they're accomplishing with this is making developers have second thoughts, if they even considered it in the first place.

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Grand Master

+Majesticmerc MVC

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I really don't like the controller. Looks far too alien

 

Indeed it looks quite odd to use. Feedback so far appears to be positive though, so I'm keeping an open mind.

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Grand Master

PGHammer

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I don't think Steam OS will ever have any advantage over a gaming PC running windows. What advantage could it have over Windows ?

Performance ? I don't see that happening.

Functionality ? big picture running on windows will always have the same functionality as Steam OS.

Exclusive titles ? Valve would be dumb to release their first party titles exclusive to Steam OS.

Personally i see Steam OS more like a fire and forget OS for htpc/gaming pc. Anyway this is what Valve should be aiming at. It should be easy to install, manage, update and also control using a controller and a media bluetooth kb.

If they can achieve that i think they might have a chance to compete in the living room. It would definately be an interesting alternative at the very least. I personally really like big picture ui.

Given a wireless keyboard, it can even run alongside Windows on an HTPC (separate HDD).

 

My current testing box (my desktop) uses a wireless keyboard by default - to avoid wire clutter in front of the PC.  My mouse is wireless for the same reason.  Both wireless keyboards and wireless mice are not just for portables (my wireless keyboard is bigger than most notebooks all by itself - it's not something I'd lug in my carry-on).  SteamOS supports both - and without issues - today.  In addition to two VM installs, I have a native install on a third HDD (completely separate from Windows 8.1, Windows Server, and OS X).  If you can build/configure an HTPC, having a side-by-side of SteamOS and Windows is easily plannable - same applies to the Hackintosh crowd - it's no harder.

 

Other than the UEFI issue (which can be end-run), the requirements for SteamOS on the hardware side are really no taller than those of (believe it or not) Windows 7.  The "desktop" side of SteamOS takes getting used to - entirely because it's too close to ModernUI for the typical Linux crowd to accept - such is the reality of GNOME 3.x, as opposed to GNOME Classic.  (That is something that Valve realizes - Big Picture is a "ten foot UX" by design; GNOME Classic - in fact, any pointing-device-centric UI would be a poor fit.  Because I'm used to ModernUI, I had a small (very small) learning curve with GNOME 3.x (I'm normally more into KDE in terms of Linux DEs), and adjusted to it painlessly.

 

Next up is changing HDDs - in this case, I'm moving to my 80 GB SATA HDD that had been hosting Mavericks.  (No loss - I have the USB stick to reinstall it, and I should be purchasing more USB sticks this week.)

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Grand Master

Growled Member

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Indeed it looks quite odd to use. Feedback so far appears to be positive though, so I'm keeping an open mind.

 

It does look odd but they are trying something different at least. It may be a winner or they may have to tweak it some more.

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Grinch

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I couldn't really play with it like I wanted to due to the UEFI requirement and the workaround for said requirement not working for me (black screen after progress bar, woo!). I hope they remove that restriction.

 

Glad to see positive feedback. Hopefully I can play with it sometime in the near future. :p

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Grand Master

HawkMan

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Given a wireless keyboard, it can even run alongside Windows on an HTPC (separate HDD).

 

My current testing box (my desktop) uses a wireless keyboard by default - to avoid wire clutter in front of the PC.  My mouse is wireless for the same reason.  Both wireless keyboards and wireless mice are not just for portables (my wireless keyboard is bigger than most notebooks all by itself - it's not something I'd lug in my carry-on).  SteamOS supports both - and without issues - today.  In addition to two VM installs, I have a native install on a third HDD (completely separate from Windows 8.1, Windows Server, and OS X).  If you can build/configure an HTPC, having a side-by-side of SteamOS and Windows is easily plannable - same applies to the Hackintosh crowd - it's no harder.

 

Other than the UEFI issue (which can be end-run), the requirements for SteamOS on the hardware side are really no taller than those of (believe it or not) Windows 7.  The "desktop" side of SteamOS takes getting used to - entirely because it's too close to ModernUI for the typical Linux crowd to accept - such is the reality of GNOME 3.x, as opposed to GNOME Classic.  (That is something that Valve realizes - Big Picture is a "ten foot UX" by design; GNOME Classic - in fact, any pointing-device-centric UI would be a poor fit.  Because I'm used to ModernUI, I had a small (very small) learning curve with GNOME 3.x (I'm normally more into KDE in terms of Linux DEs), and adjusted to it painlessly.

 

Next up is changing HDDs - in this case, I'm moving to my 80 GB SATA HDD that had been hosting Mavericks.  (No loss - I have the USB stick to reinstall it, and I should be purchasing more USB sticks this week.)

Dual booting on a HTPC kinda defeats the purpose, but then dual booting never made sense to me, even when that was the only option back in the early 2000 and I dual booted some Linux distros while studying, I never ended up using them because I does was what I needed and it simply worked better in general and that made it pointless for me to reboot all the time to play around.

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Grand Master

Dotdot

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That's not how it works, even with an installer, regular people wouldn't install this. The only thing they're accomplishing with this is making developers have second thoughts, if they even considered it in the first place.

How is it not how it works? Neither of us has an idea why no basic installer. But at a guess Id easily say its to add an extra hoop to jump thru, maybe to ensure that people with knowledge further than an installer are using it, or maybe to deliberatly deter folks away from a pre-consumer almost alpha piece of software?

Your far too cynical and defeatist Hawk. Give it time, as I said above Rome was not built in a day and generally speaking any service or OS on its first release (even more so pre-alpha) is generally utter nonsense.

At present this is nothing more than big picture mode embedded in a grubby distro that.

A. Ati users cant run

B. Has no easy installer

C. Is meant as nothing more than a basic OS for alpha testers. (not consumers).

Reviewable, final product this does not make.....

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Grand Master

HawkMan

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It's not how it works because enthusiasts don't care and regular people wouldn't install it anyway as I said. Furthermore adding that this preview is far more for the developers than the users and therefore the developers will see this and simply think that this isn't worth developing for, assuming any AAA debs actually had plans to to start with.

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Grand Master

PGHammer

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Dual booting on a HTPC kinda defeats the purpose, but then dual booting never made sense to me, even when that was the only option back in the early 2000 and I dual booted some Linux distros while studying, I never ended up using them because I does was what I needed and it simply worked better in general and that made it pointless for me to reboot all the time to play around.

The dual-booting is a needful because not even all Steam games play on SteamOS - in my current collection (one of the smaller ones), fewer than a half-dozen games from over two dozen are SteamOS-ready.  (That has, in fact, been used in this very thread as a hammer to bash SteamOS.)

I'm not saying that the compatibility issue isn't a problem - it is, in fact, a rather large problem.  However, it can be solved.

The bigger problem is the audio support - it defaults to HDMI.  While HDMI support is mostly bog-standard (and that is true for nVidia GPUs as well as the not-supported-yet AMD GPUs), there are some odd ducks that don't.  That means they will be requiring support for onboard sound or sound cards - even of the PCI Express sort.  While even Debian wheezy supports (or can support) quite a few, SteamOS isn't quite up to Debian wheezy levels of audio support.  (While both Debian and SteamOS detect my Creative Recon3D as an Intel High Definition Audio device (that is proper - it's detected in Windows as the same thing by default) - it cannot configure it as the HDMI-only support designed into PulseAudio by default gets in the way - and I haven't seen how to fix that yet.

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Grand Master

HawkMan

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Then dual booting isn't necessary.

You can do everything you can do in SteamOS on your other OS and more and probably at better performance to, so why would you even waste the time to boot into SteamOS...

If you just want to test the OS, then use a WM, if you need to dual boot, then the OS simply isn't ready for use or testing that deeply.

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Grand Master

PGHammer

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Then dual booting isn't necessary.

You can do everything you can do in SteamOS on your other OS and more and probably at better performance to, so why would you even waste the time to boot into SteamOS...

If you just want to test the OS, then use a WM, if you need to dual boot, then the OS simply isn't ready for use or testing that deeply.

I have two VMs with SteamOS installed - however, it has issues in both compared to native installs that have nothing to do with performance.

 

I'm actually USED to this method of dual-boot - I did it with OS X on the same HDD that SteamOS is on.  I use the BIOS - not GRUB - as each OS is on a physically-separate drive. (Before Wubi and UNetBootin came along, I bare-metal-tested Linux distributions the same way.)

I'm actually looking at creating a third-VM in Hyper-V, now that i have an ISO that doesn't require UEFI.  (And I got the audio in desktop mode sorted - it's big-picture mode that I have issues with at present.)

I'm actually evaluating SteamOS no differently than I would any other Linux distribution - including Debian; still, I AM keeping Valve's focus on the ten-foot UX in mind, as opposed to looking at SteamOS as a desktop-focussed distribution.  Portal is my primary test game, as it is both Linux-ready and supports BPM; further, it's in my Steam library already.  I've not had a single performance issue with Portal in SteamOS - even compared to Steam on Windows.  The desktop side of SteamOS is as solid as any distribution of Debian wheezy, despite the tweakage Valve did - that says a LOT about Debian's stability.  (Point to Debian, and a half-point to Valve itself for choosing wheezy vs. Ubuntu.)

What stability issues I'm having with SteamOS are, in fact, entirely in Big-Picture Mode - it happens both in VMs, and in bare-metal.  (Because it happens in VMs and in bare-metal, I have zero idea whether it's OS-related of a hardware-configuration issue; while the bare-metal side is, naturally, closer to optimum than a VM, it's not as optimal as it should be - even I get that.)

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Grand Master

macoman

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What a piece of junk is SteamOS, I just try to install the new release for BIOS PC and is not able to create the username and password. After installation, it boots me directly to logon without account creation. I am ######.

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Eric Veteran

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What a piece of junk is SteamOS, I just try to install the new release for BIOS PC and is not able to create the username and password. After installation, it boots me directly to logon without account creation. I am ****ed.

The accounts are created automatically. "steam" and "desktop". It's in the installation instructions. Or do you mean it didn't create those?

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Grand Master

Boo Berry

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I don't believe it does.

 

Personally, I don't see the point in using SteamOS at this point in time when I can just use Ubuntu, Mint or Debian Testing with Steam instead. However, as it matures I'll reevaluate my decision to avoid it and perhaps install it to a spare SSD for the sake of game streaming on my HTPC.

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