Torvalds: SteamOS Will 'Really Help' Linux On the Desktop 304
nk497 writes "Linus Torvalds has welcomed the arrival of Valve's Linux-based platform, SteamOS, and said it could boost Linux on desktops. The Linux creator praised Valve's 'vision' and suggested its momentum would force other manufacturers to take Linux seriously — especially if game developers start to ditch Windows. Should SteamOS gain traction among gamers and developers, that could force more hardware manufacturers to extend driver support beyond Windows. That's a sore point for Torvalds, who slammed Nvidia last year for failing to support open-source driver development for its graphics chips. Now that SteamOS is on the way, Nvidia has opened up to the Linux community, something Torvalds predicts is a sign of things to come. 'I'm not just saying it'll help us get traction with the graphics guys,' he said. 'It'll also force different distributors to realize if this is how Steam is going, they need to do the same thing because they can't afford to be different in this respect. They want people to play games on their platform too.'"
Stallman ain't gonna be happy (Score:4, Insightful)
This doesn't help GNU/Linux on the desktop. It will only lure people into using non-free programs distributed through Steam.
Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy (Score:5, Insightful)
It certainly will help Linux on the desktop if more optimized graphics drivers are made available. That's the whole point of this article.
Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy (Score:5, Interesting)
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I could not get accelerated graphics working on the desktop. It still looked good enough, even without accelerated graphics but I suspect this also had the other disadvantage of greatly lowering my battery life, by running everything in software.
This is something I don't understand much. If you're running a desktop without compositing and without animations when minimizing windows (e.g. Xfce, Mate, LXDE) then aren't you *saving* power? The GPU can stay in a 2D only, low powered state (hopefully).
If you're piping the whole desktop through OpenGL for no benefit you'd be likely to waste power, since not only you draw the application contents (which had to be drawed already), but you pipe all the bitmaps through the OpenGL subsystem and GPU. If the GPU
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Thanks, where I might be wrong is hoping the GPU is on "2D clock" frequency if it has a crap driver, unlikely yes. But maybe it boots at slow clock (no point of high clock when your life starts in VGA or VESA mode) then lack of reclocking would mean it stays slow.
Overlay, xv? that's a nice feature thanks. It used to use a fixed fonction scaler I think, at least in S3 Virge, ATI Rage Pro, and took YUV as input. It's what made our PCs smooth at full screen video till flash video tried to ruin it, requiring a
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Last I tried, about 6 months ago (2 year old laptop), I could not get accelerated graphics working on the desktop.
How? Or more specifically what hardware do you have? There's only Intel, Nvidia and AMD now, and all have drivers between passable and excellent. Unless you had one of those hateful intel ones with the PowerVR core.
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I still run linux on a netbook, but I switched my HTPC to windows. XBMC runs about the same, but netflix works perfectly.
Of course, now my complaint is that both the Netflix and the Amazon Prime streaming videos are still crippled on my HTPC. You cannot watch HD video content from amazon on the PC. You can watch it in HD on a roku or on some crappy blu-ray player that has the plugin, but you can't watch HD on a full power HTPC. Netfli
Re: Netflix (Score:2, Informative)
Yeah, great, but.... you have run silverlight based app via Wine, so it is kind of wierdly possible.. SteamOS can bring native Linux Netflix, at least there's hope.
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I spent a few hours trying to get that to work on Debian, and I couldn't. I'm a rank amateur, but usually I can get stuff working, given enough time and Google. Part of the problem was that I wasn't starting from scratch; I tried using the Netflix app that some guy rolled together with WineSkin, targetting Ubuntu. Still...
And his point stands: if they can get Netflix working on Android, there's really no good reason they couldn't put something together for Linux in general.
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There is netflix for linux.....it just matters who is willing to pay the licensing fee.... the WDTV Live+ is a linux device and supports netflix...western digital was willing to pay the licensing fee....your major distros however probably arent willing to bear that cost.....
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Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy (Score:5, Insightful)
"This doesn't help GNU/Linux on the desktop. It will only lure people into using non-free programs distributed through Steam."
The problem with stallman is that he doesn't grasp that anything requiring years of education and basically amounts to a time commitment of a full time job needs to get paid for. The reason many free programs suck is because no sane programmer in their right mind can produce and maintain a project of non-trivial size that doesn't have a sizable community of tinkerers and paid experts from which to draw from like linux has.
GNU/Linux would be helped if they would allow some commercialization IMHO without any ability to make revenue, who can afford to maintain/update applications which more often then not require a serious amount of time and hard work?
The problem becomes as problems become non-trivial (aka beyond the realm of part-timers both amateur and pro) you simply can't maintain a project of any reasonable size and complexity for any given length of time because people have lives, get old, get sick, die, etc. That is why there needs to be some kind of income coming in to maintain any project beyond the trivial.
While I agree with many of stallman's principles, his allergies to commercialization show how naive he is. If he was serious he'd be rallying the open source community to invest in GOG.COM and get them to make an app that competes with steam that allows users to own their own games for instance. People like stallman don't get that the world doesn't work on hardcore morality, it works on time, energy, effort and what is required to maintain it.
A better idea would be instead of going against the grain of the world, intelligently build cultures that promote at least some of your ideals. The whole gaming world is going F2P/MMO/Walled garden. I'm sure Nintendo, Sony and MS are chomping at the bit to make every game 'online only' eventually after the smashing success of diablo 3 in terms of sales (the march of gaming morons continues).
A better idea would be to fund and protect those people who are at least selling products to have a compelling reason to use software you own. Steam won because it added a huge tonne of features sits like GOG.COM lack (Friends list, etc). It has all you gaming in one place, you can see when you friends are online, what game they are playing, can message them, etc.
The moral crusaders never got the message that they need to act more rationally and intelligently if they want any of their values to survive the onslaught of greed.
Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy (Score:5, Insightful)
The GIMP doesn't match up in features or usability to Adobe Photoshop. But if you don't have the money for Photoshop, GIMP is much better than nothing. Developing software for Windows on Visual Studio beats using Mingw - but that only makes sense if you're a professional developer planning to make a living by writing software for Windows. If you're trying to teach yourself software development, or you're a kid, or you just don't have $500 or $800 or whatever the hell it costs, then Mingw is the only thing that lets you even try. Most of our planet, most of humanity, are poor people. The successful IT professional can buy any proprietary program he or she needs - but we are not the typical human being. If they're going to reach our level, they have to do it through extremely cheap tools.
In the realm of encryption, it is increasingly difficult to trust proprietary products. With the Linux kernel, or Truecrypt, or any of the OpenPGP implementations, you can read the code yourself or hope that someone else trustworthy and skilled enough to detect backdoors has read it. With proprietary security products, how do you know?
But maybe most important of all, the competition against open source products continually forces the proprietary vendors to compete on features and price. If Linux didn't exist, maybe a copy of Windows 7 would be $600 instead of $200 and a cohttp://linux.slashdot.org/story/13/10/23/184236/torvalds-steamos-will-really-help-linux-on-the-desktop#py of Windows 2012 Server Standard Edition would be $8000 instead of $800 and Solaris or AIX would be $100,000 per core instead of whatever it is now. They keep the prices where they are for fear that people will decide an inferior free alternative and the extra work it involves is more cost-effective than their closed alternative.
Even if you only ever use proprietary software, you benefit tremendously from the existence of free software and its moral crusaders.
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If you're trying to teach yourself software development, or you're a kid, or you just don't have $500 or $800 or whatever the hell it costs, then Mingw is the only thing that lets you even try. .
Visual Studio Express is free.
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>> Visual Studio Express is free.
not exactly.
it comes with the cost of being tied to an aeging-soon-to-be-obsoleted platform.
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You mean the platform that owns 90% of the desktop market? Wow, yeah, that's a problem.
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"Even if you only ever use proprietary software, you benefit tremendously from the existence of free software and its moral crusaders."
There's nothing wrong with being a moral crusader. But if you want you values to proliferate, you have to offer something better then the alternatives. Let's be honest, Free software movement hasn't been a success for the average gamer. Steam is totally closed platform and so are all the big console players.
I have no problem with free software advocates principles. The p
Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy (Score:5, Interesting)
As for painful to use, well, that's just like, your opinion, man. Me and the GIMP get along just fine.
Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy (Score:5, Insightful)
I hear this myth perpetuated a lot and it's not really true. Stallman has said on several occasions he believes developers can and should be compensated for their work and he believes this is perfectly feasible within a free software ecosystem. The problem is that many traditional methods of monetization don't hold up in a free software world and it would require people to rethink how they plan to monetize. That said, I don't think a lot of large scale development (especially from big devs who have been doing things with the normal model for years) can switch over without a lot of effort (and effort means money), especially when the end result may very likely lead to less income. Businesses don't work that way.
Stallman (and the FSF in general) also believes that any proprietary software is immoral and it should be shunned and not used ever. I agree that this is the right ideal, but I think the long road to it may require some sacrifices along the way. If SteamOS leads to a significant trend away from current ingrained non-free systems (like Windows), that in turn makes devs (like Nvidia's) play nicer with free software devs and creates a positive feedback loop. I believe that's a good thing, even if the fact that SteamOS is closed is not. I think the correct course of action is to urge Valve to try and free the software or to develop a fully free alternative rather than simply urging people not to use it at all, and I think this applies to other parts of a mixed-freedom environment. For instance, the FSF encourages the use of what it deems fully free GNU/Linux distributions, which are often just forks of popular distributions with any non-free software removed. I don't like this approach; I think a better one would be to make it transparent what parts are non-free and simply make it a top priority to free or rewrite these portions.
Stallman and the FSF are very interesting and make a lot of good points (if you read the literature they put out, it really does make a lot of sense), but it's always best to think for yourself and not blindly adhere to any ideology. What Stallman thinks and says is often interesting and insightful, but it shouldn't be the only metric you use to make a decision. I don't disagree with the FSF very often, but in this case, I do think SteamOS is good for the long-term prospects of GNU/Linux and free software primarily because of the politics involved.
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I hear this myth perpetuated a lot and it's not really true. Stallman has said on several occasions he believes developers can and should be compensated for their work and he believes this is perfectly feasible within a free software ecosystem. The problem is that many traditional methods of monetization don't hold up in a free software world and it would require people to rethink how they plan to monetize.
The trouble is that most of these ideas are crap for application development like service and support, though they're okay for platform/distro/device development like Android / Tivo / RHEL / Ubuntu and so on. Particularly those where you have a huge number of users who each contribute very little, like say a million people paying $1 on the app store. That's a pretty good income for a small development house of say ten people, less Apple's cut it's $70k/head before expenses and taxes. I wager that if you mad
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I tend to agree that software should be free, but on the importance scale i'd much rather have the core os and applications which i require for communication and editing/storage of my own data were free...
Games are far less important in this instance, they might be fun for a little light entertainment but you don't need them and they aren't holding any of your important data captive by being closed source. I would be perfectly happy with a free os, free application software and non-free games.
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The point is that he's either not thought to it properly, or he has, but doesn't care about the consequences. I tend to believe it's the latter - he thinks that software developers should take a hit, except for himself.
Essentially, he insists that people to whom software is distributed - whether sold or gifted - should have the 'right' to 'help their neighbor' by giving away the software, if asked. That provision alone guarantees that any price tag put on the software is meaningless, since it's only t
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One of the key interests of software vendors is hiding the sourcecode from the users... They will usually have many reasons for this, but none of them really benefit the users.
To hide poorly written code, to hide code which infringes upon others' copyrights, to keep the customer beholden to the vendor etc...
Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy (Score:5, Insightful)
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GNU/Linux would be helped if they would allow some commercialization IMHO without any ability to make revenue, who can afford to maintain/update applications which more often then not require a serious amount of time and hard work?
GNU/Linux already allows proprietary userspace programs. To avoid any doubt on this point, the licence file for the kernel explicitly states that a program does not become a derived work merely by using normal system calls. Neither GCC nor Glibc prevent proprietary programs from being compiled and executed.
Kernel drivers are supposed to be GPL, but manufacturers are already making money on the hardware, and even on fully-closed platforms would not usually make any extra money from the drivers. In most cases
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Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy (Score:4, Insightful)
Most developers make at least $120K every year. And that is simply the net salary.
No, they don't. [glassdoor.com] Perhaps you're thinking of the *top 10%* of software developers.
Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy (Score:5, Informative)
The FSF was mixed [gnu.org] about Steam for GNU/Linux. Since most of the issues remain the same with SteamOS, I'm guessing that their opinion on it will be similar.
For obvious reasons, they're never going to endorse anything that's partly proprietary, but it it moves people away from dependence on completely proprietary systems, in there view it's possible that there might be some benefit. The FSF isn't so hardline that they refuse to acknowledge the distinction between software that's mostly free versus software that's completely proprietary.
From the article I linked:
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exactly!
FSF and Stallman will say for sure that Steam have DRM, have closed source client and games, but by using gnu/linux will open the games and wor to a new platform, improving the linux hardware and software support. SteamOS, if really open as they say, will enable people to edit and change it... and maybe replace the closed parts with time.
And remember, Stallman one said that if the game engine is free software, the game content (story and music, maps, models, etc) can be closed (specially the story,
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You've kept my don't-know-about-MS-Windows-don't-wanna-know-about-MS-Windows kneejerk reflex nicely wound up with those examples, thank you.
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It will only lure people into using non-free programs distributed through Steam.
It will also allow you to run free programs. I can't imagine that the SteamOS will only run signed executables. So as soon as you finish your clone of GTA V, with even a larger and more detailed world, you should be able to share it for free with everyone. I will definitely download it and say my thanks to you for a lifetime of labor that you spent for my entertainment.
I know that there is a free flight simulator out there
Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy (Score:5, Insightful)
It will only lure people into using non-free programs distributed through Steam.
It will also allow you to run free programs.
This point exactly. So with steamOS (and the right hardware) I can play Left 4 Dead 2 at a blazing 300 fps. Well, what happens when I just paid my rent and don't have the $50 to blow on Arkham Origins? Maybe I'll start looking at what I can get for free. That's when your normal (i.e. non linux nerd) folks will start to notice Tremulous or any of the other Id Tech derived games. They may even dig deeper and find some reborn classics like FreeDOOM. I doubt seriously that any of the free offerings will cause some uprising in gamers, but in the search of free through the SteamOS "software center", they'll be sure to stumble on all sorts of things they didn't realize had free/open alternatives. Maybe word will spread that LibreOffice will save that $90 for a student (read: Limited) version of Office or $400 for the full thing.
Gamers are a picky and often very vocal group. Once some catch on to something, they can start an avalanche.
Re: Stallman ain't gonna be happy (Score:4, Funny)
Stallman had 30 years to pioneer computing and the best he could do is give us emacs and gcc.
Fuck him.
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Actually, emacs and gcc are pretty triumphant pieces of computer programming.
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How is this a "problem"?
The core system gets accelerated graphics from more vendors. The core system gets tweaked for better real-time responsiveness. The core system gets more eyes debugging it for stability. The core system has another vendor contributing fixes and patches.
Only to a fanatical raving lunatic is this a "problem."
Oh, yeah. We're talking about Stallman. You don't get any more fanatical than that, though I don't consider the man a lunatic by any stretch of the imagination.
Agreed. (Score:2)
And I'll go as far as to say Linus is a "Desktop Idiot". Like the kernel devs at any Microsoft or Apple, he hasn't a clue what it really takes to make a decent desktop platform. The rest of the folks at the Linux Foundation seem to struggle with the question in a manner that is both half-hearted and hamfisted.
The first rule for them should be not to shove piles of 'packages' bereft of vertical integration (and unifying design) at consumers... Do not throw the products of server-room culture at them and expe
but it will (Score:3)
When people have a nice steambox already there and running, they will want to run other apps on it too. Check facebook, read webmail, play youtube, soundcloud, stuff like that. That's a web browser that will most certainly be running a lot on those steamboxes. Next thing you know it, they'll be running XBMC for media too. Once they have all that, why have a PC for only office stuff, if you can run it on the steambox? Even if you have a PC for desktop use, you already know how to use linux, it's cheaper (fre
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Really huge (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think so (Score:2)
Re:I don't think so (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, exactly like how Tivo buyers were all open source advocates, and Apple TV buyers are primarily interested in the fact that the kernel has posix API's. Though, there may be a small group of SteamBox buyers who buy it mainly because of playing games, and don't really care about what OS it runs.
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Or... we could wait and see.
If I'm wrong, all I said was that I'd be surprised.
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Yeah, exactly like how Tivo buyers were all open source advocates, and Apple TV buyers are primarily interested in the fact that the kernel has posix API's. Though, there may be a small group of SteamBox buyers who buy it mainly because of playing games, and don't really care about what OS it runs.
Don't forget those of us who like to occasionally play PC games on the big TV in the living room, but don't want to have to deal with unhooking the tower, dragging it downstairs, then hooking it all back up again.
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Wouldn't know about that: when I was a kid, we had all of one TV, and didn't even have a Nintendo until the mid-90's.
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As for people adopting it, when the SteamOS and the hardware are released you know Valve is going to have a big carrot dangling to get people to try it out, something related to a game with a 3 in the title
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steam works pefect in GNOME shell in archlinux. unity is not a requeriment.
To add to this, I don't think SteamOS will use unity period. I suspect they'll use a custom window manager or perhaps full screen mode for steam os will be the window manager. I personally run steam in KDE without issues.
Not so sure about SteamOS (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not so sure SteamOS is going to be such a good thing for Linux.
Yeah, you'll get AAA games on Linux (probably), but if they start tying everything to proprietary APIs and specific environments (say, Ubuntu/Unity/Mir, or worse, some entirely proprietary stack built from the ground up on top of the kernel), that's a loss for Linux. Your freedom is gone and it's Windows all over again.
Corporations don't care about Linux and free software. We already have Google tightening its grip on the "open" Android. SteamOS will probably be more of the same: a corporation using the argument of "Open-Source" to lock users into their closed-source solution.
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| It's a good thing for Linux, because maybe more people will write apps for Linux, outside of the steam walled garden. It will expose more people to Linux then before. This is a long term thing.
How well did that work with Android? How much carryover from Android to generic Linux?
It had to be said... (Score:5, Funny)
Taking Linux seriously (Score:2)
Taking the platform "seriously" really hasn't anything to do with it. The game industry has always been a chicken-or-the-egg problem with Linux: Games spur adoption, but adoption is abysmal without the games. I'm not quite sure how Steam figures they will work around this inherent problem.
Re:Taking Linux seriously (Score:5, Insightful)
Slowly.
Valve plays an incredibly long game compared to most tech companies (hell, most companies, period). They started Steam because they could see where constantly-increasing bandwidth was leading. They missed on some of the particulars, but by getting the main point correct early on, they were able to gather the momentum to overcome minor obstacles before anyone else could seize initiative. So not only did they avoid being tied down to another company's proprietary platform, but they managed to become the de facto digital distribution system while still being a relatively minor player.
SteamOS is a defensive move. They're concerned that Microsoft may lose its Windows dominance, or might try to move it to an Apple-like locked store (they sort of have, with RT). So they ported Steam and their own games to both OS X and Linux.
That was enough to spur an initial kick of OS X games following after them. It's not nearly universal now, but it's respectable, and growing.
Linux didn't get the same kick, mainly because they don't have as much market share. So Valve is giving it more support, and perhaps more importantly, lending it a more prestigious (among gamers) brand name.
Will it be a success? Perhaps. At the very least, it's enough a threat to Microsoft that they're not going to try to take over the digital distribution market, because if they do, Valve will just drop Steam on Windows and enough publishers will follow them to wherever they lead that Microsoft will ultimately have lost. So in one sense, it's a deterrent. But it could become a legitimate gaming platform in its own right, particularly if they get enough console-like games for Steam Machines to go up against the PS4/Xb1 in the coming generation.
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The game industry has always been a chicken-or-the-egg problem with Linux: Games spur adoption, but adoption is abysmal without the games. I'm not quite sure how Steam figures they will work around this inherent problem.
By making a console, of course. They're not pitching this to developers as "let's bring AAA games to Linux". They're pitching it as "we're bringing our viable and proven content delivery system to the living room and lowering the cost of entry by ditching Windows. Oh, and we're minimising the financial risk by spreading it out: giving away the open-source OS to hardware manufacturers and letting them take care of the dirty details." Sounds more tempting that way, doesn't it?
Depends on SteamOS being general purpose (Score:3)
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I only have windows to play games on....So if your telling me my next PC can play all the games I want and not require me to play for a operating system I'm all excited!
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No, it doesn't count as a linux desktop, but it makes certain that linux will be a target platform for PC developers. It pleases me, becaues games were pretty much all that keep me on windows.
Re:Not happening (Score:5, Informative)
The console crowd doesn't get to take advantage of PC hardware the way PC games do. Have you ever seen an Xbox hooked up to two or three monitors?
This is an alternative for PC gamers who might like to dump Windows and use an OS better suited for their games, coming from a company that already makes a lot of popular games. The people who will buy this thing are people who use PCs and are fans of Valve games.
The Linux fanboys don't need to buy the SteamBox; they'll just use their existing custom PC and run Steam on that, like they're already doing. This will merely help improve support for Steam on the Linux platform by getting the gfx card makers to better support Linux.
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Re:Not happening (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, the folks who only play games on Windows might. Or they might dual boot, and use Steam on Linux. And a lot of people cite the absence of Triple-A games on Linux as being the big thing stopping them from migrating.
Certainly, it isn't going to hurt anything :)
Seems to me that Steam is already an "app store". Distributing non game software through it shouldn't be a problem, really.
Re:Not happening (Score:5, Informative)
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nobody is going to buy steam OS
Well, considering Steam OS itself will be free...
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At best it will force the hand of Intel, nVidia and AMD to make it so their drivers work on Linux, but everyone else, unlikely.
Well Intel and AMD are much better community players than is nVidia.
With the focus of Windows slowly shifting to tablets, and web based versions of their Cash Cow Office, and with Ubuntu's minimalist desktop or KDE's robust one covering just about anyone's needs for home computing, and small business computing.
IBM and Intel seem to have a different opinion of OpenOffice and OfficeLibre than you do.
The last thing holding home users to windows is TurboTax Quickbooks.
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Don't forget that they have also gotten Steam running on more traditional distros (well, Ubuntu) as well. SteamOS could help them to iron out the kinks, generate greater driver availability get more game binaries made for Linux. With all of that worked out, you could start playing these games smoothly on your distro of choice.
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Games are the only thing keeping me from moving. And (as pointed out earlier), NetFlix, but that's less of a problem. Everything else on my linux install is fine. I have used OpenOffice and now Libre nearly exclusively since 2003 (I say nearly because work still requires Office and file formats still don't perfectly interchange, but there's nothing I need out of Office or any other windows apps that aren't available to me in Linux, with the exception of high end gaming support).
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The driver improvements are actually what Linus is talking about if you RTFA. That's how desktop Linux will benefit.
As for why SteamOS: about a year ago (I think) Valve demonstrated that you could get superior performance on Linux because the code was open. It's a lot easier to do optimizations on a platform when you have comprehensive documentation on how it works—and where the bugs are. Valve's devs were also greatly elated to discover that they could actually fix said bugs instead of just working a
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Why mod Troll?
AC is dead on on this one. If you have an Xbox a PS3 and a desktop (Windows) why on earth would you want to run Linux on your Desktop just so you can game?
You wouldn't.
HOWEVER, if you didn't want to have to pay almost $200 for a proprietary OS that's so locked down and filled with trash it makes the Georgia State prison system look like an all-inclusive Hawaiian resort, then the fact that gaming on Linux is finally getting some respect would be a very good thing for you.
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Simply put, the problem that Linux has is a lack of open source support from Nvidia and other companies in regards to drivers
While it's true that drivers are a problem, you won't get Linux on the desktop until AAA titles are released simultaneously on Linux.
When CoD:Ghosts comes out on Windows and consoles in a month, you'll know what kept Linux off the desktop.
The OP isn't trolling, despite the moderation. Nobody likes his truth.
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You might want to go read about it some more; what you're talking about is preemption. The kernel has been preemptible for years now. Here's an article about it from 2002: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/5600 [linuxjournal.com]
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Re:Not happening (Score:4, Informative)
Re:ditch windows? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not? Increasingly games are using standard APIs and getting multi-platform releases. They're not tied to an OS anymore. A Windows license is a huge, unnecessary expense for PC gamers. Gamers worship hardware and entertainment software, not operating systems. They're going to go with whatever has support for the hardware they have and the games they want to play. With Valve pushing Linux and GPU makers joining them, all the pieces are in place to dethrone Windows or at the very least drum up some competition.
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1. Every time a person is looking to buy a Steam OS box, he's going to ask himself whether there's a game he really wants on the horizon that is currently Windows-only. The answer is always yes, so he won't buy.
2. Every time a company looks to port a game to Steam OS, the
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If Valve can help resolve whatever problems you think still require documentation, then that will yield a positive result for distributions that aren't SteamOS.
If there isn't any need to consult the M, then there won't be any motivation to tell people to RTFM.
Although if Microsoft was dependent on people installing Windows on their own they would have been dead a long time ago.
Re:This won't do anything for Linux on desktops (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm guessing you haven't tried a Fresh install of any version of Linux lately.
Its no harder than windows. There is actually less tinkering required than with windows.
Especially for those distributions that have aimed their packaging at the new users.
The obstacle is that it was difficult to buy a pre-configured Linux machine. Nobody installs windows these days either. They buy it pre-installed.
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Linux beats Windows.
Order of easiest OS installs I did the last 2 years:
- Debian (about 6 times pressing [enter], and once a down button or something, takes about 20 minutes between second to last [enter] and the [enter] to reboot)
- Ubuntu (needed a few more down buttons and [enter], so, a couple of more minutes before the download+install happens)
- Windows pre-install on a Dell system (takes about 10 minutes, reboot, 15 more minutes, reboot, 10 more minutes, reboot, 20 more minutes, etc.)
- MS-DOS 4 on a mo
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I'm guessing you haven't tried a Fresh install of any version of Linux lately. Its no harder than windows. There is actually less tinkering required than with windows. Especially for those distributions that have aimed their packaging at the new users.
Yes, the install is easy in most cases but what about the post-install experience? I like Linux and just got my SO back onto it following a Win7 fuck-up, but if I wasn't around she likely wouldn't have a system that functions as she needs it to. She's Chinese and wants Chinese input in Kubuntu. There is no obvious setting that adds pinyin as there is in, say, OS X. I had to install the ibus stuff then figure out by trial and error what the config was called as it's not part of the KDE settings (as far as I
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Had you let her do the original install in Chinese, you would not be in this mess.
Seems YOU are the problem here.
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Half a brain?
ESR is a pontificating whack job, who's only contribution to opensource was an open mouth and a single program so horribly written it was virtually unmaintainable.
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Torvalds is ESR with half a brain. If all he cares about is driver support why doesn't he just install Cygwin on a Windows 8 tablet and be done with it.
Um... because that's not all he cares about?
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Still, let's not completely forget the pretty login screens either. They especially give a nice and professional experience to new users.
For example, when you restart a Windows computer, you get this smooth transition to a screen showing "Restarting" with the spinning pearls animation. In Linux, on restart you might get the distro logo screen, which is nice, but it might not work 100% smooth: the animation might not be playing, or the screen is going black and coming back...maybe you even see some lines of
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I like to bash Miguel de Icaza as much as the next guy, but he hasn't been involved with GNOME for many years now, so you can't blame the current state of GNOME on him. He left the project long before GNOME 3 was envisioned, more like back during the GNOME 1.x days or perhaps early early 2.x days IIRC.
The sad fact is, GNOME is largely under the control of Red Hat, as they employ several of the most prominent GNOME developers including Jon McCann. So if you want to blame someone for attempting to ruin desktop Linux with the abomination that is GNOME3, blame Red Hat.
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M$, with every iteration of xbox, has been subconsciously trying to diminish the viability of windows as a gaming platform, this is mostly due to the 10 dollar royalty they get for each xbox game, compared to no royalty for each windows game. Games are the last reason for many technically minded people to retain a windows machine. Dev's won't take linux over windows yet, but in three months...if it's easy to port from ps4 to linux...then gamedevs may start to view windows as "not a worthwhile endeavor".
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Look at all the Linux users...
As a Linux user, I have to say, you're seriously overestimating the market there.
How much of the gamer market would ditch Windows in the blink of an eye if they could play the same games on Linux
Even if every member of the intersection of "Gamer" and "Linux user" switched, devs would have to be shirt-soaking drooling stupid to "ditch Windows" for that tiny slice of the pie.
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You can do it, it's called VGA passthrough using an IOMMU, need two graphics cards, the right CPU (any AMD, any Intel where it isn't disabled on purpose by Intel) and the right motherboard (compatible chipset, mobo vendor serious about supporting their BIOS like Asrock and Gigabyte)
You have to use a bare metal hypervisor too (Xen or VMWare ESXi), and at worst you'll fail to have the other graphics card in the linux VM (which would require you to use second display or KVM or a monitor's second input, anyway)