A little background on what it is.
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/steamos-faq-machines,news-17614.html
Thanks. Saw some headlines. Haven't dug into it yet.
With their currently stellar customer service quality, I wonder how their expansion into new realms will turn out. :-\
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You should.
If you set up a linux box now with Ubuntu (or something similar) and then install the Linux Steam client all your platform-agnostic games are there to download and play. I had Red Orchestra installed on mine and I only purchased it once, back when it was released a long time ago. Portal was also there along with a few others but I didn't ry them since the Linux box was pretty old and barely handled RO.
It seems invasive Steam DRM isn't irritating enough, now we're getting a Steam OS as well. I don't trust them enough to even consider it for a moment. In fact, I hope it is a total failure when launched. What bad news.
Quote from: phredd1 on September 29, 2013, 01:08:06 AM
It seems invasive Steam DRM isn't irritating enough, now we're getting a Steam OS as well. I don't trust them enough to even consider it for a moment. In fact, I hope it is a total failure when launched. What bad news.
Wow. Not even I feel like that, and I'm far from Valve's number 1 fan. Why all the hate? And why, specifically, do you hope this will fail?
From a personal perspective I couldn't care less about SteamOS; I already run Chakra Linux and Steam works perfectly on it, and I certainly don't want to play PC games in my living room. I have consoles for sofa gaming. However, anything which makes Linux more attractive to games developers is a
very good thing because ultimately, a long way down the line, it could lead to the majority of the games market to become platform-agnostic, and I can say goodbye to Windows forever! \o/
I first installed Debian Linux in the 90's and I've dabbled with it from time to time but never really stuck with it. The idea of a well supported consumer grade Linux distro is very appealing to me.
Republic, when was the last time you tried Linux? Modern distros are as easy to use as Windows, if not easier, and if anything they're much better supported - patches are much more frequent, for example. I'd recommend Linux Mint for the inexperienced.
Debian never was particularly user-friendly. ;) (Although it's probably better now that it uses the insultingly simple Gnome 3 by default)
I haven't tried it seriously at home in a long time but I do use Ubuntu for surfing the net at work regularly but that doesn't really count. Maybe I should give it another whirl.
Definitely interested to see how these new endeavors go. The new controller they're putting out is different, but the people who have had a chance to play with it seem to have liked it a lot.
I'm hoping this finally gives Linux that kick it needs to become more main stream. Never thought I'd get EU4 and CKII natively on Linux but Steam helped that happen.
The new controller will be the key to the whole thing. The mouse/keyboard combo is just so much better than any current game controller for FPSs. Also try to imagine playing a RTS or even a pukka wargame which requires a lot of mousing with a gamepad...The PC retains its share of the games market with those sorts of games because it is the best platform for them.
If the new controller isn't at least as comfortable/quick as mouse/keyboard, then why would any gamer want to move from their PC to the console and telly in the living room?
Looks like Steam is just trying to get it's foot in the Console door, to me.
They already have a Linux option in their client, from my understanding, so that's a moot point unless they (or someone) really polishes up an easy-to-use Linux version for the masses that doesn't cost them anything. Some people may love to dick around with troubleshooting Linux compatibilities, but most of us do not.
Either way, it's a Valve/Steam endeavor and the biggest concern anyone should have is in regards to their customer support. Or support in general. They absolutely suck at this and I haven't seen any indication that they're attempting to improve it.
I thought I'd give Linux another chance at home...downloaded Ubuntu 13 got it installed on a separate partition...go to install Steam and I get "Dependency is not satisfiable: jockey-common".
I can't get no, satisfaction...I try, I try, I try and I try, but I can't get no....no I can't get no...
Wow, really? Ubuntu's the officially supported distro so you should have no problems at all. Did you download from the Steam website or via the repo? Jockey is a now-deprecated program that some distros used to use to make installing hardware drivers easier (which it utterly failed to do in the majority of cases). Nobody has used it in a while, as far as I know.
I'll do some research for you.
Edit: According to the Ubuntu website you just need to install it from the software centre. Is that what you did? And that you should only install Valve's version if the Ubuntu version didn't install cleanly.
Oh, another possibility is that it doesn't use Jockey any more, but because it's still a dependency in the package, it will complain if it can't find it. So have you gone into the software sources and enabled things like third-party/community sources? It's been a long time since I last used Ubuntu but it used to only have a small subset of official software sources enabled by default.
I eventually got Steam to work through apt-get'ing and updating the package manager. However, I then tried to get my screen brightness controls to work and editing a config file was recommended...so I did and now it won't boot.
I'll fix it later...
I have almost 30 years of Windows troubleshooting experience...its just going to take time to build up my Linux experience.
Which file did you edit? Xorg.conf?
The recommended fix I saw said edit /etc/default/grub
I'll fiddle with it some more this evening.
That's bizarre; Grub is the bootloader (which is why messing with it has made the system unbootable). I don't see why someone would tell you to edit that in order to do something with screen brightness.
Luckily, fixing it should be easy. You just need to boot from a live cd and issue a command or two to reinstall Grub. I haven't done this since the new version of Grub was released but you'll find a million articles explaining how to do it.
Edit: Like this one. (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1581099)
The recommendation was to set the panel brightness control info into the bootup I suppose...
The fix was: echo 50 | sudo tee /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness
Once I run that command it drops the lcd brightness and the function buttons work.
The thing about Linux fixes is that I have no idea how I would have ever found that on my own.