Those wanting to try out Steam’s new linux-based operating system can do so very soon…
While only a select few will have access to the Steam Machine prototypes being sent out to people, along with their interesting new controllers, the Steam OS is available to anyone. Use it on your main PC, use it on an older PC, use it on a media box connected to your TV through Big Picture mode… Or stream games from a PC to a smaller box in some unholy, black magic form of in-home cloud gaming. It’s up to you.
Obviously, being linux-based, you’ll only be able to play games that have been coded for that variety of OS, which is something Valve has made a priority over the last couple years, and others have done for a while. I can’t think of a more important player than Valve to support linux gaming if it’s ever going to catch on. With the shambles that Games For Windows Live was, games becoming easier to develop for multiple OS environments, and Steam less and less beholden to Microsoft, who knows what the future holds.
Check out the Steam OS site for more info, and presumably, when the time comes, a download link.
Comments
37 responses to “All Aboard, SteamOS Arrives”
no dual boot
Wait what??? What kind of ancient archaic bastard system doesnt allow dualbooting???
Are you saying that the system doesn’t support dual booting or saying that the option wasn’t mentioned?
from what I’ve read on arstechnica, the official install methods do not allow dual-booting or installing on a secondary hard drive.
Keep in mind though, this is not the official public release. This is version 1 and they have said only for those who are very familiar with Linux. My guess it dual boot will come in later. Also yo could run it in a VM if you wanted, VM’s are free
yeah, of course. I’m sure there’s already ways to dual boot anyway, probably via installing Debian first and then the Steam OS Gnome on top. I’m not very familiar with Linux though so I may be skipping a hundred steps for all I know.
Steam OS is based on Debian 7 and since I already had Debian installed on all my kit I’ve already installed Steam OS. All you have to do is add the repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list file and update.
put:
deb [arch=amd64,i386] http://repo.steampowered.com/steamos/ alchemist contrib main non-free
in /etc/apt/sources.list and run wget http://repo.steampowered.com/steam/signature.gpg && sudo apt-key add signature.gpg to add the security keys for the steam repository. Then run apt-get update and apt-get upgrade to complete the installation.
I’ve already installed it on both my server and my desktop PC.
Awesome, cheers for the heads up. I have started running Linux Mint recently, I assume it would work on their Debian based version? I’ll give it a shot when I can and post how it goes.
yep. all mint is based on debian.
Just out of curiosity man, what would you recoomend to be better to use? I honestly can’t tell the difference, as the normal one supports debian packages. Is there something in the Debian version SteamOS might need? Either way, I’ll give it a shot.
http://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php (debian specific version)
http://www.linuxmint.com/download.php (v16 Petra)
I’d go for v16 petra. But I honestly don’t know in this regard.
Got all excited until I found NVIDIA only.
🙁
Damn, I was going to try this on my gaming laptop, but it’s got a Radeon 5650 🙁
Same here. Though amd support is close anyway.
– No dual booting
– UEFI required
– NVIDIA only
Also, I want videos and pictures of the OS.
And to people downloading, use a torrent if you can, Steam’s official link keeps timing out for everyone.
Well its gnome so… search gnome desktop?
– No multiple sign-in allowed.
Someone remind us when it’s out of Beta with a functional feature set.
Are you sure? Videos i’ve seen of peopel signing in shows single, and multiple steam user environments supported..?
I’m not sure, I haven’t personally tested. But I’m willing to bet such a feature would be in any changelogs for updates (which I haven’t received) and covered widely by media.
If its not already a feature, I more than imagine its in the important planned features. It works side-by-side with the new Family Sharing features, so it would essentially be killing their own feature off to not include it. I was referring to this video, but upon second viewing I realise the + sign is to join, not to add another account (though it may act like that).
eh it doesn’t seem too exciting and I really don’t have any gripes over using Win7.
I think once you see how many resources Windows 7 takes up even if all you’re doing is playing a game then you’ll want to at least have the option of dual booting into Steam OS
If your machine can’t handle Win7 and some 2D indie games, running SteamOS isn’t going to help much.
I think you missed the point dude. He is trying to say that by understanding how many resources windows uses, you’ll be able to see a jump in performance playing your games on SteamOS (even on a wicked pc, in theory).
Obviously this hasn’t been tested yet, but I would be willing to bet a whole lot of money that’s going to be true. Windows isn’t inherently made for gaming, while SteamOS is.
Should be interesting.
Well, I actually agree with you. Portal2 etc and other Linux games actually run better under Linux than Windows.
But the point is that the amount of ‘demanding’ Linux games is so small, that the above fact is currently moot.
Yeah, exactly. I think once dual booting becomes an option, (as well as AMD support) and more games are supported I will probably start booting to W7 for work, Steam OS for games.
whats that game on the bottom row on the left? the map looking one.
@os7 Europa Universalis 4. An excellent game.
EDIT* that should have been a reply.
Running Ubuntu at the moment, so I’ll be interested to see what the Steam OS is like.
It runs the latest gnome desktop so pretty similar to ubuntu with gnome
It’s using Debian, while it’s lighter than Windows 7, it’s considered to be on of the ‘heavy’ standard distributions. If it was based on something lighter such as Arch then you would see a much more noticeable difference. And that’s only if the SteamOS UI is not as heavy .
I would guess they are trying to support as much hardware as possible out of the box? My guess is they will thin it out later on and create an Arch like package where you select the things you need.
I hope :p
so… will it support bf4??
No.
Yes.
Only if you’re streaming from main rig.
But BF4 isn’t on Steam, so it may not be possible
So they’ve deliberately blocked multi-user support, multi-booting and AMD support? Boo!
I thought one of the things going for it was that it could stream game files from Windows boxes?
Deliberately? You’re kidding right? Its the first version, that they have clearly stated is early, and have suggested to wait until later next year to get a proper commercialised version. AMD support will be coming, along with dual-booting, even though really SteamOS is more for a dedicated box outside of your normal Windows machine, so you can stream to it and such. As it won’t be much of a performance increase to want to sacrifice everything Windows straight away, just an awesome OS for HTPC’s, and Steam Machines, which can work together with your current windows machine.