SteamOS - So how does this work?

[nuttshell]

Now that it's announced and it will be a Linux streaming reciever from your, mostly Windows PC, to your TV, not a closed console and my initial PC gettin' sum' love - happy phase died out, I must say, I am fairly sceptical of this thing.

The OS is free, so it will probably have ads. More than there allready are on Steam? They allready make my blood boil. I can't help it, I have a short fuse for those kinds of things.

The OS is light, it will be capable for streaming and displaying videos, music, games and will have local and most certainly, online social features. An OS needs a lot of things to enable these all of the time and seeing how Valve made the Steam-client allready this clunky, I'm not sure how they will make the OS good without pouring years and years of optimisation in it. But does that even matter? Because streaming.

Our Network chips havent improved in a major way for a loooong time now. The theoretical speeds for a WiFi is 54 Mbit/s, for a LAN it's 100 Mbit/s. Will this be enough to stream gr8 graphix 4 TV in HD? What about input latency? Will this thing stream games that are not for steam?

TLDR: Can this work reasonably well?

 

[Doom972]

There are 2 announcements left, so the Steam Box is still a possibility. If they're not making it, there's still the Piston, which will probably use SteamOS.

It doesn't just Stream games, it can run the Steam games which have native Linux versions (all of Valve's games plus a lot of indies).

As for the streaming quality over an ad-hock connection, we'll have to wait and see. If nVidia could pull it off, I'm sure Valve could as well.

EDIT: Also, I doubt that they will use ads.

 

[Costia]

They aren't making a new OS, they are customizing Ubuntu for games to make it easier for developers and users.
Linux is free- no ads. So SteamOS shouldn't have any ads.
They will have to pour years of work into it, but they aren't writing it from scratch. They are taking something that existed and evolved since 1991.
edit:
If you are curious about this, you could try steam on Ubuntu even today.

 

[nuttshell]

If you are curious about this, you could try steam on Ubuntu even today.

I am curious but I would like to hear what others have to say, who have tried maybe streaming Team Fortress 2. Does this work? Is it possible?

And I know that Linux is free but steam is also free and has ads. Why wouldn't it? There are Linux distributions available for purchase.

 

[Costia]

It is possible, you can see the NVIDIA shield demos. NVIDIA shield runs android , which is basically a modified JAVA VM on linux.
What ads does steam have? It has (or is) an online shop, but I didn't see any steam ads in my library or games.
What you are paying for in the Linux distros that aren't free is support and additional software, not the Linux OS itself.
Having ads won't make any sense. People would just use Ubuntu.

 

[DoPo]

Now that it's announced and it will be a Linux streaming reciever from your, mostly Windows PC, to your TV, not a closed console

No, it's a Linux based OS which also allows streaming (well, easier than normal) but otherwise is an OS of itself, too.

The OS is free, so it will probably have ads.

It's Linux, your comment makes no sense.

More than there allready are on Steam? They allready make my blood boil. I can't help it, I have a short fuse for those kinds of things.

The store page? Or the thingie that comes up once after you boot Steam and play a game? Because both of these are sort of optional, you know - you can turn off the notifications, and you can just not go to the store front...which is actually pretty much like any other store front and has a bunch of featured items, so I won't call that "advertising" but you seem to think there is a lot of this going on, so you probably do.

The OS is light, it will be capable for streaming and displaying videos, music, games and will have local and most certainly, online social features. An OS needs a lot of things to enable these all of the time and seeing how Valve made the Steam-client allready this clunky, I'm not sure how they will make the OS good without pouring years and years of optimisation in it.

It's Linux, your comments still make no sense.

TL;DR you don't seem well versed in what you seem to be criticising.

 

[nuttshell]

It is possible, you can see the NVIDIA shield demos. NVIDIA shield runs android , which is basically a modified JAVA VM on linux.

However, is it any good? I fished around the net a bit and I saw people doing it with VLC for example but the input lag still remains a problem.

What ads does steam have...

I just googled to show a popup for the latest offers and games and then I found out, you can actually turn them off! This is great! *giggles in delight*

 

[Costia]

VLC is for media streaming(if at all,its mostly a player), not gaming.
Just read about NVIDIA shield, not VLC. Reviews I read state that there is no perceptible lag.

 

[Esotera]

Why would the network chip affect the graphical output on your TV? They're almost definitely going to be connecting by HDMI/VGA, anything else would be stupid.

Anyway, they're building on what is already a very well established Linux distro, and just improving it for a gaming experience. Hopefully with Valve's weight behind this we'll see a greater selection of games come to Linux, I'd imagine they'll be getting the developers of games that sell well to produce Linux builds right now.

 

[Costia]

It will have to be WIFI. but his numbers are outdated.
LAN (wired) is 1Gbps (even 10Gbps in some cases)
WIFI (the current one is 802.11n) can go up to 600Mbps

 

[nuttshell]

It's Linux, your comments still make no sense.
TL;DR you don't seem well versed in what you seem to be criticising.

Well, you may be right. I tried a few Linux distributions a while ago but I have no idea how the steam client runs on them. Is it any better than on Win7/XP? I doubt that Linux is so awesome to automatically make anything Valve does with it great. If I can revive my 7 year-old machine for SteamOS and stream the games from my new machine on to my TV, that would be great and I would kiss every ass inValved.

VLC is for media streaming(if at all,its mostly a player), not gaming.
Just read about NVIDIA shield, not VLC. Reviews I read state that there is no perceptible lag.

You can capture the screen with VLC and stream that. Possible but problematic. I read some reviews, the Shield indeed sounds solid enough.

It will have to be WIFI. but his numbers are outdated.
LAN (wired) is 1Gbps (even 10Gbps in some cases)
WIFI (the current one is 802.11n) can go up to 600Mbps

Damn, youre right. Still slow, but it's getting better.

 

[The Enquirer]

The OS is free, so it will probably have ads. More than there allready are on Steam? They allready make my blood boil. I can't help it, I have a short fuse for those kinds of things.

Linux is free but it doesn't have ads. So to respond to your most basic question I think that it can work well responsibly just like anything else. The Xbox One could have worked well and it did have some decent ideas behind it, but then Microsoft started screwing around with it to the point where they hit the point of no return. I think Valve will fair much better with it though as people actually have expectations of them because they are a game company, not in fact a hardware company.

 

[DoPo]

It's Linux, your comments still make no sense.
TL;DR you don't seem well versed in what you seem to be criticising.

Well, you may be right. I tried a few Linux distributions a while ago but I have no idea how the steam client runs on them. Is it any better than on Win7/XP? I doubt that Linux is so awesome to automatically make anything Valve does with it great.

Depends on the client, furthermore, I've not tested many, so I have no idea. There is not one client per platform, heck, with Linux, there must be several dozen, I guess. And no, Linux is not "so awesome to automatically make anything Valve does with it great" but it certainly isn't what you make it out to be - needing years to develop and optimise it - what sense, in Hastur's name, does that make? It's already been out and developed and optimised for years so far. Nor does it need ads for...anything. I mean, come on, your assumptions were so warped, you may as well be talking about a different company and a different product.

 

[RikuoAmero]

It will have to be WIFI. but his numbers are outdated.
LAN (wired) is 1Gbps (even 10Gbps in some cases)
WIFI (the current one is 802.11n) can go up to 600Mbps

Actually the newst wifi is 802.11ac. I was in a pc store the other day, and I remember seeing a dual band one advertising 1750 mbps (450 on 11n and the rest on ac).

 

[Snarky]

Valve revolutionized gaming before. Does anyone remember the requirement to insert physical media to install or play a game? How about patches? Sometimes you would have to install a half dozen series of patches to get up to date. Using gamespy or WON to try to find multiplayer games? Library management alone is great in steam, install or uninstall whenever.

Now i hope the next archiac thing will be: does anyone remember when you had to pay 100$ for windows everytime you built a gaming pc? Seriously. Dealing with windows is half the horror of a pc build. Installation, configuration, authentication, patching for 3 hours. I hope this is the shot on the arm pc gaming needs. Windows 8 was the catalyst for this... Gabe hated it.

 

[Worgen]

What steam ads are you talking about? Aside from the fact that steam is a store, I haven't ever seen an ad on it at all, maybe the notifications could be considered one but you can turn those off.

 

[DrOswald]

Now that it's announced and it will be a Linux streaming reciever from your, mostly Windows PC, to your TV, not a closed console and my initial PC gettin' sum' love - happy phase died out, I must say, I am fairly sceptical of this thing.

My understanding is that is will be a gaming machine itself and a streaming machine as a second option. Basically, it will run any linux compatible game itself and the streaming will give you the option of running windows/mac games from your computer or if you have a really beefy gaming compy then you can choose to use that to do all the heavy lifting. But it is possible I am wrong about that.

The OS is free, so it will probably have ads. More than there allready are on Steam? They allready make my blood boil. I can't help it, I have a short fuse for those kinds of things.

The OS if free because it is based on an open source Linux build. Basically Valve found freeware and adapted it to their use. I doubt it will have many adds. It will probably be the same thing as the Steam client, only on the store page.

I have seen people say how annoying the ads on steam are before and I really don't understand why. I mean, they are only on the store page so they only show up when you are actually looking for games to buy. And they never pop up in your face or block you actually trying to find the game you want or play annoying music and sounds. Well, I guess there is that popup window that shows up after you close a game but that can be disabled. So... I don't really agree that the ads on Steam are annoying. I mean, they are a business trying to sell you games. When you go to their store I don't think it is unreasonable for them to show you what is on the shelf, so to speak. But I guess we all have different things that push our buttons.

The OS is light, it will be capable for streaming and displaying videos, music, games and will have local and most certainly, online social features. An OS needs a lot of things to enable these all of the time and seeing how Valve made the Steam-client allready this clunky, I'm not sure how they will make the OS good without pouring years and years of optimisation in it. But does that even matter? Because streaming.

Well, it is a Linux based OS so I think they are going to be fine. There are several open source Linux builds that already do all those things without any problem. All Valve needs to do is basically lock down the OS and prevent it doing things they don't want. If they were creating an OS from scratch it would certainly be a major point of concern but they are not. I would expect it to function about as well as the steam client - a little clunky, but it does the few things it needs to well.

Our Network chips havent improved in a major way for a loooong time now. The theoretical speeds for a WiFi is 54 Mbit/s, for a LAN it's 100 Mbit/s. Will this be enough to stream gr8 graphix 4 TV in HD? What about input latency? Will this thing stream games that are not for steam?

Yes, this will be sufficient. The biggest concern in streaming a video game isn't bandwidth. Even an internet connection can do that just fine. The problem is lag. Which, again, on a local network should a minor problem at worst.

The bigger question is really if Valve makes a good remote connection client. If they do it will work very well. If not it will be crappy. I am pretty sure they have the expertise to do this right and they seem to be riding a lot on this feature, so it will probably turn out ok.

TLDR: Can this work reasonably well?

Yes, It can. Will it? Probably, but there is always a chance this will crash and burn.

 

[VladG]

Now that it's announced and it will be a Linux streaming reciever from your, mostly Windows PC, to your TV, not a closed console and my initial PC gettin' sum' love - happy phase died out, I must say, I am fairly sceptical of this thing.

Steam going to the living room is, in itself, fairly good news for PC gamers, but I don't understand why the steambox itself would be of any interest to existing core PC gamers? Surely, it's targeted at console gamers who would like to get into PC gaming, but don't want the bother of dealing with a PC.

The OS is free, so it will probably have ads. More than there allready are on Steam? They allready make my blood boil. I can't help it, I have a short fuse for those kinds of things.

Dude... it's Linux, a FREE operating system. It makes no sense to have adds. Also are you seriously complaining about Steam promoting games within it's own platform??

The OS is light, it will be capable for streaming and displaying videos, music, games and will have local and most certainly, online social features. An OS needs a lot of things to enable these all of the time and seeing how Valve made the Steam-client allready this clunky, I'm not sure how they will make the OS good without pouring years and years of optimisation in it. But does that even matter? Because streaming.

Yeah. Years of optimization. Check. You don't seriously believe they started working on it 2 weeks ago, do you? Also, compared to your standard Windows install, even with minimal optimization it will provide far superior performance. And I expect SteamOS to be a very minimalistic OS, providing functionality for gaming and a web browser. They wouldn't really need much else.

Our Network chips havent improved in a major way for a loooong time now. The theoretical speeds for a WiFi is 54 Mbit/s, for a LAN it's 100 Mbit/s. Will this be enough to stream gr8 graphix 4 TV in HD? What about input latency? Will this thing stream games that are not for steam?

Now this is just laughable. 300mb/s wifi is standard even for super-cheap routers and I can't remember the last time I've used a 100mb/s LAN. 1gb/s is common even for built in adapters on budget mobos. This being said, even 54mb/s is PLENTY to provide a good quality digital stream.

 

[MasterOfHisOwnDomain]

Valve revolutionized gaming before. Does anyone remember the requirement to insert physical media to install or play a game? How about patches? Sometimes you would have to install a half dozen series of patches to get up to date.

Of course we "remember" using "physical media" to install games, by which you mean CDs or DVDs, they aren't some relic of a bygone age. I still use them frequently. And patches really aren't a massive complication. Go to the developer's website or another, download and install the patch. Play game. I think the amount that Steam has "revolutionised" PC gaming is rather overplayed.

 

[loc978]

It's Linux, your comments still make no sense.
TL;DR you don't seem well versed in what you seem to be criticising.

Well, you may be right. I tried a few Linux distributions a while ago but I have no idea how the steam client runs on them. Is it any better than on Win7/XP? I doubt that Linux is so awesome to automatically make anything Valve does with it great. If I can revive my 7 year-old machine for SteamOS and stream the games from my new machine on to my TV, that would be great and I would kiss every ass inValved.

Depends on your 7-year-old machine. I'm still gaming primarily on a 6-year-old build, and it could do this thing easily, since it has onboard 1GBps ethernet. If your 7-year-old machine has that and a high-end video card from back then to run that big ol' display (mine would have a small issue with needing a DVI adapter), then there's no reason your old machine couldn't do that.

As for Steam on Linux, there are still a couple of display bugs within the client, at least under KDE. I'd imagine they're not there under gnome, unity et cetera. KDE has always been a problem child. That's probably what attracted me to it. I seriously doubt any such issues will exist in a Steam OS... and if they do, well, it was free. All you're risking is time.

...Also, Windows Steam under Wine still works just about flawlessly. I maintain both versions on my laptop.

Valve revolutionized gaming before. Does anyone remember the requirement to insert physical media to install or play a game? How about patches? Sometimes you would have to install a half dozen series of patches to get up to date.

Of course we "remember" using "physical media" to install games, by which you mean CDs or DVDs, they aren't some relic of a bygone age. I still use them frequently. And patches really aren't a massive complication. Go to the developer's website or another, download and install the patch. Play game. I think the amount that Steam has "revolutionised" PC gaming is rather overplayed.

They revolutionized gaming the way Blizzard revolutionized MMOs. Made it accessible. Patches and discs aren't a big deal among the tech-savvy (in fact, I still prefer discs. Faster), but to some people they're just too much hassle. I don't mind being the guy at the LAN party who matches everyone's versions by reinstalling and patching... but what do my friends do when I'm not there?

...call me for tech support. Unless it's a Steam game.