Valve announce SteamOS (Linux based for the Living Room) 1st announcement of 3

[Family Fry]

SO Valve have three announcements at

http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom

The first one is SteamOS, lets take a look.

Steam is coming to a new operating system

As we’ve been working on bringing Steam to the living room, we’ve come to the conclusion that the environment best suited to delivering value to customers is an operating system built around Steam itself.
SteamOS combines the rock-solid architecture of Linux with a gaming experience built for the big screen.
It will be available soon as a free stand-alone operating system for living room machines.

There will be four new steam features focused on the living room.

In-home Streaming

You can play all your Windows and Mac games on your SteamOS machine, too. Just turn on your existing computer and run Steam as you always have - then your SteamOS machine can stream those games over your home network straight to your TV!

Music, TV, Movies

We’re working with many of the media services you know and love. Soon we will begin bringing them online, allowing you to access your favorite music and video with Steam and SteamOS.

Family Sharing

In the past, sharing Steam games with your family members was hard. Now you can share the games you love with the people you love. Family Sharing allows you to take turns playing one another’s games while earning your own Steam achievements and saving your individual game progress to the Steam cloud.

Family Options

The living-room is family territory. That’s great, but you don’t want to see your parents’ games in your library. Soon, families will have more control over what titles get seen by whom, and more features to allow everyone in the house to get the most out of their Steam libraries.

The bolded one is kind of hinting at Steam Box for living room that connects everything together.

Next announcement will be Wednesday 6pm, last probably on Friday 6pm.

[Brad]

Brilliant

[Kit]

of 3 eh?

Dare anyone say it?

[Dogg Thang]

Oh we on the Internet will all be in for a world of pain if one of these announcements isn't HL2 Ep3.

Edit: I dared.

[Kit]

Ok, if one of the announcements is that game Charles needs to do something amaze in the thread.

Maybe post a vid of him setting himself on fire in a lab coat with a crab on his head.

[charlesr]

Did that last week. ([monty python]I got better[/MP])

[Kit]

hmm... have you ever killed a crab with a crowbar?

I'm sure it'd get a lot of peta members to join.

[Brad]

If they announced hl3 was only for steam os I wonder how many would set their pc up to dual boot? steam os could make Linux mainstream.

[briareos_kerensky]

If they announced hl3 was only for steam os I wonder how many would set their pc up to dual boot? steam os could make Linux mainstream.

Mainstream is far from being a game-driven OS. Probably when companies like Adobe or Autodesk will actually care about Linux, it could happen. With many games released as multi-platform between PCs and consoles, the risk is to have more people migrate toward console rather to rethink their PCs.

[Brad]

But these days there is less and less need for desktop Pcs. Gamers must be a large part of what's left of that market maybe. So if steam os starts to take off then adobe and Co might join in. I just want the pc market to stay alive despite Microsoft's attempts to kill it lol

[Baseley09]

I'm kinda excited and kinda scared.

[briareos_kerensky]

But these days there is less and less need for desktop Pcs. Gamers must be a large part of what's left of that market maybe. So if steam os starts to take off then adobe and Co might join in. I just want the pc market to stay alive despite Microsoft's attempts to kill it lol

I still think it won't be due to what looks like a heavily customised Linux distribution with a focus on gaming and media entertainment; it will carve its niche, for sure: unlike the Ouya, Steam has a name and a great catalog of games to get it started. Probably I'm a bit skeptic about the idea because I moved away from PC gaming and the few games I play aren't available on Steam. Right now I'm more curious on how the PC-Steambox streaming will work.
I also wonder if Valve are going to close their OS and to what extent.

[Neon Ignition]

Nice that it's free, given the popularity of Steam I'm sure there'll be many who'll give it a go to test it out. Beyond that though the whole saga still sounds utterly redundant. Hopefully Half Life 3 is announced so something substantial comes out of a drawn out week of semi-announcements.

[speedlolita]

What I would like to see is the performance gain over games running on Windows, if there is any at all.

The distribution could potentially be so low level that it operates near the kind of levels that the OS in an Xbox 360/PS3 runs theoretically could it not which would yield superior performance.

Not for me, but interesting. Couple this with an AMD APU and you're laughing, probably.

[Decider-VT]

It'll be interesting to see what this commitment to Linux leads to games-wise and whether or not there'll be a meaningful shift away from Windows. It'll be quite funny if people end up running Windows VMs on their Steamboxes in years to come, so they can play the back catalogue of non-Linux compatible games already on the service.