The new GOL survey for April is now available, so please make sure to fill it in if you have the time.
The results of the previous (March) survey will be published in the next couple of days.
You can find the link here, and please share with other Linux gamers if you can!
The results of the previous (March) survey will be published in the next couple of days.
You can find the link here, and please share with other Linux gamers if you can!
Some you may have missed, popular articles from the last month:
The real aim are those in the console market.
Most PC gamers already have a decent machine to play with, and Steam Link seems to be more than enough to bring us to the living room.
So, I really doubt we'll see massive Steam Machine adoption amid PC gamers.
You can also see how it's progressing here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1ed8os_t_OmbqqdhuEqSn9diStc5RGXtIZooACX1cKuw/viewanalytics (I only know this as it was commented on the reddit post, I didn't see a link on the form).
It is Debian-with-tweaks, but you can't simply Alt-Tab from your Steam game to your desktop to check a browser or messages - I have a dual-screen setup, and that took a bit of tweaking to fix the Steam mode (adding xrandr commands to the startup script to force one screen off; otherwise Steam was trying to centre itself across the middle of both displays)... but that means you couldn't, for example, have a browser on one screen while you're gaming away on the other.
If I were to get a big-screen TV, though, SteamOS actually seems fairly viable if your primary thing is gaming, with maybe a bit of YouTube using their built-in browser. I'd be tempted to try hacking together some sort of Kodi(XBMC) / SteamOS kludge and make a hybrid HTPC / gaming rig for the living room... I'd almost go as far as to say that's how Valve should be going. If you've got a decent gaming rig for Steam, it's more than enough to replace a Slingbox/AppleTV/Chromecast/etc. and there's some decent open source projects doing just that that they could try and integrate. One box to rule them all, sort of thing.
Of course, the community can always figure out how to do it ourselves, and I'm sure someone already has. :) The joys of open source!
Since I actually use that machine as my main desktop, though, I ended up switching back to Xubuntu, but rolling forward to 15.04 beta 2 since that's out this month anyway. Copied my home folder back across, and pretty much everything 'just worked'. I love that. All my settings, configs, profiles, just... dropped right back in as if nothing ever happened.
Unrelated: Though I'm running Intel + nVidia at the moment, in my heart I'm still rooting for AMD to come up with something awesome, particularly because they're working on (almost) fully open source video drivers for their upcoming cards. Being able to drop the proprietary blobs and still be fully supported like the Intel guys sounds pretty sweet, particularly with all this talk of Vulkan. AMD could do some real good for Linux gaming with that.