GOL Podcast S01E06: Steam Machines PC or Console, guest starring 'The Linux Gamer'

If it's a new thing, then you may need to configure it. This is not typical though, i rarely had to do it for any GNU distro i use. Also, "console" versions of games are usually dumbed down versions of the PC version of the game, or the PC version is a prettified version of the console game. Why would it be a bad thing that you can choose your own hardware in a steam machine? If you have some standard configurations and you can get developers to have a lighter version for those then it will work the same way as the other consoles. If you have a game that is "not compatible" with AMD, that basically boils down to the state of the drivers, which the developers will need to fix. I personally had very few situations when i "had to" crawl around in the command line to get something to work, everything works 95% of the time.

1a. If you want a console (appliance) like machine, then things need to just work. If they don't, then you have failed.

2a. Steam Machines need simple options, otherwise, choice paralysis kicks in. Have you seen the options on the hardware section, especially before it was pruned down by OEMs pulling out? How, as a consumer, could you compare all those options, and determine what was compatible with what you wanted, let alone the value of the machines? Again, if you want choices, you could have bought a PC.

2b. A problem is now you need to guarantee that games will be compatible for the machine, and automatically pick the right graphical configuration. For the sake of simplicity in this argument, we don't care that the user can change them, either to fix them or "break" (go out of bounds of reason) them. Now you need to put this overhead on all titles for whatever range of machines you have, and probably for older games as well. If you have more than one specification level, then you need some way to distinguish between then, and that needs to be simple as possible while carrying the nuance. This is solvable, but hard, yet necessary if you want the appliance factor.

3. Of course drivers need to improve. But if you're suggesting users should drop to the shell to fix issues there, then you lose the appliance factor.