Another day, another journalist claiming that Valve is killing SteamOS (amongst other things mentioned) and it couldn't be further from the truth. I'm going to be pretty blunt in this one, because it needs to be.
I give you this sensationalist piece from Softpedia titled "Valve Is Killing Its Projects by Abandoning Them, Including SteamOS".
While it's true SteamOS hasn't turned into the almighty force some hoped, here at GOL, I always said it would never be a big success overnight and it would take a long time. That hasn't changed and SteamOS is still very much alive. In June of this year, Valve did a major update to SteamOS that dropped AMDGPU-PRO in favour of Mesa, it had a big Kernel version bump and more. Only a few days later another SteamOS beta was released with more updates. The development is ongoing and you can hardly call something that was updated majorly only a month ago, as something that's being abandoned.
They quite literally have no idea what they're talking about. I don't think Valve has ever said anywhere they were pouring money into OpenGL and Vulkan development. Valve did actually help to kickstart Vulkan, Valve has also hired developers to work on Linux graphics drivers. The public Mesa mailing list is extremely active, with patches from all sides flowing in every day, with the Valve developers doing quite a bit of work. Anyone following it knows this, they would too if they looked. They should know too, since they report on Mesa. Only recently one of the Valve developers finished up the OpenGL multithreading code in Mesa, which can give big performance gains in certain games.
The bit about developers not being heard of any more is also strange. It takes a long time for a brand new API to gain traction, but it is gaining with Vulkan games being released. Croteam have thrown their weight behind it, so has Feral Interactive. Not a massive amount sure, but again, it takes time. Games already in development won't throw out their entire renderer for Vulkan, but new games have a good chance of using it.
No one really knows if Half-Life will continue or not. Apart from that, the other examples are all still sold and worked on. SteamOS, as mentioned, is regularly updated. The Steam Controller is constantly updated with new awesome features, there's even been hints of a second revision. The Steam Link is still selling well with plenty of people rather happy with it. It's not quite likely any of them will follow the path of Half-Life, there's nothing whatsoever hinting at it, they're pulling speculation out of their backsides here with no sources to show for anything they're saying. It's bottom of the barrel reporting.
No, it hasn't. Vulkan 1.0.55 was released only yesterday and last I checked there's more Vulkan games than there is DirectX 12 games on PC. What part of that has slowed down considerably? It hasn't, not at all. I'm also unsure as to what they mean by "integrated VM solutions", I'm going to assume they're really trying to sound smart, but missing the mark. They likely mean wrappers, but so many things come under that banner and wrappers aren't necessarily a bad thing.
I'll be honest here, I really don't like Softpedia and I think their reporting is quite often terrible. They reported on the iCloud hack that happened some time ago, by using one of the stolen images of a celebrity in their article—just awful.
I often end up feeling like we're one of the few sites that won't scaremonger for traffic, because it's stupid. It's an article where clearly research just hasn't been done, but hey it makes a good headline to click right?
I won't blindly stick up for Valve or any company, as every company serves their own agenda. However, Valve are very clearly and often quite publicly still supporting Linux, SteamOS, Steam Controller and so on. I will gladly report on it when there's signs they are dumping something, but there's no such signs yet. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
I give you this sensationalist piece from Softpedia titled "Valve Is Killing Its Projects by Abandoning Them, Including SteamOS".
While it's true SteamOS hasn't turned into the almighty force some hoped, here at GOL, I always said it would never be a big success overnight and it would take a long time. That hasn't changed and SteamOS is still very much alive. In June of this year, Valve did a major update to SteamOS that dropped AMDGPU-PRO in favour of Mesa, it had a big Kernel version bump and more. Only a few days later another SteamOS beta was released with more updates. The development is ongoing and you can hardly call something that was updated majorly only a month ago, as something that's being abandoned.
QuoteValve also promised to put a lot of money in the development of OpenGL and Vulkan, so that Linux could feature the same type of performance with games running on Direct3D, on Windows. That is also a really quiet front, and after some initial success, developers are not heard anymore.
They quite literally have no idea what they're talking about. I don't think Valve has ever said anywhere they were pouring money into OpenGL and Vulkan development. Valve did actually help to kickstart Vulkan, Valve has also hired developers to work on Linux graphics drivers. The public Mesa mailing list is extremely active, with patches from all sides flowing in every day, with the Valve developers doing quite a bit of work. Anyone following it knows this, they would too if they looked. They should know too, since they report on Mesa. Only recently one of the Valve developers finished up the OpenGL multithreading code in Mesa, which can give big performance gains in certain games.
The bit about developers not being heard of any more is also strange. It takes a long time for a brand new API to gain traction, but it is gaining with Vulkan games being released. Croteam have thrown their weight behind it, so has Feral Interactive. Not a massive amount sure, but again, it takes time. Games already in development won't throw out their entire renderer for Vulkan, but new games have a good chance of using it.
QuoteValve is becoming famous for two things. One is the easiness of which they make money from their Steam Platform, and the other is their started and failed projects. The most famous of them is the Half-Life series, which ended abruptly and it feels abandoned. It’s quite likely that SteamOS, Steam Controller, and Steam Link are following the same path.
No one really knows if Half-Life will continue or not. Apart from that, the other examples are all still sold and worked on. SteamOS, as mentioned, is regularly updated. The Steam Controller is constantly updated with new awesome features, there's even been hints of a second revision. The Steam Link is still selling well with plenty of people rather happy with it. It's not quite likely any of them will follow the path of Half-Life, there's nothing whatsoever hinting at it, they're pulling speculation out of their backsides here with no sources to show for anything they're saying. It's bottom of the barrel reporting.
QuoteThe development of Vulkan, an open source alternative to Direct3D, has slowed down considerably. Games are still being developed for Windows systems and ported to Linux with the help of integrated VM solutions, which greatly decrease performance.
No, it hasn't. Vulkan 1.0.55 was released only yesterday and last I checked there's more Vulkan games than there is DirectX 12 games on PC. What part of that has slowed down considerably? It hasn't, not at all. I'm also unsure as to what they mean by "integrated VM solutions", I'm going to assume they're really trying to sound smart, but missing the mark. They likely mean wrappers, but so many things come under that banner and wrappers aren't necessarily a bad thing.
I'll be honest here, I really don't like Softpedia and I think their reporting is quite often terrible. They reported on the iCloud hack that happened some time ago, by using one of the stolen images of a celebrity in their article—just awful.
I often end up feeling like we're one of the few sites that won't scaremonger for traffic, because it's stupid. It's an article where clearly research just hasn't been done, but hey it makes a good headline to click right?
I won't blindly stick up for Valve or any company, as every company serves their own agenda. However, Valve are very clearly and often quite publicly still supporting Linux, SteamOS, Steam Controller and so on. I will gladly report on it when there's signs they are dumping something, but there's no such signs yet. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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" don't think it matters that much if a ton of people actually run SteamOS as their distro. It's the way it influences distro design, and reassures developers, that is important."So, first, even if you say SteamOS "will not" have influence and game developers "will not" target it if no one uses it, this isn't a hypothetical. SteamOS exists now and isn't being used much directly now. So does it have influence, do game developers target it? I think fairly clearly it does and they do.
it will not influence the design if no one use it, even game developers will not target it, and steam runtime is proprietary.
are you really saying that the solution for the linux fragmentation is: ship proprietary code?
Second, the Steam runtime? Don't believe I even mentioned it. Forget apples and oranges, and forget comparing--I'm talking about an apple and you're trying to refute me by pretending it's a hammer.
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So, first, even if you say SteamOS "will not" have influence and game developers "will not" target it if no one uses it, this isn't a hypothetical. SteamOS exists now and isn't being used much directly now. So does it have influence, do game developers target it? I think fairly clearly it does and they do.they target steam runtime, just look at a lot of games that support linux on steam, look at the minimum requirements, it says: Ubuntu version x, not SteamOS version y.
Second, the Steam runtime? Don't believe I even mentioned it. Forget apples and oranges, and forget comparing--I'm talking about an apple and you're trying to refute me by pretending it's a hammer.
but that is what they're targeting.
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Although not universally true as crytek and Unreal 4 have linux versions and we have not seen that many games using either engine on linux and there are tons of unreal 4 games.good point, but if the engines dont support, even the games that do support wouldnt.
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They threw out the man years of augmented reality research, and sold it to the head researcher for $100, who could then continue it in her own company.what??
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https://www.polygon.com/features/2017/4/12/15257842/jeri-ellsworth-profile-castar-valveThey threw out the man years of augmented reality research, and sold it to the head researcher for $100, who could then continue it in her own company.what??
Jeri Ellsworth is a real hacker. As such she was hired and had a team to research augmented reality and such, making it man-years of research. When Valve concluded that augmented reality would not aid their business, they fired Jeri, and sold her the rights to her teams research for $100 (they couldn't actually legally give it away, so a symbolic $100 was asked).
Jeri is still pursuing her idea of augmented in CastAR, which shows promisse, but also that it barely touches Valves immediate core business.
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what??https://www.polygon.com/features/2017/4/12/15257842/jeri-ellsworth-profile-castar-valve
Jeri Ellsworth is a real hacker. As such she was hired and had a team to research augmented reality and such, making it man-years of research. When Valve concluded that augmented reality would not aid their business, they fired Jeri, and sold her the rights to her teams research for $100 (they couldn't actually legally give it away, so a symbolic $100 was asked).
Jeri is still pursuing her idea of augmented in CastAR, which shows promisse, but also that it barely touches Valves immediate core business.
im not talking about valve investing in AR, i didnt even knew they did that.
i'm talking about microsoft's holo lens, or google glass.
we dont have an alternative for that on linux.
when linux were born, it was too late to try to take the desktop market, we managed to enter in all other markets except the desktop due to the vendor lock-in that microsoft created.
i dont want the linux to lose this market, we are moving to an world were, voice controled Ai (like cortana, ok google, siri) are a trend, the era of machine learning, VR and Ar, i dont want linux to be late for the party again, that is what i'm afraid of.
linux has the bad fame of being an CLI OS (despite the fact that this is not the true anymore) wich is bad seen for people used to the GUI.
still, even that not being true, i see a lot of blog posts trying to teach CLI for the new users as if that would be exciting for then, when we are entering the era of the AR and voice-ai Era, those technologies, if implemented well in the workflow can save time (and time is money).
yes, cli is usefull, and can save time too, but as and end user that was seeing linux for the first time, what made me love it, was compiz, not the CLI.
if we dont have such techs we will be seen as dinosaurs by the new generation of potential users, and as we dont live forever, the marketshare may decrease even more than now.
on android, we have google now, but what about the desktop?
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i used the quote just to notify you that some one replied to you this time.
just take a look at this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N80hzTpglQ
it shows how canonical or other linux vendor can enter in the market of operating systems, and why we cant ignore the AR and voice market
Last edited by elmapul on 26 Jul 2017 at 8:18 am UTC
just take a look at this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N80hzTpglQ
it shows how canonical or other linux vendor can enter in the market of operating systems, and why we cant ignore the AR and voice market
Last edited by elmapul on 26 Jul 2017 at 8:18 am UTC
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it shows how canonical or other linux vendor can enter in the market of operating systems, and why we cant ignore the AR and voice marketI sure can ignore any tech I'm not interested in. It's a handy skill, leaves time for fun and games.
Jokes aside, I do see why especially advertisers are all over AR, and sure there's actual potential for useful applications as well, but why do you think voice "AI" will succeed this time? The tech is still at the questionably useful gimmick level, and its greatest advancement since the first primitive voice control craze in the nineties is how efficiently it ignores the user's privacy and collects data for our corporate overlords.
What drives both of these technologies so hard right now isn't consumer demand, and the only ones I see foaming about them are companies who see the marketing potential and hapless consumers who think these are examples of super cool sci-fi tech we absolutely need for ...reasons.
BTW, I stopped watching your video link when I saw the title. How dare he claim my precious Sailfish OS doesn't exist. :(
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it shows how canonical or other linux vendor can enter in the market of operating systems, and why we cant ignore the AR and voice marketAt least afaik we have the blind/braille market, as for braille comes natural to linux 8-D.
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"I sure can ignore any tech I'm not interested in. It's a handy skill, leaves time for fun and games. "
i dont even know what this means.
in any case, if your boss require you to know something, you better know it.
and its not about you, its about another missed oportunity to make the linux desktop rise.
"The tech is still at the questionably useful gimmick level, and its greatest advancement since the first primitive voice control craze in the nineties is how efficiently it ignores the user's privacy and collects data for our corporate overlords."
Like it or not, the best way to know what commands the users want is by analysing what they were trying to say.
that is why we cant have nice things.
we have to respect the user privacy, we have to keep the code open source allow the user to redistribute it, we cant...
everything that is profitable, we cant do.
except sell suport for companys, because end users dont pay for such a things.
i dont even know what this means.
in any case, if your boss require you to know something, you better know it.
and its not about you, its about another missed oportunity to make the linux desktop rise.
"The tech is still at the questionably useful gimmick level, and its greatest advancement since the first primitive voice control craze in the nineties is how efficiently it ignores the user's privacy and collects data for our corporate overlords."
Like it or not, the best way to know what commands the users want is by analysing what they were trying to say.
that is why we cant have nice things.
we have to respect the user privacy, we have to keep the code open source allow the user to redistribute it, we cant...
everything that is profitable, we cant do.
except sell suport for companys, because end users dont pay for such a things.
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"I sure can ignore any tech I'm not interested in. It's a handy skill, leaves time for fun and games. "
i dont even know what this means.
in any case, if your boss require you to know something, you better know it.
and its not about you, its about another missed opportunity to make the linux desktop rise.
"The tech is still at the questionably useful gimmick level, and its greatest advancement since the first primitive voice control craze in the nineties is how efficiently it ignores the user's privacy and collects data for our corporate overlords."
Like it or not, the best way to know what commands the users want is by analysing what they were trying to say.
that is why we cant have nice things.
we have to respect the user privacy, we have to keep the code open source allow the user to redistribute it, we cant...
everything that is profitable, we cant do.
except sell support for companies, because end users don't pay for such a things.
What his phrase was saying is that because he is not interested in AR he doesn't care. Although he cared enough to post he didn't care about it.
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"I sure can ignore any tech I'm not interested in. It's a handy skill, leaves time for fun and games. "It's a half-joking answer to your claim that we can't ignore AR and voice controlled (faux) AI. What exactly should Linux or the distributions do to support them anyway? You can't run either without huge resources and some serious infrastructure in place. You won't see an indie Siri-clone any time soon.
i dont even know what this means.
we have to respect the user privacy, we have to keep the code open source allow the user to redistribute it, we cant...You can do a lot of stuff that's profitable, but not at the cost of the users' privacy. And that's awesome. My interest isn't in making Linux the most profitable platform. I just want it to be the best computing platform for end-users. Financial success at the cost of ethical integrity (or our privacy) just isn't worth supporting. Also, what is this elusive "we" you keep bringing up?
everything that is profitable, we cant do.
What his phrase was saying is that because he is not interested in AR he doesn't care. Although he cared enough to post he didn't care about it.No, that wasn't my point. My point was that these technologies aren't being pushed by Google and Apple because they're useful for us as consumers at this point. A more efficient medium for targeted ads would hardly make my computing experience better in any meaningful way. You should read past the first sentence, especially if the first sentence is a joke.
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" What exactly should Linux or the distributions do to support them anyway?"
i dont know, maybe stop reinventing the whell trying to argue what DE or graphic display is the best and join efforts a little (it took years to canonical to stop they NIH syndrom and drop years of effort on mir and unity)
" You can't run either without huge resources and some serious infrastructure in place. You won't see an indie Siri-clone any time soon."
actualy, we have, mycroft.
but if we want to compete, we have to target android (and maybe windows).
just look at the firefoxOS, they failed, but at least they had an strong brand to at least try, if you ask the average joe, what Firefox is, they will know its a browser, if you ask what ubuntu is, you will have luck if they think its a food.
maybe we should stop doing over 2000 distros and focus on a market that we can actualy grow and make money, then try to strike again at the OS market.
" Financial success at the cost of ethical integrity (or our privacy) just isn't worth supporting. Also, what is this elusive "we" you keep bringing up?"
i dont think we should completely give up on privacy, take a look at the firefox aproach, he have the option to turn on/off telemetry.
if you turn it off, you can have your privacy, if you turn it on, you can help improving the browser, not only for yourself but for those who have it turned off.
ubuntu tried something similiar with amazon, but it was set to on by default, and the people didnt shut up until the option was completely removed.
"No, that wasn't my point. My point was that these technologies aren't being pushed by Google and Apple because they're useful for us as consumers at this point. "
of course they arent at this point, the tecnhnology has to evolve from something, we wouldnt have cars before someone invent the whell.
in the future Ai may be as ubiquitous as keyboards and toucscreens are nowadays, and hololens is that kind of thing that make you realize you're living in the future.
if you dont want you privacy to be lost due to this kind of tech, that is why you should move now and help to fund alternatives.
i dont know, maybe stop reinventing the whell trying to argue what DE or graphic display is the best and join efforts a little (it took years to canonical to stop they NIH syndrom and drop years of effort on mir and unity)
" You can't run either without huge resources and some serious infrastructure in place. You won't see an indie Siri-clone any time soon."
actualy, we have, mycroft.
but if we want to compete, we have to target android (and maybe windows).
just look at the firefoxOS, they failed, but at least they had an strong brand to at least try, if you ask the average joe, what Firefox is, they will know its a browser, if you ask what ubuntu is, you will have luck if they think its a food.
maybe we should stop doing over 2000 distros and focus on a market that we can actualy grow and make money, then try to strike again at the OS market.
" Financial success at the cost of ethical integrity (or our privacy) just isn't worth supporting. Also, what is this elusive "we" you keep bringing up?"
i dont think we should completely give up on privacy, take a look at the firefox aproach, he have the option to turn on/off telemetry.
if you turn it off, you can have your privacy, if you turn it on, you can help improving the browser, not only for yourself but for those who have it turned off.
ubuntu tried something similiar with amazon, but it was set to on by default, and the people didnt shut up until the option was completely removed.
"No, that wasn't my point. My point was that these technologies aren't being pushed by Google and Apple because they're useful for us as consumers at this point. "
of course they arent at this point, the tecnhnology has to evolve from something, we wouldnt have cars before someone invent the whell.
in the future Ai may be as ubiquitous as keyboards and toucscreens are nowadays, and hololens is that kind of thing that make you realize you're living in the future.
if you dont want you privacy to be lost due to this kind of tech, that is why you should move now and help to fund alternatives.
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" You can't run either without huge resources and some serious infrastructure in place. You won't see an indie Siri-clone any time soon."Mycroft seems cool. Compared to the proprietary alternatives at least. I have no interest in trying it out, but a collaborative effort like this is clearly the way to go.
actualy, we have, mycroft.
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maybe we should stop doing over 2000 distros and focus on a market that we can actualy grow and make money, then try to strike again at the OS market.
I hate to butt-in to the middle of a conversation like this , but , I believe this point was brought up before by Brian Lunduke of "Linux Sucks" (/sarcasm)
He pointed this out as a good and bad thing.
Yes it is bad we are splitting resources.
But it is also good people have the freedom to fork stuff. Mate and Cinammon are Gnome forks as far as I know.
In my humble opinion unifying will not work , but I could be wrong.
What would be more feasible would be something like a version of POSIX distros adhere to so you know the DE treats a program the same etc.
Just my two cents.
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Yeah, I don't think unifying would work, but I do think we have far too much diversity and it hurts. But it's all about the ego - if you contribute to a project and your contributions are rejected... you fork. It's that simple.
What's interesting to me is that Gnome is particularly bad here. It's a nice interface, but they keep making unpopular decisions, which cause forks. How many forks of KDE are there? How many of XFCE? But already we have Unity, Mate and Cinammon as examples of where people flicked the Gnome devs the middle finger.
What's interesting to me is that Gnome is particularly bad here. It's a nice interface, but they keep making unpopular decisions, which cause forks. How many forks of KDE are there? How many of XFCE? But already we have Unity, Mate and Cinammon as examples of where people flicked the Gnome devs the middle finger.
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In my humble opinion unifying will not work , but I could be wrong.Of course unifying would work!
Single desktop environment. Everybody enlightenment and sloppy mouse focus.
No you are not allowed to update your software, you will wait until the maintainer allows you to.
But yeah... unifying would only work if everybody would finally accept that I have the one true desktop.
Actually the only reason I condone chromeos on my chromebook is because chrome works, and chrome needs an entire machine for itself. Chrome on a chromebook can crash the system, but it will restore all tabs. Chrome on a desktop is capable of bringing the machine down.
I really hate how chromeos does not correctly do sloppy mouse focus. It's so wrong having to raise a window to type something in it.
It doesn't have workspaces... Even OS-X got workspaces after 12 years... Windows got (non-functional(!)) workspaces since 1998 or so...
So my primary environment is enlightenment with sloppy mouse focus.
I install fvwm2 with a good config for noobs that don't know how to use computers, because noobs should not be bothered with a start-menu.
So I myself am already anti-unifying it.
What I do hate about linux is the complete lack of using existing infrastructure...
Corba was invented and used as X11-ICE. X11-ICE worked like a charm. So what happens if you do that, well if you have multiple seats and a single user, netscape was able to treat each seat as a seat. Mozilla however kept opening new windows on the first seat. I think it took more than 8 years before people in gtk land realized that there are seats.
Anyway I should stop rambling about that.
It might be handy to have an easier way to de-unify your specific distro.
Although ubuntu does it in a handy way with PPA. You can install a core ubuntu, and then add your own repos using core ubuntu infra (ppa's). That's not really easy with debian.
You know what, I should just drink 2 more cups of coffee.
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