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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The comments on this article are closed.
Quoting: elmapul" 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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Quoting: Purple Library GuySo, 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.
Quoting: Purple Library GuySecond, 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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Quoting: Whitewolfe80Although 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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Quoting: ArdjeThey 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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Quoting: elmapulhttps://www.polygon.com/features/2017/4/12/15257842/jeri-ellsworth-profile-castar-valveQuoting: ArdjeThey 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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Quoting: ArdjeQuoting: elmapulwhat??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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Quoting: Ardjei 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 July 2017 at 8:18 am UTC
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Quoting: elmapulit 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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Quoting: elmapulit 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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