Quoting: lucifertdarkThe last time I bought a pre-built PC it was obsolete before I'd even got it out of the store, that the PCs biggest strength & weakness, you can upgrade it but it's already obsolete the moment you decide which one you want.

Consoles are obsolete before you even buy them. But since they're not building new consoles with the components now available, this obsolescence is masked in a way it isn't with PCs.

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Quoting: cRaZy-bisCuiT

Quoting: Whitewolfe80

Quoting: cRaZy-bisCuiTSo what is the user base they so actually aim for?

They have to be aiming it at console players the fact the default view drops you into big picture mode. If you are already using Linux chances are there is no way you are dropping you're distro to go to steam os.

I would say the same, but I'm not sure how this should work out. Steam Maschines will always exist with different configurations of hardware. It's not quite the Plug'n'Play these people are used to.

But it is, isn't it? Sure, you can open 'em up and upgrade 'em, just like you can install Linux on a computer that shipped with Windows. But most people never would. Steam Machines worked fine out of the box.

The reasons Steam Machines didn't sell were more a matter of polish/features on the OS side, like with little multimedia support and so forth, and price. And marketing push being too small. Perhaps to some extent lack of games, but Steam Machines could run many more games than consoles ever can at launch, and with the help of the Steam controller, many games that consoles normally can't at all, so I don't think the games as such were that major a deal. If Valve put a solid bit of work into polish on SteamOS, making sure it matched or exceeded whatever Xbox and PS do, and made some deals with Netflix et al. and made sure the results were, again, polished and transparent, easy to use, and if they then opened up the Valve wallet and mounted a major league marketing push, and if they made some subsidy deal with a big manufacturer so the price point would be right (they'd make it back from their cut on all the extra games sold on Steam) I think they would have an excellent shot at making Steam Machines a big big thing.

The other problem was talking points about games running slow on Linux/SteamOS. Likely they won't go for it again unless and until Vulkan is solidly in use for a good number of games and drivers are in solid shape, so we have some desirable games that run as fast or faster than on competing platforms.

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Hmmm, combat seems to be pure broadside-to-broadside. No maneuvering to "cross the T", no stern chases wearing down the fleeing foe with your bow chasers (or trying to nail your pursuer's mast with a long nine at the stern), no competition to get windward of the opponent. But broadsides are fun.

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This seems like an exaggeration.

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Quoting: GuestI am a realist. Linux gaming as it is now is good for indie gaming only.

I think we need some kind of word for games that are made by fairly established companies which are not operating on a shoestring but which do not cost the truly obscene amounts of money and marketing that we associate with the AAA. Maybe AA or something. Because, really, when someone says "indie gaming" I picture a couple guys in a basement, or at most like a quickie rented office space with a bunch of hastily-installed equipment and cables hanging out all over the place. And lots of games, including lots of games on Linux, are not big enough to qualify as AAA but are made by profitable companies with solid sales and track records, moderate numbers of employees, and probably fairly stable offices with ergonomic furniture and receptionists and the whole schmeer.
So if we admit only two categories, "indie" and "AAA", then I guess it's not wrong to say Linux gaming is nearly all indie. But it's kind of misleading. If games are a pyramid in terms of size, slickness and expense, then "indie" sounds like the bottom layer, where in fact Linux has its share of all but the top few blocks.

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Quoting: svartalfSoftpedia's the CNN of tech news.

(They're calling CNN the most trusted name in Fake News these days...)

You Americans need to start getting it through your heads that all your main news sources lie to you. The Democrat-slanted ones lie for the Democrats, the Republican-slanted ones lie for the Republicans, and they all lie for the billionaires and the military contractors. So like, whenever they start telling you how incredibly dangerous (Country Leader X) is, and so you have to do something and the response has to be military and so the military needs more money again . . . yeah, it's a lie.

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Quoting: razing32Hmm , a competitive economic strategy game . Honestly don't think I've played one of those. Sure I have played games thathad long supply chains before you got to churn out soldiers but never purely economical.

That's making me think of Stellaris, which I'm playing a lot of right now. Building the mining stations and the bases and building up the planets and developing the colonization technologies and enhancing my politics and influence and keeping the people happy and somewhere in mid game we come to the brute fact: It's all so I can make a big stack of warships without the economy falling apart. Not that I really have a problem with that, but there's something absurd there.

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Quoting: LeflI was looking at the screenshots before reading and thought: "That looks a lot like Godot"
It's a great Engine, but sadly it starts to have performance pretty soon when you have many meshes in a scene.

(Insert obligatory "Waiting for Godot" joke here)

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Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: ArdjeReally? No "IP"...

They must talk about software, game IPs. And objectively speaking they are right. It's been ages since any new IP has arisen from them. Not sure how much it matters, though.

Fact is Valve just isn't primarily a game company any more, and hasn't been for some time. Google hasn't come out with a lot of games lately that I know of, either, but nobody seems to consider that a failing.

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To me whether typical Linux users start using SteamOS is mostly beside the point. Well, the points--there are two main reasons for SteamOS as far as I can see, and they're both quite solid.
--First, SteamOS is a vehicle for things like Steam Machines. This is stalled at the moment and I hope at some point it gets started up again, except better. We've all gone over the challenges and shortcomings that would need to be met and defeated for a successful relaunch. Keeping SteamOS current is one component of keeping that dream alive.
--Second, and more importantly for the moment, SteamOS is a sort of reference gaming implementation. Everyone can basically agree that Valve are the go-to people on gaming, so if you want your distro to run games properly, do the relevant stuff the way SteamOS does it. This drastically reduces the "fragmentation" problem of Linux for gaming purposes, both in reality and in perception: Developers feel they can develop for SteamOS, and distromakers know what the developers are targeting and so they can make sure games that run on SteamOS will run on their distro, if it's the kind of distro that cares about games. Probably distros intended for embedded won't worry about that, but it doesn't matter. And I don't think this is a huge constraint on distributions, because the desktop-oriented ones are more interested in things that happen "higher up", closer to look-and-feel, so keeping compatibility on some background down-in-the-graphics stuff shouldn't be a big issue.
Given that, I 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.

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