Edit: Aaagh. After reading a bit further, I realized my comment here was utterly wrong and based on a complete misunderstanding of the situation I was commenting on. Nothing to see here, move along.

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Whatever game will shut up the most people saying "But there aren't any AAA games on SteamOS!"

On a more personal level, I'd love to see Galactic Civilizations III, but Stardock seems to be a depressingly Windows-Only kind of shop.

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I'm sure this has come up before, but I find it interesting what a huge gulf there is between the proportion of AMD users running an open source driver (more than half!) vs. the proportion of Nvidia users running an open source driver (Like 2%!)

It's always been pretty clear that on one hand, the AMD proprietary drivers suck and its open source drivers are fairly decent, and on the other hand, the Nvidia proprietary drivers are fairly decent while (largely because Nvidia are unco-operative bastards) its open source drivers suck. But I hadn't realized the contrast was quite this dramatic.

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Meh. I bet it's really slow. You'll be waiting forever for stuff to render. (rimshot)

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Quoting: Guest^If the platform had been marketed better, it would be dominating the market. Despite it's shitty state of 1.0 release.

Because I mean imagine the ad: "over 1500 games available!" people would go

That can actually still be done, wouldn't be as effective as pre-release, but it will still be effective.

Well, you and ChrisQ do have a point. To be honest, I've started to feel like Valve have almost treated the Steam Machine launch as a really extended beta--like, they didn't feel like they were really quite ready to give it the hard push it needed to go places, because it still had too many rough edges and maybe not as many games as they wanted and drivers weren't where they wanted them and stuff, but at the same time they couldn't do "Valve Time" any further, having already delayed the launch one year and pissed off their hardware collaborators--and at least they had the controller pretty much where they wanted it. So they did a soft, semi-beta launch to test the market, give them time to work out the rough edges, get feedback etc., and maybe next fall they'll do a bigger push with newer machines running a newer version of SteamOS and more available games.

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Quoting: eddie-foss

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: eddie-fossPS.: SteamOS is a mess compared with any distro, there is no consistent game/software packaging like we have in all linux distros, there is no dependencies check and there is no file duplication check.

What exactly do you mean? Steam handles the installation of games and their dependencies (the Steam Runtime) and behind the scenes SteamOS--being a Debian derivative--uses APT for package management to cater for the rest of the system.

But SteamOS is obviously not supposed to compete with all-rounders like Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch and the like. It's just a purpose-built vehicle for Steam. If that's not what you want, go ahead and run Steam on another, supported distribution like Ubuntu. Obviously you're not part of the target audience for SteamOS. Neither am I, so don't take this the wrong way.

If you do checksum for all files with same name you will see many duplicated and actually most of the games has a folder with their needed dependencies which some of them is redundant.
In my years of linux I learned that symlinks is a very eficient tool to avoid the flaw of unpatched cloned files.

Redundant . . . now. You missed the time element. Games are not open source packages. They will not get updated forever. Distro packagers will not carefully make sure the version of Victor Vran they ship works with the libraries they also ship. It is wise to include some of their own dependencies in their own folder; in five years, the game will be the same and want the same dependencies, but the OS will have moved forward and the libraries will be a few versions ahead. Depend entirely on the OS' versions and you will get breakage over time. Depend on versions the game has with it and it will keep running fine quite a bit longer. Takes up space, but disk space is ludicrous cheap, especially on most gaming machines, and the kind of libraries that go in dependencies are small.

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Currently, it seems to me that the whole "exclusives" question is rather beside the point. SteamOS is missing so many games that other platforms have . . . it's like everyone else has tons of exclusives over SteamOS. One or two in the other direction, it seems to me, would have a relatively minor impact at this point. Which doesn't mean I don't think it can sell right now, but I don't think it can sell to the sort of people who would care about exclusives unless they have so much money that they can buy every platform without noticing the cost, including however-many-dollars for a Steam machine just to get one game. Mostly, it would just piss people off.

If the various hiccups the article mentions can be fixed, and then the general situation in terms of games on SteamOS continues to improve (as it has been rapidly so far, and Vulkan may well help things keep on getting better), then at some point it might be worth starting to argue about exclusives again. Until then, I think exclusives would be basically pointless. Even then I'd likely be agin' em 'cause they're evil, but for now it's just not even worth arguing about.

For right now, improve polish, improve multimedia, push for better drivers, push Vulkan, get lots of games.

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Quoting: drjomsi am on Gentoo, so those drivers are not installed by default.

Gentoo has a "default" state?

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Quoting: Cybolic

Quoting: drmothI don't particularly like Mark Hamill as an actor, but he's seem really great as a voice actor, impressed.

Oh, he's a fantastic voice actor! Surely you know his performance as The Joker in Batman: The Animated Series (and its films) and the Arkham games.

Oh yeah. Iconic Joker. I can still remember his performance in that episode when he thought Batman was dead and he had the guy who "killed" him. Puzzlement, disbelief, increasing unease, anger shading to total flipout, and then "That was fun. Who's for Chinese?" It was a thing of beauty.

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That's impressive. Betcha it was easier to get them because it's MOO and half these people are nerds who probably used to play hours and hours of it.

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