After the initial announcement by Valve of a new console machine with its own controller and based on its own rebranded Linux, many were very excited. However, after moving in "Steam Time" for awhile, that excitement died down. That all changed this week at GDC as Valve made official announcements of many "triple a" games coming to SteamOS, with a large sale on Steam for them to boot.
There were also many vendors takes on Steam Machines announced (although many seem overpriced), as well as a new VR headset system, the official announcement of the controller, and a small fifty dollar device called the "Link" to let you stream your games (or even applications) to a tv from a computer. With all these announcements, excitement seems to be building again for the chances of SteamOS and the future of Linux gaming (which has always been a sticking point for consumer desktop adoption).
Can this finally be the dawn of a new age in the Linux world thanks to Valve?
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Several sites, including OS Technix, are reporting that Arch will be collaborating with Valve. A heavily modified in-house Arch distro is used by Valve for SteamOS.
In an exciting development for the Linux community, Arch Linux has announced a new partnership with Valve, the company behind the Steam gaming platform and Steam Deck. This collaboration will see Valve financially support two major projects for Arch Linux: an improved build service infrastructure and a secure signing enclave.
[...] By providing freelance backing, Valve's support allows Arch Linux to work on these critical projects without being hindered by limitations in volunteer time. This will significantly accelerate progress and enable the Arch Linux team to tackle ambitious endeavours that would have otherwise taken much longer.
The collaboration will lead to the development of a robust build service infrastructure. This infrastructure will involve servers for building software, potentially similar to continuous integration systems. The system will likely manage compiling and distributing software, simplifying the process and reducing the need for custom setups for different devices.
The introduction of a secure signing enclave marks a significant advancement in security for Arch Linux. This enclave will leverage code signing to provide a higher level of assurance that packages downloaded from the official repositories haven't been tampered with. Users will be able to cryptographically verify the origin and integrity of software packages, making it much harder for malicious actors to distribute compromised software.
There is speculation that Valve might publicly release SteamOS in the future or that native support for games on GNU/Linux will improve greatly.
Previously:
(2021) Valve's Upcoming Steam Deck Will be Based on Arch Linux--Not Debian
(2015) Steam Now Has 1500 Linux-Compatible Game Titles
(2015) Valve's SteamOS Dreams Beginning to Look Like Reality
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday March 07 2015, @01:45PM
Looking forward to being able to play more games on linux, not especially thrilled by having to use Steam.
Oh, and VR headsets can suck it. They were, are, and always will be nothing but a niche fad.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2015, @02:07PM
tip top lel
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Saturday March 07 2015, @04:21PM
HATE STEAMOS! Systemd!
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by wantkitteh on Sunday March 08 2015, @12:52AM
Steam is certainly the least objectionable of the online video game marketplace ecosystems, but that's not saying much given the competition are all pathetic publisher locked-in offerings with zero linux support. Cross-platform games don't require you to repurchase them for each platform they support, they have at least got that spot-on. The Steam controller is also very intriguing, can't wait for November - unless the vapour cloud gets misted further away of course, this is Valve we're talking about here.
VR gaming is like 3D movies at the cinema - they're both display formats in their infancy and no-one knows how to handle them correctly to get the most out of them without exposing their technical limitations. I read an article recently (can't find it again, sry) about someone who'd spent some time playing Dying Light (zombie-killing FPS with free-running elements) through a VR headset; seems the most vomit-inducing thing you can do in-game is side-stepping. Given how heavily first-person viewpoint games rely on that most simple of evasive movements, it rules out pretty much every FPS ever made from being a comfortable VR experience.
(Score: 2) by CoolHand on Monday March 09 2015, @11:30AM
The HumbleBundle Store [humblebundle.com] has a lot of the games. You can buy them there and download them without steam (but also get steam keys). Sometimes they have better sales there than on steam also..
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2015, @01:51PM
This is surely the Year of Linux on the Desktop.
It didn't happen in 1994, like we thought it would. But it just has to happen this time, in 2015.
It didn't happen in 1995, like we thought it would. But it just has to happen this time, in 2015.
It didn't happen in 1996, like we thought it would. But it just has to happen this time, in 2015.
It didn't happen in 1997, like we thought it would. But it just has to happen this time, in 2015.
It didn't happen in 1998, like we thought it would. But it just has to happen this time, in 2015.
It didn't happen in 1999, like we thought it would. But it just has to happen this time, in 2015.
It didn't happen in 2000, like we thought it would. But it just has to happen this time, in 2015.
It didn't happen in 2001, like we thought it would. But it just has to happen this time, in 2015.
It didn't happen in 2002, like we thought it would. But it just has to happen this time, in 2015.
It didn't happen in 2003, like we thought it would. But it just has to happen this time, in 2015.
It didn't happen in 2004, like we thought it would. But it just has to happen this time, in 2015.
It didn't happen in 2005, like we thought it would. But it just has to happen this time, in 2015.
It didn't happen in 2006, like we thought it would. But it just has to happen this time, in 2015.
It didn't happen in 2007, like we thought it would. But it just has to happen this time, in 2015.
It didn't happen in 2008, like we thought it would. But it just has to happen this time, in 2015.
It didn't happen in 2009, like we thought it would. But it just has to happen this time, in 2015.
It didn't happen in 2010, like we thought it would. But it just has to happen this time, in 2015.
It didn't happen in 2011, like we thought it would. But it just has to happen this time, in 2015.
It didn't happen in 2012, like we thought it would. But it just has to happen this time, in 2015.
It didn't happen in 2013, like we thought it would. But it just has to happen this time, in 2015.
It didn't happen in 2014, like we thought it would. But it just has to happen this time, in 2015.
It's 2015. It will surely happen this year! 2015 will be the Year of Linux on the Desktop. It just has to be!
(Score: 2) by pkrasimirov on Saturday March 07 2015, @02:12PM
It's coming November, dude. Don't get overly excited about 2015.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2015, @02:29PM
To quote a great man,
What am I feeling in the air tonight? It's Linux. And where is it? It's on my desktop. And what's the year? 2015.
2015. It is THE YEAR OF LINUX ON THE DESKTOP.
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Saturday March 07 2015, @04:22PM
2015. The year of systemd on GNU Hurd!
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Arik on Saturday March 07 2015, @04:41PM
FFS people set their sites way too low.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by wantkitteh on Saturday March 07 2015, @05:04PM
Offtopic - SteamOS is not a desktop OS.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mtrycz on Saturday March 07 2015, @02:19PM
The game industry lately has been filled with new spyware platforms, with big game distributors letting you download AAA titles for "free", if you install their platform (that reports on what use browse, buy, install, etc.).
Obvioulst the Steam Shop mines your preferences for suggestions and such (which, for once, actually makes sense), but I'm actually oblivious on what else it does on your system.
Haven't heard much on it, but don't know if it's because Steam's actually "ethical" about it, or it's just so burried.
Is anyone more knoledgebale than me? Thanks in advance.
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
(Score: 1) by GoonDu on Saturday March 07 2015, @02:57PM
I think it only snoops your preferences and hardware specs. Hell quite a number of the games on steam can actually be played without launching steam and I don't think Valve puts in a lot of effort to make Steam so entrenched into your system. That said, if you don't trust Steam you can always get games from other online distributor, I heard GoG is pretty friendly when it comes to DRM. (Not to sure about their GoG Galaxy). Origin, on the other hand, is pretty safe so far. The scare back then turns out to be a rumour but other than that, it probably works like Steam but knowing EA, who knows what kind of shenanigans they are thinking. And uPlay? Fuck uPlay.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Saturday March 07 2015, @05:08PM
SteamOS itself wouldn't really have a lot of opportunity to snoop on you - it's built for playing games, that's about it. Even the web browser is an afterthought, so unless it's packet-sniffing your network, a Steambox is the privacy-focused gamer's dream.
(Score: 3, Informative) by gman003 on Saturday March 07 2015, @05:44PM
As far as I know, the only "spying" it does is:
Games played through Steam (AFAIK simply "when were you playing it")
Game chat (for abuse reports)
Steam chat (for abuse reports)
Obvious game data (achievements, community pages, and such)
Supported games send saves to Steam servers, to let you continue the game seamlessly on another computer
Valve games often send more detailed data about gameplay (they had some nice heatmaps of player death locations on TF2 maps), supposedly and probably anonymized
Steam Hardware Survey (prompted to opt-out when it happens, supposedly and probably anonymized)
For those last two, by "supposedly and probably anonymized", I mean "they claim the data is anonymized, and I don't see a benefit to them by not doing so".
If you are particularly paranoid, Offline Mode will prevent almost all data from being sent, at the cost of disabling most internet capabilities, and preventing you from launching games you have not launched in online mode (since Offline Mode disables the checks with Steam servers for "do you actually own this game?"). Some of it is cached to send in the next time you go online, though - the achievements and so on, mainly.
It is possible that Steam is secretly doing some more intense spying, but enough people like you are paranoid about it that I would expect it to have been uncovered by now. I can't guarantee that it doesn't do so, but I have seen zero evidence that it does.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Marand on Sunday March 08 2015, @03:47AM
(Sorry for the delay; I tried to post this this morning but maintenance came up while I was writing it, so I had to wait until tonight.)
Valve seems to understand that Steam benefits from having as many people as possible using it, and has (so far) avoided spyware/malware behaviour that would discourage users from using it. It might change in the future, as leadership in the company changes, but so far it's been pretty good about it.
As best I know, Steam itself just tracks purchases and play time, and makes sales by impulse buys (via steam sales) and social pressure (friends list always shows you what someone is playing as they play it). It tracks achievements and shows them on a profile page, also visible to friends, as another social pressure/competitive thing. There is a wishlist feature for games you want, which is also visible to friends, and also a "follow" option that pushes notifications of news about the game to you. Chat goes through their servers and is susceptible to snooping by them, but that's on different than most online games or other IM platforms, so it shouldn't be a surprise.
They recently added a queue feature that picks a handful of games and, if you choose to view the queue, it shows you the pages for those games and on each, you can wishlist, follow, block, or make no change. It's part advertising -- show you games you may not have known about to get impulse buys and wishlist entries -- and part filter building. When you hit the "not intersted" button it filters out that game so you don't see it in sales, featured game info, etc. in the future.
Devs are encouraged to use it because of the SteamWorks platform, which provides things like multiplayer and matchmaking features, along with some anti-cheat stuff, so it may do some sort of process checking for finding known cheats, similar to Blizzard's Warden software (used in World of Warcraft, Diablo 3, etc.). I've never seen any uproar over it like I've seen over Warden, though, so if it does, it's probably less invasive than Blizzard's software.
In Windows, most of the games seem to require Steam to be running to launch them, even if they make little or no use of Steam features. In Linux, however, this doesn't seem to be the case, at least not yet. Nearly every Steam game i have that's Linux-ported uses it as distribution and nothing else, so you can launch the games directly once you've downloaded and installed them. Running them directly prevents Steam from tracking achievements and play time, in most cases even when Steam itself is running at the same time.
It occasionally does hardware surveys, but it's an opt-in process and it asks you each time, so you can refuse if you're concerned, and it tells you what it's sending before you let it go.
The only other thing I can think of is it added a music player feature that lets you select directories to scan for music to play with the built-in player while playing games.
As far as distribution platforms go, Steam is pretty inoffensive. Steamworks is optional, the tracking seems minimal, you can make your profile friends-only, the queue is optional, etc. You don't have to do hardware surveys, you don't have to add friends, and you don't even have to sign in to Steam's friends list at all. You can take it offline completely and nothing is tracked while you do, but you occasionally need to connect; I've gone months between Steam logins and played single player games without issue, for example.
Using steam for DRM is the developer's choice, so if it's the DRM aspect that bothers you, just stick to the games that only use Steam for distribution and launch them outside of Steam.
This isn't an in-depth analysis or anything, just what I can think of offhand. It's possible it does something else, but I've never seen anybody complain about it, and usually someone raises a stink over that sort of thing. No examples of it doing sneaky things like encoding information into screenshots (Blizzard), doing memory inspection (Blizzard), etc. I think the most offensive things about Steam are 1) the UI looks equally alien on any system because Valve rolls its own UI crap, 2) CPU use can get high during game download/install, and 3) memory use seems high for what it does, probably because of #1.
(Score: 2) by Lunix Nutcase on Saturday March 07 2015, @03:38PM
All Steam users combined are only a few percent of all total PC users. Even if they all switched, which they won't, the user base of Linux will barely move percentage-wise. So, it's great for Linux users that you might finally get some of the AAA games, it isn't the "Year of the Linux Desktop". While PC gaming is an important niche for Windows, it is still an extremely small minority group of all Windows users and most gamers aren't going to switch anyway.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Saturday March 07 2015, @03:54PM
As with platforms, it's going to take a few big exclusives to get many people to try it. I think that after they try it and see how great an OS it is, many may stay as well.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Saturday March 07 2015, @05:29PM
You miss the point - SteamOS is nowhere near competing with Windows and is never going to be a switching proposition on the desktop. SteamOS is designed to allow folks to build their own games console without paying for Windows, buying a completely new library of software, or figuring out how to perform all the little Linux config tweaks Valve already did for them streamline the Linux gaming experience. Valve also don't care it's only a percentage point or two in the OS market, it's still a point or two they're taking away from Xbox/PS by invading their home turf - the big screen TV in front of the sofa - and that's really just the build-your-own numbers as commodity Steambox hardware is yet to have any real marketing push so far.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday March 08 2015, @12:03PM
might finally get some of the AAA games
AAA game is just a marketing euphemism for boring as hell, yet expensive, WWII FPS sequel, or a lightly skinned variant.
I think its interesting because steam has all kinds of games at least some of which could appeal to all gamers.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by danmars on Saturday March 07 2015, @07:47PM
As far as I can tell, everybody's missed the thought path of the summary here. (This feels like college, where it always seemed like I answered a different question from everyone else.)
Facts:
1. The lack of good games on Linux has always been a claimed reason why nobody would switch to it from Windows.
2. SteamOS is based on Linux.
3. Game makers are building Linux versions of their "AAA" games to run on SteamOS, and thus on Linux.
Question:
If SteamOS is successful, it may mean a lot more games that can run on Linux, and thus Linux will potentially be past this gaming hurdle which has allegedly kept people from switching to it (from Windows). Does that mean Linux will finally become an OS used on normal people's home computers?
My answer:
I certainly hope so, but not in 2015. Maybe 2017 or 2018, though. Many of the missing pieces seem to finally be in place. If Linux gets the Adobe Creative Suite (or Adobe comes out with true cloud applications), let's talk about it then.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Sunday March 08 2015, @02:08PM
SteamOS is not a desktop OS - it's for geeks and OEMs to build their own games consoles with.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08 2015, @07:00PM
You missed it. A = B, !B -> !C, A, therefore C
SteamOS is still Linux. People see the lack of games running on Linux as a major hurdle to actually adopting Linux. If games can run on SteamOS, they can also run on other Linux operations and that major hurdle is gone.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Sunday March 08 2015, @02:24AM
For fun, spec'd myself up a cheap Steam box. £250 will get me:
- Mini-ITX case and 300W PSU
- Mini-ITX motherboard, Pentium G3220, 4GB 1333MHz RAM
- 1GB Nvidia GT 730 graphics card
- 120GB SSD
To contrast, the PS4 is £350 and the XB1 is £330 and both have significantly better GPUs. Unfortunately, the choice of CPUs Sony and MS have made doesn't make the slightest sense - based on AMD's PC designs, that means they have awful IPC compared to Intel chips and, at 1.76GHz and 1.6GHz for the XB1 and PS4 respectively, no number of cores will make up for the hideous deficit in single-threaded performance that even a cheap-ass budget CPU like the Pentium G3220 I chose will bring to the equation. Maybe single threaded performance will become less significant in games over time, but I wouldn't bet money on it.
Here's where the consoles really start to lose out in my eyes - I've spec'd this up to the £250 price point building the system from scratch with all components included. I'm a system builder with a spares box - I have RAM, hard drives and an SSD spare and a graphics card currently under-utilized in it's current system that could be used to massively reduce the cost of this system. In fact, by raiding my stock, I can push the spec up to an Nvidia GTX 660 graphics card and a 3.8GHz Intel i3 4370 while reducing the price to £208, and I'll bet there's a good few folks around like me who could do the same thing.