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Steam Machine

(store.steampowered.com)
1173 points davikr | 4 comments | 12 Nov 25 17:59 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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mojoe ◴[12 Nov 25 18:03 UTC] No.45903447[source]▶
Steam is the only reason I have a Windows desktop, I'll probably just get one of these next time I want a hardware refresh (which admittedly will probably be many years).

Interesting that it uses KDE Plasma for the desktop

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lordleft ◴[12 Nov 25 18:17 UTC] No.45903671[source]▶
I like SteamOS a great deal, though it's not my daily driver (yet). I'm curious if people will begin to use it as a daily driver and thus expect Valve to be an OS developer on top of creating software for their gaming hardware. That's a different set of expectations and I wonder how they'll navigate it.
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1. embedding-shape ◴[12 Nov 25 18:24 UTC] No.45903799[source]▶
> thus expect Valve to be an OS developer on top of creating software for their gaming hardware. That's a different set of expectations and I wonder how they'll navigate it.

They've been doing it since Steam Deck launched, or even since they started to contribute to Proton/Wine (depending on exactly what you see "OS" to be). They seem to have grips on it more or less already, Deck upgrades are a breeze and the machine and software itself is open enough for a Linux hacker like me to be very comfortable on it, and also closed down enough for my nieces to not be able to brick theirs by just tapping around.

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2. oersted ◴[12 Nov 25 18:38 UTC] No.45904020[source]▶
Indeed, even much earlier. With Steam Deck they achieved wider adoption but the first generation of Steam Machines came out in 2015 and they have been committed to the SteamOS linux distro since then.
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3. embedding-shape ◴[12 Nov 25 19:54 UTC] No.45905466[source]▶
Yeah, I'm sure you're right overall, they've been at it for a long time. I think it's worth keeping in mind that all of the SteamOS'es before Steam Deck were pretty much nothing like the current (3.0) iteration. If I recall correctly, I think they were based on Ubuntu or Debian, compared to the current Arch Linux distribution.
4. keyringlight ◴[12 Nov 25 20:41 UTC] No.45906331[source]▶
They seem to have worked it out well by limiting SteamOS to their hardware, so they don't have to handle all the varieties a regular distro has to. There's a significant number of people who want an 'official' release as a regular installable distro but I doubt it'll happen and Valve are happy to delegate that to others