crooky said:
Doesn't really seem that exciting to me. There's barely any games that run natively on Linux, so if you want to play most games you'll be using the streaming function which requires you have another PC (probably with Windows) in the house to stream from.
Is there something I'm missing?
Let's say you've just spent your hard earned cash on a new rig and you need to buy windows which costs anything from £70 upwards. Now wouldn't that £70 be better spent towards a more powerful graphics card? Now you can spend that money on better gear and install SteamOS for free.
Some devs including ken levine (bioshock and system shock) and John carmack (doom and quake etc) are looking forward to see what valve can do with thier own Linux distro, and would be more than willing to develop games for it in the future.
Linux uses OpenGL which is faster than directx. AMD and Nvidia have also said they're going to offer driver support for Linux from now on.
For the moment you're right, it's going to be a windows machine streaming the game to a steam machine over your LAN, but hey, I'm not going to knock an OS that's made for games, unlike windows which we all know takes up a percentage of system resources before you even run a game!
