Linux

Someone tried Eve on SteamOS ?

What has Skyrim got to do with anything?

Anyway, SteamOS is nothing all that special, really. It's just Debian (Wheezy I believe) with a bunch of Kernel patches that boots into Steam Big Picture Mode by default. It won't play Eve via Steam since it will only offer to install and launch native Linux games which Eve isn't, so you'll have to go the same old wine-route.

I guess I'll give it a try later, but don't expect anything.

Update: Turns out I am not able to make a working SteamOS USB stick, grub2 can't find it's config for some reason. Not sure if I can muster the effort to sort this out.

People already accepted the Steam Experience on Windows, they will accept it on Steam OS - doesn't matter If you or me like it, we will still profit from it if it takes off. We actually are profiting already, but more on that later.

I actually managed to install SteamOS before, it's in a decent yet a bit unpolished state. I don't know what happened to my USB drive. Since I can't be arsed to do anything about that yet, I can't report anything about Eve, but I can give you a general assessment from my first look at the thing. However, since there's just a Gnome 3 running below the Steam, I believe that running Eve/wine on SteamOS will not be different from running it on Debian, *ubuntu, Mint and what have you.

But on to my experience: Since tinkering around with all that techy Linux voodo is not the point of SteamOS, I did not try to run any wine apps on my test install and just tried the Steam part. As far as native Linux Steam games go, it works rather well. Proprietary drivers for nVidia and AMD cards are integrated, though the latter are not officially supported yet. Everything worked out of the box, including my Wireless Lan and Xbox 360 controller. The "Big Picture" GUI has already been in Steam for months and is quite polished. It is obiously designed with a TV and a Gamepad in mind but mouse and keyboard work just as well as does switching between the two methods. All things considered, for an Alpha+ as you call it, things are looking and working great.

Of course, Valve didn't conjure up some sort of magic wonder-OS. It is basically just Debian Wheezy, a few kernel patches and Steam. Benchmarks show, that the kernel patches don't do much in comparison to other binary distributions and can even slow the games down a bit. But that is supposedly due to a bad or missing implementation of P-States or something (I frankly don't really know or care what that even is) and will be fixed before release.

The main benefit is, that the whole thing pretty much does feel like a console: You turn it on, play your game, shut it down. You have all your (Steam-) games in your games-library, you can just download them, or buy new ones. You don't have to install, configure, manage anything. As more or less tech-savvy linux people, we don't care, but many other people might, and that is the important part.

Linux as it stands is technically not a bad system for games. Actually publishing games for linux however is very hard as there are many different distros with different ways of installing things and each one comes with it's own repository and package manager. Publishers want to know their target platform, so they can be sure that their installers and patchers and anti-cheat shenanigans work as intended. Of course you don't want Valve or Ubisoft to **** around with your desktop computer and the linux bunch in general is very slow and in parts unwilling to accept and adapt things as software stores and proprietary software.

Now, along comes Steam, hands down the biggest and most influential digial games store there is and unifies all that and gives you and the publishers a platform, that is NOT your desktop computer. A platform that only exists, so that publishers can bring us polished, working games. Steam on linux has already brought us quite a few very good commercial games: I do enjoy having Starbound, KSP, Portal 2, CSS, L4D2 and many other lesser known but still enjoyable games. For many years the only thing we had was Tux Racer and the Gnome Games Collection. What's missing now, are the big and New ones. And those only depend on whether or not Valve can actually sell the thing to the publishers.

Users in the USA only I'm afraid. I would love to know how they work though.

They should do well given the specs that I have seen.

Pretty high grade, so will our bog standard boxes be able to cope?.

Actually they put out an installer online. So if you have a spare system you don't mind wiping it should just work. I've been toying with firing it up in a vm, but it seems pointless as I have steam under linux and wine on my Ubuntu system already...

http://store.steampowered.com/steamos/buildyourown

PS- It should also be noted that a fair number of the steamboxes will dual boot windows and steamos....