TECHRIGHTS has written several articles to highlight the big impact that Valve has had on GNU/Linux as a gaming platform. Now we see another major milestone. A lot of hardware companies, from chipsets [1-2] to integration, make a lot of so-called Steam Machines these days [3-8], which can be seen in this new gallery [9] and specifications overview [10]. Some high-end ones dual-boot with Windows [11] (SteamOS is based on Debian, not Ubuntu, due to legal reasons [12]).
Among the major competitors there's Sony and Microsoft. Xbox One is faulty [13] and it's losing to Sony [14] (which uses BSD); for general-purpose boxes that run GNU/Linux one can go for Steam Machines, which prove that 2014 will undoubtedly be an exciting year for GNU/Linux [15]. ⬆
Related/contextual items from the news:
Valve has announced their first 12 partners that intend to bring Steam Machines to the marketplace this year.
More than a dozen vendors have announced that they've joined forces with Valve to produce Linux SteamOS-powered PCs and gaming consoles. Here their first wave of devices.
Valve's Steam Machines are reinventing the game console by transforming daunting PCs into friendly boxes for the living room. But rather than make the machines all by itself, Valve has turned to hardware partners to create a whole lineup of them, from basic consoles priced like an Xbox all the way up to towers that just barely veil their gaming PC roots.
Digital Storm was one of the first companies to reveal its Steam Machine — its own take on Valve's formula for the perfect living room gaming PC. Today, the company's getting the news out ahead of Valve's announcement yet again, formally announcing that the new Digital Storm Bolt II will go on sale later this month for $1,899.
Last month when SteamOS was publicly made available in beta form there were many surprised that Valve based their Linux distribution off Debian rather than Ubuntu, which they had been heavily promoting up to this point for Linux gaming. There was some speculation why Valve went with Debian, but Gabe Newell has now confirmed the reasoning for not basing their operating system off Ubuntu.
An example of a buzz kill is waking up on Christmas morning to find an Xbox One sitting under the tree, only to later discover that it doesn't work because of a disc drive malfunction. Gamers first started complaining about the issue in November, with several YouTube videos showing the disc drive making a grinding noise when popping in a game or movie. Now that more consoles have been opened up, the issue is again making headlines, and Microsoft's response is the same.
As we now know, Sony sold a massive 4.2M PS4s worldwide in 2013, which dwarfs Microsoft’s already impressive 3M number by quite a substantial sum. It’s particularly surprising given the fact that the console sales have been relatively close to date. Both systems sold 1M units within 24 hours of release. Microsoft hit 2M consoles sold about a week or so after Sony said they’d hit 2.1M. They were behind, but within striking distance.
Linux won, the penguin has achieved world domination, and the usual commentarians completely missed it even after years of predicting it. Because it's not something that happened in a single flashy event, but rather has been the product of years of hard work and steady improvement. 2014 is the year that Linux starts to win the desktop, which is the final Linux frontier. And it is the year of exponential growth in every arena.