It sure is gettin Steamy in here! (SteamOS)
 

Seems Steam is rampin thing sup with a Linux based OS of their own.

The rest here

I'm mighty interested in this! Won't completely replace windows for me since there's a lot of things I need it for. But hey, competition is never a bad thing.

What's with all the crazy fools now predicting that Half Life 3 will be SteamOS exclusive? HL3 doesn't exist and will never be developed or released, fools.

Not exclusivity, but availability. If the OS is a modification of Linux, it has around the same capacity for games that Linux has(Aka, not much). Even though Valve helped port ~200 games for Linux is the past time, they're most simple indie games and not something you would change your OS for.

If the next announcement is(And most likely will be) the availability of existing AAA games or maybe even the announcement of a soon to be released game for the SteamOS then this will be slightly more interesting.

edit: not Half-Life 3, of course, that doesn't and will never exist.

Speaking in monetary terms methinks a lot of developers, big and small, will be interested in this. Microsoft's certification model is fuckall terrible across the board. Takes too long, too expensive, too much beaurocratic BS, ego stroking, etc.

What I'm curious about is how will drivers be handled? Especially nvidia. The Linux community and nvidia arent exactlyon the best of terms due to conflicting ideologies on openness. Nvidia doesn't want anyone knowing what's going on under the hood of their driver software and their Linux tech support is...fucking awful at best. Linus Thorvald and the Linux community cry foul at nvidia because of the open source ideology that Linux is all about. It's a big clusterfuck, really. AMD has always been more Linux friendly, but considering that Nvidia has a large market share of the GPU market it'll be interesting to see how the StOS repository will handle it all.

I agree that it'll be interesting to see how they try to bridge compatibility with the ungodly mess of software of varying levels of "no we won't work with Linux". But if it works then I'll definitely be sold on a dual-boot.

Valve, you know that I love you, but I miss the days when you used to make video games. I know you've had lots of success with Big Picture Mode and Steam in general, but... you were so good at making video games!

I'm quoting all of this because I don't know enough about what I'm talking about to unpack it, but all my searching along the lines of "How do I fix my Linux machine this time" have said something along the lines of "Linux has no AMD support, buy NVIDIA or cry more." Seems kinda odd that google would lead me astray like that. Not that I've had any trouble with AMD's drivers.

I was on my phone during break at the time so I couldn't really go into as much detail as I wanted. The gist of it is AMD is courteous enough to have open-source drivers and continues to provide support for them whereas Nvidia is all NOPE NOPE NOPE FUCK NO TO OPEN-SOURCE DRIVERS NOPE NOPE NUH-UH NOT GONNA HAPPEN NOPE NOPE. A long history of being stubborn asses eventually caused Linus Thorvald to say Fuck You to Nvidia.

Hardware-wise Nvidia cards are fantastic..but that really only applies to a Windows based machine. The drivers are unstable at best, terrible at worse, and generally run inefficiently across the board on a linux system. Take an AMD card of equal specs and it'll run significantly better on a linux machine in comparison. AMD offers flexibility, is basically what I'm gettin at.

Good news: At least one of those announcements will be about some new Valve game that will(also) run on SteamOS.

Bad News: It most likely will be or involve L4D3

Blue and magenta, SteamOS sure looks pretty
 

Considering the recent appearance of this, the second icon on the /livingroom page looks a lot like that Sens device. Presumably this will act as the "Steam Box"'s version of Kinect.