Well, here is an announcement that will for sure be to follow up. Steam, the very well known online gaming store is now about to release their OS, SteamOS. This OS will be catered to make Steam running perfectly, this means we have here expecctations for the perfect OS for a custom made living room gaming PC.
Valve did not stop at “just” an OS, they are also announcing Steam Machines. In short, a series of custom made PC sold by the hardware manufacturers and with SteamOS pre-installed on it.
This will surely give hard time to both gaming consoles and Microsoft Windows.
Gaming consoles are so far preferred by many gamers as it comes with no fuss, no issue on hardware compatibility, simple usage with a dedicated OS, unlike a gaming PC where you need to fiddle around to make it work at its best. An OS like Steam OS coupled with Steam Machines means that we will soon see a wide range of gaming rig all compatible with Steam games catalog (which is not small) and simpler to use.
Moreover, if SteamOS is free or reasonnably priced and can be installed on any PC hardware, many gamers will adopt it quickly, give it some months for AMD and Nvidia to work on their Linux drivers (what they are doingalready actively) and the OS will have performances equal to what you can get on Windows. If you consider the vast amount of Windows licenses sold for gaming machines (sold for that particular performance reason), that is maybe one more nail for Windows’ coffin (which is already building rapidly).
I’ll be reporting here any worthy news on this front and you are welcome to give me some links in the comments.
