SteamOS hype opinion.

Seriously, developers, another Linux distro has gotten your attention?! Its just a distro after all, who knows if it will be a closed distro or not (in case of DRM checks and stuff like that)? In any case, yes it can be dual booted with our Windows and Mac machines, but... its Linux. Most of our favorite Windows games and programs are not going to be ported over (and I yet have to hear of a GTA game on Linux for example). Its also a commandline mess (Linux), mainly because your life is commandline based on Linux, rather than the GUI made for pretty much simple clicking Windows and Mac gets to utilize (yes, Linux has one, but it depends more on the command line terminal).

And then on, its not exactly what we wanted. We wanted more functionality and a better Steam client. Valve outright ignores all of this to do just decoration stuff such as PIG BAWCTURE, and forcing a big button the main client window. They put trading cards, a feature that none apparently expected, and placed in emoticons. OK, put emoticons, but why put em after removing "/me"? /me sure was removed for scamming, but that was due to lack of documentation of it. Weird, Valve documented your password at start but not your /me command.

Also, you came to the PC platform, and Steam of course, so you download games and play em while sitting comfortably on your chair and desk, playing with your keyboard and mouse, and occasionally your gamepad, with your lovely monitor whether it be an old 640x480 one or a new uber LCD 1920x1080 monitor, not move to your living room... if I wanted to move to my living room, I would've gone either PlayStation, XBox, or Nintendo (or even SEGA and Atari if I feel nostalgic), but hooking up a PC to a TV when your PC got a monitor just doesn't work with me. Not to mention that instead of having two devices run at one time for the family, its now down to one, because one monitor is left behind.

Not to mention the Big Picture interface is just stupid. All what it does well is basically make "Fully supported" controller games work with any controller you throw at, as long as that controller's inputs are modified to Big Picture's settings. Bam, I can play Sonic Generations without having to depend on Joy2Key using my knockoff PS2 controller. But that's it. Not to mention the interface isn't really good looking or easy either; but it seems to be more developed than the normal mode interface in terms of data; speak about download progresses in percentages being visible with the download as opposed to being visible when you hover on the Steam icon in the taskbar. What the?


All in all, I'd suppose that if Valve spent some time fixing their client and giving it real improvements, not goofy additions like trading cards, would've been better than them spending time making a Linux distro or wasting their time trying to transform the PC to a console; if I wanted to be in the living room, my console sits there ready for play, OK?



TL;DR: the hype on SteamOS is just as worthless as My Little Pony.