What went wrong?

what went wrong?

They waited until after the hype died to talk about what a Steam Machine actually was. People were confused until they moved on, eventually finding out it was a product they had no need for.

they used Xorg instead of Wayland and in return got shit performance for all games, they also used buggy shit like pulseaudio which breaks sometimes requires you to drop into desktop mode and fix via cli (they also used SystemD which breaks my wifi after a reboot and requires a reinstall of the whole OS)

Turns out gamers don't give a shit about Linux gaming machines when they can only play 1/10th of the games available on Steam - if that.

No windows as the main OS = no games to play

>no real launch
>no exclusives
>no cheaper than a gaming PC
>supports a small minority of the steam catalogue
>marketed to existing PC gamers

It seemed to be mainly a way to threaten MS

it should have been a valve + amd + hp partnership

rather than a bunch of pc manufacturers

they want them to be affordable it only makes sense to go with amd and since hp is already partners with amd it makes sense.

>steamOS doesn't support most major releases
>the machines themselves are overpriced and built with cheap parts

You're honestly better off just buying a laptop with windows on it, installing steam, force it to launch in big picture mode on boot and hooking it up to your TV.

Even then, Valve would still have had to very heavily subsidise the hardware cost.

I think the main problem is, that even as a Linux guy the distro wasn't very lucrative. It should have focused on bleeding edge packets and mainly gaming and it failed to do so. A properly installed Arch Linux was superior from the beginning. Ubuntu is a bloated shit distro and it was a huge mistake to base steam os on it.

Btw. I was gaming on Linux for years because the NVidia driver for my card had a bug and all Source games where crashing all the time on Windows. I needed to change back to Windows for Rocket League and I can tell you I absolutely hate it. Windows 10 is a fine OS when it comes to stability and performance, but god damn is it a PITA to install it. All that additional Group Policy tweeking and PowerShell shit that is necessary these days to get a somewhat usable experience.

>pulseaudio is shit
Then what's a better alternative?

Only cucks buy or use steam machines or steam on Linux.

Ubuntu is as bloated as Debian or Arch. They all use the same fundamental components. Steam OS is no different to any of them.

Expensive OEM machines that came with "Linux" for gaming.

Oh boy, what the hell went wrong.

No hardware options, intel charge far more for CPUs than anything in consoles. Nvidia can't make an X86 cpu. AMD APUs have weak GPUs and AMD openGL performance on linux is a disaster. Nvidia charge a lot for mid range GPUs.

Any intel cpu + nvidia gpu combo has miserable performance until you move well above the price range of consoles.

The only way it could work is if they fund custom silicon. Either tegra with a large GPU and GDDR or AMD APU with a decent GPU and memory. They sort of have another chance with vulkan but they are slow and directionless so there's little chance they succeed.

Valvetime killed them. Seriously.
Valve would announce that they're making steamOS and it'd be done 'soon' or whatever, so manufacturers would rev up their production lines and get some machines ready in a few months.
Valve would turn around and go "coming soon!" when these machines were ready.
So machines got planned for the next year, and when they came out, steamOS still wasn't ready, the steamcontroller still wasn't ready, so they had to ship them with 360 controllers and win7 again.
Remember that shit?
Then a few years later, SteamOS actually came out and no-one gave a shit.

1. They didn't spend a good amount of time viewing various forums and discussions on what's annoying and what's good in regards to Linux distros and packages.
2. They didn't make a survey of what features the users would like in their OS.
3. They didn't consolidate all that data and didn't polish it.
4. They didn't form a good team of long-time Linux neckbeards who will mainly be in charge of the OS.
5. They didn't look up the criticisms users have of the UI and customization in Windows and OS X/MacOS, and work from that.

It's a lack of communication that fucked them up.

And finally:
6. Their marketing sucks balls.
7. Lack of a nice and simple slide tutorial when the OS is installed, which shows all the features and neat customization and other shit that the OS provides for users to casually sift through and get the gist of it.

Sorry man but you have absolutely no clue. If you want an unbloated Ubuntu you need to install Ubuntu Server without everything and even then you got way more bloat than a clean Arch. I'm not sure about debian, but I would say it comes with less preinstalled packeges if you deselect everything. But Arch is a complete other story, there will be not a single packet that you haven't select yourself.

I this really still true about AMD GPU on Linux performance? I'm considering waiting for Vega, because of the new NVidia Spy for Facebook program, but Linux performance is still important to me.

The whole point of the steam box was that it was supposed to use its own OS designed exclusively for games, instead of Windows.

Unfortunately it was a buggy piece of butthole though

Regardless of the OS, it's still essentially a console at the price of a PC with less games than either of them.

If it was a normal ATX format in horizontal form,
with proper airflow and cooling and dust filters,
it would be better and more functional than consoles
and still be capable of use with a TV (just put your normalfag audio equipment on top of it or something).

Even if the hardware shit was a mistake;
the OS alone would have been adopted well if it was marketed properly as a standalone option in the way i described.

Steam already is a "maintenance" platform where donation for the OS could be made from by users who want to do it.

As i said, their marketing management fucked up in various ways.

>the OS alone would have been adopted well if it was marketed properly as a standalone option in the way i described

Given how historically difficult it's been to unseat Windows, the OS would have to be an absolute game changer, so to speak.

Windows was difficult to unseat because Windows used to pay devs and provide software support once upon a time in the early 2000's and late 90's, and actually did good marketing.

Today, incompetence and speeding are the only excuses.

>If it was a normal ATX format in horizontal form

this was the biggest mistake

I mean just look at this garbage

32 bit libs

fuck that shit with a rusty hoe

When they finally released pictures of them and I saw they were horizontal alienware looking consolesque garbage into the trash.

Expensive too. It's a good thing Valve just partnered with HTC on the vive because they don't know shit about hardware.

I memed myself into buying that steam controller and that was a crock of shit,

Windows supports just about all existing PC hardware, has an enormous software library (including Steam of course) and crucially is preinstalled on almost every prebuilt computer,

Getting the average normie to go to the effort of removing it and installing something else is incredibly difficult.

They should have just had a proper Steam Machine sold directly by Valve, like the ones they sent out pre-launch.

Because no matter what, if it isn't windows, you just won't be able to play every blockbuster aaa at release.

literally no market for that crap

pc users that buy the cheapest pc's
pc users that buy high end
console faggots that won't consider pc's anyway
console faggots that might consider a steam machine but might find out a regular pc is much cheaper

>muh bloat
Even ssds are cheap these days, storage is nothing. An extra gig of packages is nothing.

Like what everyone thought they were going to do before it turned out to just be a bunch of HTPCs sold by random companies.

>A properly installed Arch Linux was superior from the beginning.

This, if Valve based their SteamOS on Arch, it might have turned out better. Not even memeing, Arch is probably the best Linux for gaming because of the bleeding edge packages.

I use Steam Stream so that my laptop doesn't have to run on a shitty integrated graphics, my desktop in the other room can do all the work and I can still sit on the couch with a controller. Steam Machines wish they could be this comfy.

SteamOS is based on Debian, not Ubuntu

it was never more than a contingency plan for valve

That's precisely the wrong philosophy.
You don't want to command the average normies to move.
You want to get them thinking, you want to hit mental points without outright commanding them or pushing them. That's all it takes. Just a thought, a subconscious reminder.
You want that simple overview of the features and promise of improvement with user input to float up there in their Steam client or whatever;
and let the hook do its own thing as they get more and more fed up with Windows and Microsoft's shit. It's gonna take time, but hate accumulates.
Microsoft is getting shat on over some UI shit?
Great! Get a small note up there where it says SteamOS treats this and this feature in the correct way and you slap Microsoft's dick that way, just for shits and giggles.

Enormous software library? Yeah, of old shit.
Most averagefags only care that the CURRENT and future gaymes are getting support. So long as this compatibility is doing its work via Steam and GoG software teams, nobody gives a shit about the Windows library. Over time it will become irrelevant, just as time always has a habit of creeping up on companies and people.

>Arch is probably the best Linux for gaming because of the bleeding edge packages.

OSS4

The biggest problem it faced is that most games are windows only

alsa, with an easy to use gui controller, pulse produces shit audio quality and further complicates audio shit far more than it should be

It's not about storage space, it's about crap that runs in background and clogs your CPU and is probably buggy as hell. Windows somehow manages this quite well if you think about all the crap that runs in the background, but Linux is horrible at this, probably because many little programs suck or they simply don't work together as well.

Ok even though Debian is a better choice, it's still pretty stupid if you think about it. Debian is a server OS and is horribly outdated because of security and stability (and it's actually risking both because of not having all the fixes and improvements).

Rusty ass libraries and a gpu drivers from 2015 won't do you much good when trying to play a AAA game released in 2017. You're gonna want the latest stable libraries and drivers.

Wrong? I use it for in-home streaming every day...

yea, stable, not bleeding edge

>pulse produces shit audio quality

It produces excellent audio and is very versatile if you use up-to-date packages.

When I say stable, I mean stable according to upstream devs which from Debian's point of view is experimental or in testing (aka bleeding edge). According to Arch, a package is stable as soon as the upstream devs say it's stable.

Unfortunately stable in the Linux worlds means about three years old or so. Arch also has stable and testing branches only their stable is quite recent compared to other distros.

>He look we're going to make computers to compete against consoles somehow
>except that console players overwhelmingly already have a PC
>and our computers will run a gimpy shit tier linux distro that immediately boots into Steam living room meme mode
>and even though we have hardware standards, they're going to be all the fuck over the place
>they're all going to be over priced
>and all the systems are just currently available Windows PCs rebadged
>also we're going to release this stupid dildo touchpad controller thats objectively bad for the majority of FPS/TPS games
>b-b-but you can use it like a laptop touchpad to move the cursor!
>also we promised that our OS would magically perform better than Windows because of lower abstraction, even though this isn't a real issue
>Whoops, looks like our Linux distro is actually worse at gaming than some already existing distros
>plz give us your autism bucks

-Steam Machines.
Literally the only people who shilled for this are fetal alcohol syndrome NEETs.

They should have released it as a distro in the Linux ecosystem. We have Scientific Linux, Pentesting Linux, Ubuntu Studio and so on for special purposes. Why not have a distro dedicated for gaming? It would be tightly integrated with Steam and testing ground for Wayland/Vulkan in the future.

Wayland is nowhere near ready when it comes to gaming performance. For 2D desktop effects it is better than Xorg (less tearing), but if you like to have your games run like a slideshow Wayland is your choice now.

Source? I'm curious because I know Wayland doesn't really work under Nvidia yet but I don't know much about what's going on with AMD and Wayland. And if you're just talking about the open souce GPU drivers then you're memeing at best and ignorant at worst.

>what went wrong?
It's literally just a sticker on some prebuilt pc.

>Why not have a distro dedicated for gaming
Why is there no gaming specific linux distro.

They should have made it a normal OS like Ubuntu with multimedia options. Not turn it into a console OS.

Because until just last year, gaming on Linux was just a meme.

Linux game support went wrong

Other than a brief Phonerix's POS test suite blurb about Wayland+Intel Skylake chips (buggy in some SDL titles and parity in others), not much has been written about Wayland performance in the past 6m. Only reddit and ML comments how some games are performing below par on Wayland. Furthermore, you are not gaming with Nvidia or AMD discrete chips/cards? Enjoy your indie shovelware then. I'm sure they're system sellers.

They did, though. You can download and install SteamOS yourself.