[mdlug] Semi-OT: SteamOS

[Ingles, Raymond]

Valve software (who developed Half-Life and the sequels, Portal and its sequel, etc.) have had their game publishing platform Steam available for Linux for a while now. A decent fraction of the games available on Steam run on Linux - and if you buy a game, you can run it on any and all platforms it runs on. I can play, say, Portal on Windows and move to Linux, and it syncs the game saves via the cloud. Overall nice.

In what's presumably a bid to become less dependent on Microsoft, Valve has come out with the 'SteamOS' concept - a custom Linux distribution (Debian-based) intended to run Steam and its games. Eventually they hope to have "Steam Box" home-theater PCs to run it.

Early versions are available, and people have even customized the software to some extent. I had an old computer to mess with, so I showed my oldest son how to upgrade the RAM and put in a hard drive, and we installed an unofficial version of SteamOS that doesn't require EUFI or Nvidia video cards and such: https://directhex.github.io/steamos-installer/?r3

The test machine is definitely old and substantially below the recommended specs. It's got a Celeron 1.8GHz CPU, 2GB RAM, an 80GB hard drive and Intel GMA 3100 graphics. (*Not* Intel HD, the older GMA style.) But SteamOS installed and booted. There was only 7GB left to install games. The main thing we wanted to test was another feature - game streaming. You can run a game on one PC and stream the image and sound to a SteamOS box - for example, running a game in the library and streaming it to the PC connected by VGA to an HD TV. In that limited sense, you could run a Windows-only game 'on' a SteamOS box.

What worked: Booting, installing and running older and/or non-graphically-intensive games. E.g. Half-Life Blue Shift (circa 1998 game engine) or a recent 2D game like "Cthulhu Saves The World".

What didn't: Recent games, or streaming. Video and sound *did* show up, but not at a comfortably playable rate, and "slow decode" kept appearing in the corner of the image. (The connection was gigabit Ethernet, so the network wasn't likely to be a factor.) I suspect that streaming would work with any semi-recent dedicated graphics card, though.

Again, we knew going in that the box was under the recommended specs by a good margin. It was actually fairly impressive how much did work. It was able to put up a nice 1080p user interface and didn't post actual errors beyond the "slow decode" thing.

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