In spite already being covered a couple of times during their development on both these sites, neither has covered the official release.

I think when two major news sites completely ignore an event it is somewhat telling on how minor that event must be.

While the BBC might be forgiven for missing a press release or a date, but the Register is a industry renowned IT news site. For a site like that not to have even made a snarky comment on your brand new product should be worrying any company that has invested time and money into the Steam Machine.

I really predicted that the Steam Machines would be something of little to no impact. Guess that two news sites missing out on it is enough to prove that my prediction was right.

Steam Machines offered no killer features over consoles or PCs. All they did was combine consoles and PCs into a, gasp, Linux box, and somehow expected Linux to kick off gaming. Linux might be a good product, but if your box is centered all around gaming, yet it runs on Linux, what will it game exactly? At this point, your option to play a game on it is to just stream it from a nearby Windows PC.

And why would I buy an entire box just to stream games from another likely high end Windows device is beyond me. With that money I could have spent it on better things. So yeah, its just as I predicted.

Add to the current way of things the fact that the Xbox One and Windows 10 now features streaming of games from one to the other. Streaming X1 games to Windows 10 is possible, and streaming Windows 10 games to X1 is also possible. The X1 has more value than the Steam Machines have, and with the planned backwards compatibility with Xbox 360 games, its already ramping up even more value to never let the Steam Machine kick off and be the failure of the decade.

Why spend the money on a likely overpriced Steam Machine when I could buy an Xbox One that does MORE than what the Steam Machine will ever do? That's another point, and I guess the hype for Xbox One and Windows 10 pairings are also killing the news coverage for the thing.

Major hi-end suckage. Put Linux on it.

And there goes all my experience of Windows, all my apps and settings, all my games, all my everything. Heheheh.

By the way, this is off-topic, but for now, I want a small Linux distro that I can use as a virtual machine with Steam installed on it. The purpose is to put that distro's VM on a SD card and summon it whenever I need a Steam related errand, without dirtying my Windows. Do you know of a distro that fits the bill?

While I don't really see the need for the Steam Machine, I fail to see the logic of that particular statement. XBox One is a closed platform. Linux is an open platform. Hence, an XBox One will only do whatever Microsoft lets it do, but a Steam Machine will do whatever you want it to do. I really can't tell if you're being snarky or deliberately clueless, but if you want a Linux distro specifically for Steam, have you considered SteamOS?

No matter what, Steam Machine is going to be a failed product. Except what Pooka said, we should also take in account of how many games we have on Linux. It's not even enough. Especially when you consider the fact that even older games got their Linux versions, but never got a digital distribution such as Quake 3 Arena, Unreal Tournament etc.

Also the controller, lack of D-Pad. If Steam Machine is a hardware to get console gamers into PC gaming., then have a D-Pad. Trackpads already did a great job at replacing analog stick. So it makes sense not to use analog stick. That may not be troublesome for most genres but for fighting games, it's a big one. Fighting games are a 2nd most played game types on consoles. Playing on a analog stick is a pain in the arse while the trackpad is too big, when performing combos or complicated moves, you are guaranteed to fail it a lot more, as there is a high chance that the trackpad will register something you don't want to do.

As far as the publications you suggested are concerned:

TheRegister was recently taken over, and they have completely uprooted the established set of journalists. It's not yet apparent what the new focus is, but it appears to be heavily "big business" oriented. They seem to be focussing on press releases for hardware vendors etc. I assume Steam doesn't fit their model.

The Beeb is always 2 or 3 days behind in any story, and are crap at tech reporting.

Good point, however, not everyone will look at X1 as a closed source system and then will proceed to look at Linux as an open source system. Considering what the Steam machines are trying to target, they're trying to target the CONSOLE gamers, and perhaps STEAM gamers, who, given their investment into the Steam ecosystem, probably care nil about open source and closed source differences. In other words, their target audience is those who aren't interested in fiddling or working anything out to do what they want, but rather those who want the features ready from the get go. In that particular field, X1 is already winning with features, the library, and the streaming function. I'm never gonna consider this joke of an operating system. Here's the other requirement... the Linux distro must not be made by Valve.

Thanks for the info on el Reg, I didn't know that had happened. Who took them over?

And agreed with the BBC

I did MS since MSDOS 5.0 and cut using it since Vista. No hard feelings really. After that, there is eternal conflict over stability vs new software, or Gnome3 vs KDE4.

Linux box can and allows to do much more than any Windows box - including running more Windows applications than Windows itself, provided hardware is supported by good drivers, which is responsibility of manufacturer (similar to Windows). Most, if not all of the games I purchase on GOG are Windows games, which I play only on Linux.


Windows only excels at out of the box support for cutting edge proprietary software - which is also written for it.
Claiming Xbox1 can do more than Steam machine is only valid, if you put Linux on Xbox. =P Debian(which Steam is based upon) with KDE Framework 5 occupies 1.5 GB of RAM and requires OpenGL3+ videocard. Thats perfect to put on 8GB SD Card to install it over Windows, overwriting. Package and hotfix slipstreaming, disk image rollbacks. Typical stuff I did on Windows prior to moving to Linux.

I can't find out. I know there's new management, they've dropped Lewis Page and Tim Worstall, and I know there's been a reorg, but I think it's not so easy to know what's going on in a small magazine like that.

Tried using many different Linux distros, but none stuck really well with me. Even then, I keep Windows as a main. But yeah, I hear that Vista had memory management issues. I didn't notice these issues with 7, 8.1 and now, 10. I hear all about WINE, but I hear that sometimes it could miss entirely. My main concern is if I run huge programs on WINE, especially that I think its emulation-based, am I correct on that? An unmodified X1 versus and unmodified Steam Machine will have the X1 winning. That's probably a point I missed initially. The target audience for Steam Machines aren't looking to modify their systems to do what they want, but they look for a system that already does what they want right out of the box. The unmodified X1 has more features and more games than an unmodified Steam Machine; of course you can argue that the Steam Machine is more open and all, but if I wanted an open Linux machine, I'd take one of my computers and throw Linux on it, instead of buying hardware from Valve who I don't trust them with not mucking up anything to begin with. Oh, I forgot that the SD card that's always inserted in my laptop is just only 2GBs :/ My 16GBs and 32GBs SD cards are on my Androids (which is actually the best thing to be ever built on top of the Linux kernel). I'd do that if I had more time and harddisk space to do them frequently than now. A virtual machine sandbox to dirty and play in all day is my cup of tea right now.

If the whole purpose of this VM is for you to install Steam on, why does it matter if the Linux distro is made by Valve?

Because I only want the client on that distro as the only Valve component. I don't want the whole operating system to be a Valve component. Not to mention that occasionally, I might use the Linux distro for something other than opening Steam, so yeah, it should not be Valve's.

Plus the fact that its developed by Valve should steer anyone away with wonky half-done implementations and unreliable stuff typical of Valve. Who uses Big Picture?

I do if i want to play a game via my Xbox One controller while sitting on my couch.