Steam, stream, or build for your screen
The last two years have seen an almighty stirring in the foundries buried in Valve’s heartland. Mutterings on the breeze of a new operating system to rival the mighty Windows 10. A platform built and developed—from the ground up—for gamers, by gamers. Yep, you guessed right: That murmur on the wind was none other than Valve’s SteamOS, making its first foray into the spotlight. November 2015 saw its official launch into market and out of beta, and by golly, what a launch the Linux-based operating system has had. In case you forgot, this is an OS that was meant to take the world by storm, transforming living-room gaming irrevocably forever, and providing PC enthusiasts with a suitable solution to all of their console woes. After all, what could go wrong, when it's from the curators and masterminds of the greatest archive of PC games the planet has ever seen?
Many questions still remain, and many secrets still lie deep within the murky code surrounding the Debian-based operating system. Should you spend your hard-earned cash on one of these new glorified gaming PCs for your living room? Is SteamOS better than Microsoft’s now thoroughly cemented ecosystem? And what is it actually like? Well, don’t you worry, because we’ve got you covered. And with SteamOS laid bare, we’ll pick apart everything Valve has to offer with its new OS, enabling you to decide whether or not it holds a candle to the notoriety Microsoft has achieved over the last three decades. And whether or not you should commit to this new, half-baked platform, which lies somewhere between the real, red meat of true PC gaming and the Quorn meat substitute of consoles.
WHAT IS STEAMOS?
In short, SteamOS is a custom fork of Linux’s Debian “Jesse” distribution, and Valve started development on it in early 2013. Designed to be installed on custom or bespoke HTPC-style builds in your living room, the intention was for the operating system to provide an almost console-like experience, while providing all the advantages and perks usually associated with a higher-end gaming PC. The aim was also to provide users with access to the vast archive of PC exclusives that are unavailable to the console market.
Another added benefit for those not looking to splurge on a secondary living room PC is the ability to stream your games between your main PC tower and elsewhere in the house, usually direct to your TV. Although there have been some concerns with latency issues over wireless, this feature has been relatively successful, especially on Windows, with a solid, dependable network.
One of the biggest questions asked of Valve was why it opted for Debian “Jesse” as its particular Linux distribution package? After all, Linux users are recommended to run the Ubuntu Linux distro if they want the most compatible software package for Steam games. According to Valve, the choice of distro was to provide users with a complete custom SteamOS experience. Debian was the easiest platform for Valve to work with, providing the team with a good basis to build a completely custom, unique user interface.
THE STEAM ECOSYSTEM
There’s no doubt that you’re already aware of what Steam is. We won’t go into too much detail here because, let’s face it, unless you’ve been living under a rock, it’s not like you don’t know how this particular application works.
Back to the topic at hand, then—the first knowledge we had of this new operating system came from LinuxCon, back in September 2013. Our lord savior Gabe Newell announced that he believed open source was the future of gaming. The following months would see the announcement and release of the first batch of SteamOS betas. Valve stated that it would help any game developers who were interested in supporting their latest titles on the Linux platform, to ensure gamers got the experience they deserved.
Then, of course, came the hints of a new controller to take advantage of Steam’s sortie into this innovative first attempt at a dedicated gaming platform. Primarily, it was developed to address some of the concerns PC gamers had with regard to playing mouse-driven titles and RTS games, which otherwise weren’t available on consoles because of this very problem. The Total War series, Civilization, City Skylines—they all suffered when utilizing a standard controller. Steam’s hap tic touchpads provided an intuitive new way of using the mouse cursor on a controller, without losing too much of the functionality. You might not be hitting the 300 APM that's associated with pro gamers, but for casual and light gaming, it’s more than enough to play comfortably.
And then, rounding off Steam’s new ecosystem, came the Steam boxes from the vast multitude of system integrators around the globe. Custom-designed, small-form factor, living-room PCs, in short. Coming with SteamOS as standard, these miniature powerhouses provide a comparable or even better experience than the console climate, and for a reasonable price.
If none of that piques your interest, and you don’t want to drop $700 on a living room gaming machine, you could always opt for the Steam Link instead. This gizmo gives you the ability to stream content straight to your living-room TV from your PC. Of course, the one downside of this is that your PC needs to be switched on for this to happen, and no one else can use it at the same time. However, it works much the same way as gaming on a Steam Machine does, and you also benefit from the extra horsepower your big rig’s GPU can muster.
INSTALLING STEAMOS
In our experience, installing SteamOS has been painful. Although it’s come a long way from the days of its entry into early beta, we were still encountering numerous problems recently, even just finding compatible hardware. But if you’re interested in trying it out for yourself, read on…
To start, you’re going to want to grab yourself a formatted FAT32 USB stick—8GB or more. Then you have to head over to http://store.steampowered.com/steamos/buildyourown, select the "Download the SteamOS" installation link, and accept the terms and conditions. Once you’ve got the file downloaded, move it to your desktop and extract it. Then copy and paste it on to your fresh memory stick. At this point, it follows the same methodology as when you install a fresh copy of Windows. Head into the BIOS—with your new USB installer plugged into the rear I/O—select “UEFI:Memory Stick Name” as your first boot option, and restart your machine.
On boot, you should have two options. "Automated install" flat-out formats your entire hard drive, partitions and all, while "Expert install" enables you to select which partition you wish to install SteamOS on, along with a couple of other language and keyboard options. Then it’s simply a matter of letting the installer do its thing, and eventually you’ll witness a full system restart. Once you’ve logged in, you need to be connected to the Internet. If you have to use Wi-Fi, you need to close the immediate window, and head to the network configuration UI on the desktop, where you can configure your wireless network. Then Steam finishes the installation, and voilà—job done, hopefully.
THE LIVING-ROOM ECOSYSTEM
As we’ve established, SteamOS is designed around one thing and one thing only: living room gaming. This isn’t a new concept; consoles rule the roost when it comes to that particular ecosystem. In fact, it probably wouldn’t exist at all without the likes of Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft duking it out in the ongoing console war. PC enthusiasts, on the other hand, have had it worse in this regard. Yes, there have been home theater PCs and the like for some time, but they hardly serve as gaming machines, just fancy DVD players. The biggest problem is getting around the Windows UI. It’s ideal for productivity, using a keyboard and mouse, but dragging those peripherals on to your couch is less than ideal. It's easier nowadays with wireless keyboard combos, granted, but they still don’t give you anywhere near as much precision as a controller does with a big UI.
So with living-room gaming and SteamOS becoming more popular, it’s about time there were some gaming peripherals designed to work around that. Whether that’s through Steam, SteelSeries, or Microsoft, you’re certainly spoiled for choice when it comes to the controller conundrum, and choosing the right controller for you might be more difficult than you think.
TO CAP IT ALL OFF
Regardless of how you look at it, the PC is still king. If you want the best performance, the most versatility, and the largest games library, your best bet is to hook yourself up with a high-powered Windows 10 gaming machine: 1080p, 1440p, 4K—the world is your oyster. But we knew that anyway. If Steam’s interface and Big Picture mode are still your jam, but you just can’t give up those extra frames, turning on “Big Picture” mode in Windows serves just as well, if not better than its Linux counterpart.
In the long run, Gabe’s fantasy of open source software being the future of gaming is a potential reality. But for the time being at least, and with figures like those we’ve seen in our testing, there’s simply no contest between the two platforms. A 40 percent drop in performance is just not worth it, no matter what anyone tells you.