The Linux Steambox Cometh – A new franchise model for ‘console’ gaming

And lo, the promised land hove into view, and the future looked brighter for PC games. First there was the Steam gamepad/controller, then there was the Steam linux beta, after that followed Steam big-picture for a console style interface on HDTV’s, now the final piece of the puzzle falls into place that ties them all logically together. Console hardware. Who will make it, what will it contain, and how will you buy it?

Valve will retail their ‘own’ hardware, it will contain standard PC hardware and software, and you’ll find 3rd party licensed versions.

Distro’s and 2011 as the year of Linux – Opensuse 11.3 showing the way.

This blogger has used linux since 2004 when opensuse 9.1 was released, and have used linux on an almost daily basis for the last three years, and throughout that time opensuse has remained the distribution of choice. Others are apparently of a similar opinion given that distrowatch rates it as the fourth most popular distro (out of hundreds) on the twelve month, six month, and three month page-hit rankings. On the 18th of July opensuse 11.3 was released.

What follows are excerpts from three different reviews:

Technologies and 2011 as the year of Linux – The underpinnings of success

In the previous article this blog discussed the value of PC gaming in bringing Linux to the mainstream home user, and in particular the importance of stable drivers as an enabler of this revolution, but what about the other technologies that will underpin a truly first-class linux user experience? In many cases the mainstream user won’t be aware of the technologies that provide this user experience, and even if they did they really wouldn’t care, because the limit of their interest is that the computer and it software environment work seamlessly to meet their user needs. This does mean however that those technologies, and their progress towards maturity, are not of interest to those with a nerdier bent.

This article will pick up a few of the technologies that this blog deems key to bringing linux to the mainstream user.

PC Gaming News – Steam on linux & DRM free games.

This post is something of an aggregate update to previous articles written on gaming topics, due to recent news on a DRM free experiment and increased hope for linux gaming.

The updates follow:

OpenGL and 2011 as the year of Linux – Will it be because of Apple and Valve?

Somehow, no matter how many “will 20xx be the year of Linux” articles get published every year, the moment never seems to arrive and why is that? Linux has been packaged into great consumer desktop OS’s for at least six years, and by that I mean that even a novice could use it. Since that point Linux distributions have had a reasonable plug-n-play install experience, there were distros with sophisticated management tools that negated the need for command-line wizardry, the desktop environment was recognisable and usable by windows/mac users, and tools for packaging, distributing and installing apps were becoming common place. This blogger has been using SuSE flavoured distro’s since 9.1 was released in 2004 (thank you Novell for that free promo disk). Arguably, Linux has been a useful desktop OS for even longer, provided you were more technically minded, as can be attested to by the native Linux ports of games like the Quake and Unreal Tournament series which hark back to the end of the 20^th century, so what happened……….

Ah gaming, that’s what has been missing from this whole desktop Linux equation, somewhere along the line it all went awry, the games dried up and somehow the great desktop revolution never happened. After all, we all know you can browse the web just fine under Linux, they even have flash support, just as we all know that the desktop experience is pretty polished these days, and that there are some truly stellar apps which compete toe-to-toe with the best windows and Mac equivalents, even better, you never have to worry about viruses or trojans, but what is that without games!