SteamOS and the future of Linux

A previous post was shared the news that Valve is developing an operating system for its future Steam Machine console, and that it will have the Linux kernel. And although it has not yet been revealed what type of licenses will be used, Valve maintains that SteamOS will be mostly composed of "free and open source software" with some proprietary components.

This brave move by Valve has garnered the attention of many figures in the world of computing, especially the world of video games. John Carmack, co-founder of id Software, received the news with some skepticism, although he expressed some confidence in Valve's decision. «I find it a bit dangerous to move to Linux ... If it were any other company it would be pseudo-derogatory, but it is Valve, so I am not«. Other opinions from figures in this industry were the comments of Lars Gustavsson, creative director of EA Digital Illusions CE, and Marcus Persson, founder of Mojang and creator of its famous title Minecraft. The executive of the EA division that develops the Battlefield saga, told the portal Polygon that he would be "strongly" interested in Linux, and that this platform only needs a great title to catapult itself into the mainstream world of video games. He maintains his enthusiasm in the fact that only the successful one was enough for the XBOX Halo to become popular. For his part, Persson took the announcement as "good news." Also Mike Bithell, creator of the indie "Thomas Was Alone", expressed his pleasure with the SteamOS project, trusting that it will "promote" the independent game industry.

As expressed in the This year's LinuxCon, Torvalds believes that SteamOS «rIt will really help Linux adoption on desktops«. For him, SteamOS «will force several distros to standardize their technologies«. One of the main criticisms towards Linux distributions is that the development of the components is very isolationist, damaging compatibility. Internal differences within the world of developers accentuate this problem, even generating tensions. The founder of Gnome, Miguel de Icaza, believes that part of the blame also falls on Linus Torvalds. However, for Tordvalds «[Valve] is the company that has the vision for how these things should be done»And it will force the different distributions to think«if this is the way Valve does it, this is how we should all do it ...«.

SteamOS could be a real opportunity for Linux. The biggest immediate benefit is that it will increase the interest of hardware manufacturers in making their products compatible with our operating system. In fact, as soon as the project for SteamOS was announced, AMD and Nvidia announced better support for Linux drivers. Particularly, Nvidia is already working with Valve and the Linux community in the development of SteamOS, and has promised that it will share more documentation of its GPUs for the communities to work on compatibility. Even has offered his help in the development of the open source driver New.

The world of video games on Linux is still in its infancy. However, a promising future can be seen for this platform. A revolution is also expected in the industry, which could topple Microsoft from its supremacy in video game technologies. AMD has announced its own replacement for DirectX that will be called blanket, and it will perform far superior to its Microsoft counterpart.

What do you think?