Valve Announces SteamOS for Living-Rooms

We all knew it was coming, websites were posting information about Valve making three announcements last week and now we’ve had the first one, SteamOS, but what’s next?

Well, if we’re to believe that the rumours about any hardware coming from Valve are true, that would seem the next logical step in their trio of announcements and if you want to interpret the image featured with the countdown timer to the next announcement as being for that ‘SteamBox’, nobody would blame you.

Valve Announcements

So, what IS Valve’s SteamOS?

A Linux-based operating system. Really, that’s all it is, but obviously not just Linux. As Valve brought us the Big Picture feature, so that we could take our Steam gaming into the living-room and on big screen televisions, it meant gamers could put a PC next to (or under, if there’s enough space) the TV and, if the system is powerful enough (namely a graphics card with at least 512 MB), it meant you could enjoy your PC games at their best.
Windows and other ‘standard’ Linux distributions don’t rely on being used primarily for gaming. There is so much going on in the background, it’s even recommended you close some background processes in order for your games to run better. SteamOS won’t have any unnecessary stuff running in the background, it’s optimized for gaming, obviously, but it won’t be just a gaming operating system.
Every feature Steam offers is included, whatever you can do in the Steam client is contained in SteamOS and because Valve will work with developers and the community, it will help to keep it running smoothly. So what’s next? Will Valve finally announce some hardware to install the SteamOS? We’ll find out on Wednesday, but what do you think?
To see all the details so far, visit the Steam Living-Room page.
Oh yeah, if you’ve tried to get a sneak peek at what’s coming next, don’t bother viewing the source code of the page, they’re giving nothing away, although there are a couple of place-holders.

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