SteamOS is a Debian-derived distribution, based on the kernel linux, and developed by Valve Corporation. She is destined to become the operating system main consoles Steam Machine and Steam Deck. It was launched on December 13, 2013 and has three major releases so far.
A free operating system for all gaming machines
The role of this operating system is to allow Steam to work without users needing to have a computer Windows for this purpose. Unlike other platforms such as Xbox One or PlayStation 4, with SteamOS each user will be able to decide, according to their budget and preferences, which components to use to build the computer they will use as their Steam console. .
SteamOS is primarily designed for playing video games away from a PC, such as in the living room, providing a desktop-like experience.a console using generic PC hardware that can be connected directly to a TV. It can run native games that have been developed for linux and purchased from the Steam store. Valve claims to have ” achieved significant increases in graphics performance » thanks to the use of SteamOS and its compatibility layer: Proton.
The evolution of SteamOS?
The operating system is open-sourceallowing users to build or adapt the source code, although the actual Steam client code is private. Since SteamOS is intended exclusively for gaming without the use of mouse or keyboard, it lacks many built-in features beyond web browsing and gaming. For example, no file manager or image viewer is installed by default. However, users can access the Gnome desktop and perform tasks such as installing other programs.
The operating system naturally accepts graphics processors Nvidia, Intel and AMD. Valve said it has added support for Movies, TV and Music to SteamOS, but video content only comes from the Steam store which has a small number of movies, while music is only provided for local file collections.
In October 2015, an update allowed netflix and other content protected by DRM to operate in the Navigator native built-in. Overall, Nvidia’s proprietary graphics driver for linux can provide performance comparable to Windows drivers thanks to the widely shared codebase across platforms.
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