SteamOS: Try Valve’s distro

Seen by some as the ‘saviour of PC gaming’, Valve has created its own Debian Wheezy-based distro. Matt Hanson assesses the first beta.

Back in 2003, when Valve first released its Steam software, it didn’t have a lot of friends. Initially, it was envisioned as a platform to automatically keep games updated whilst adding DRM and anti-cheat measures. However, Steam has evolved into an incredibly popular service, with 65 million accounts created by the end of 2013, and an estimated 75 per cent of all digital games purchased for the PC through Steam. Whilst we aren’t too comfortable with a proprietary DRM-focused application, there’s no denying that Valve’s commitment (it joined the Linux Foundation last year) has helped bring more games to Linux than ever before. When Valve announced it was creating its own Linux distro, the possibilities became very exciting.

After months of hype, the first beta version of SteamOS was made available. Expectations were quickly tempered, however, when the new distro was released alongside a message from Valve, warning that this initial release was very early, with basic functionality, and recommended only for people who were already familiar with Linux. AMD and Intel graphics hardware was not supported, though that has been rectified. However, there are a few other hardware limitations. Alongside an Intel or AMD 64-bit processor, you’ll need a 500GB or larger disk and a motherboard that supports UEFI. At the moment, it can be installed only from USB, and won’t allow dual booting – it will insist on wiping your primary hard drive and installing itself there. All these issues (we hope) will be fixed in future updates, but it leaves quite a few hurdles if we want to try out SteamOS. Luckily, there is another option.

Valve has made SteamOS free and open, and Ye Olde SteamOSe is a modified SteamOS installer that fixes a number of issues with the vanilla version – and it focuses on older machines. It can also be used in virtual machines – something the original SteamOS isn’t so good at. It can be installed via DVD, and supports BIOS alongside UEFI. It doesn’t demand 500GB of space, with a more realistic figure of 40.5GB. Best of all, it supports dual booting, so you can try it out without having to sacrifice your main distro.

There are quite a few reasons to try Valve’s distro, though they are all – for the time being at least – game-centric. SteamOS’s appeal will hopefully broaden once more features are added. One of its biggest plus points is the performance increases that many games benefit from when moving from Windows. In Valve’s benchmarks, its zombie shooting game

Left4Dead2 saw an improvement of up to 16.4 per cent on Linux. Valve’s benchmarks were run on Ubuntu 12.04 32-bit, which means that any distro could see similar benefits, and the Steam client can be run in a number of distros – with the TV-friendly ‘Big Screen’ user interface turned on. SteamOS is promising, but Valve will need to work hard to broaden its appeal. Luckily, Valve has a reputation for working hard.