Valve has announced a new, free, Linux-based operating system called SteamOS. “As we’ve been working on bringing Steam to the living room, we’ve come to the conclusion that the environment best suited to delivering value to customers is an operating system built around Steam itself,” a post from Valve reads, in part.
“SteamOS combines the rock-solid architecture of Linux with a gaming experience built for the big screen. It will be available soon as a free stand-along operating system for living room machines.”
The SteamOS page also states the operating system can stream Windows and Mac games in a user’s Steam library over a home network straight to the TV. Valve also says they have “achieved significant performance increases in graphics processing” and are now improving audio performance and reductions in input latency at the operating system level. “Game developers are already taking advantage of these gains as they target SteamOS for their new releases.”
Valve is calling it a “cooperating system” where content creators are said to be able to communicate directly with customers, and users are able to replace any part of the software or hardware they want.
Valve has also confirmed that more announcements will arrive in the “coming weeks” regarding games that are already being primed to support SteamOS natively in 2014. The next announcement will come in 34-hours at the time of writing.
“SteamOS will be available soon as a free download for users and as a freely licensable operating system for manufacturers. Stay tuned in the coming days for more information.”
(via VG247)