What are the SteamOS Hardware Requirements?
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Hard Drive: 500GB or larger disk
Default Installation
... The image provided here requires at least a 1TB disk.
It is odd that they are publishing these specs and making the default image so large when <500GB SSDs are the ideal drives for gaming computers.
SSDs are great, until your game library outgrows them. At the moment, it may be hard to fill half a terabyte with Linux games, but it's pretty easy on Windows. I've got 350GB of Steam games installed on my Windows machine, and I'm not a big spender on games. I've just bought Humble Bundles and one or two things during each of Steam's major sales.
I invested in 64GB of RAM. I have a little script to create a 32GB ramdisk on startup. Whenever I want to play a game, I copy its folder to the ramdisk, rename the original, then symlink it from the original location to the ramdisk.
SSDs are great, but ramdisk gaming loads in like five seconds flat. I suppose games will outgrow ~48GB in several years, but my hardware will grow old by then anyway.
How long does it take you to copy its folder to the ramdisk? Is this longer than it would take for e.g. the Linux kernel to figure out it should cache that folder in memory by itself?
The best solution and what will probably be adopted by high-end SteamBoxes eventually, is to ship a large cheap hard drive and a SSD large enough to cache 2-3 games.
64GB of RAM isn't possible on consumer hardware, and costs almost as much as a 1TB SSD. A high-quality cache drive on the order of 120-256GB is way cheaper and gets rid of most disk bottlenecks, and is automatically managed rather than requiring the user to write scripts to create a RAM disk for each game.
I bought my 64GB of RAM + mobo off the shelf at Microcenter. So it's probably consumer hardware. Cache SSD drives are mostly bogus, because insanely they cache by alphabetical file order instead of most recently used file. E.g. The folder "Aardvark" will be cached, but "Zebra" probably won't be, even if you use the Zebra program more often.
I know, it's insane, and I almost couldn't believe they implemented caching like that. Almost.
This was some time ago, so maybe the state of things has improved since then.
Your 64GB system uses Intel's LGA2011 server platform. It's not consumer-class hardware even if they label some of the parts for "enthusiasts". 40 PCIe lanes makes no sense for any consumer purpose - it's an odd number even for multi-GPU use, and quad-channel memory isn't economical and probably won't be even after the transition to DDR4.
I've never heard of a SSD caching system that operates on filenames. Apple's Fusion Drive system is the most filesystem-aware caching system I know of, and it ignores filenames and works based on frequency of access. Intel's Smart Response system is a block-level cache implemented as part of their software RAID system. Flashcache and bcache for Linux are block-level caches that can be layered over or under software RAID. Hybrid drives that put 4-8GB of NAND on a hard drive are completely filesystem-agnostic, as are the hardware RAID controllers that support SSD caching.
Steam allows you to install and uninstall games whenever you'd like, so it all comes down to some management of which games are installed. Say, if you need 100 GB for a new game you can just uninstall a few games you won't play.
I have a couple small SSDs in a RAID 0 for gaming. I don't keep every game I own installed, which means I have to reinstall games more often. But I can keep a few on at a time, and a lot of games these days (FTL, Castle Crashers, Magicka) don't take up much space at all.
I keep a platter for media, and another removable one for backups.
Getting used to the ceiling was a bit of a pain at first, but I would not go back.
"Default Installation
You will need to create a SteamOS System Restore USB stick to perform this install. The image provided here requires at least a 1TB disk."
I don't understand this at all. I wonder if there is actually a hard check.
Despite having high internet speeds, I feel quite uncomfortable with how big the game downloads are these days. It's probably because I play games casually and try not to spend too much time, and after playing them on OnLive, it's really hard to go back to the non-streaming model. It's like... I just wanna try a game for 15 mins, then close it and move on. I'm not gonna download 8+ GB just for that.
I feel like the "casual 15 mins gaming" is predominantly going to be iPad and cell phones in the future, whereas I see SteamOS fitting the "I'm going to spend two hours in my man cave" scenario. If it's a box in your living room, presumably you could trigger an installation remotely from your computer or cell phone, and when it's done downloading an hour later you can just walk over to it and start using it.
It's the barrier of entry of having to download and use up all that hard-drive space. It's like having to install an .exe vs. visiting a website. Even if you trigger the .exe installation remotely, it's just not as convenient and agile as visiting a site at will.
I wish viable gaming Mini-ITX builds ranged from $200 to $500, not $400 [1] to $2500 [2].
I'd really like to see SteamOS price competitive with consoles. I know that hasn't been the trend in the past, but PC part prices are a better value now than ever, it feels like should be almost in reach of a $300 shuttle with SteamOS that gives consoles a run for their money.
As a requirement, no, but basically every new machine (Macbooks \w Mac OS X, Chromebooks \w Chrome OS, Windows RT tablets, Windows 8 machines) ships booting off of UEFI.
i could install Linux on any box and then give valve full control by having to run steam as root...
what can I gain with that? It's not like my graphic card will work magically anyway as Idoubt they do anything else besides install the peoprietary nvidia driver
Something has gone wrong with Steam's caching/CDN solution, possibly because people have been hitting the direct URL instead of this one (steamstatic vs steampowered.com)
You'll probably need to wait until the rush dies down a bit.
Disappointed that AMD and Intel graphics aren't supported yet. Didn't see that, installed, black screen after booting from Grub. Hopefully they'll release those versions soon.
As someone who only games casually, and has Intel Integrated graphics in all his Linux machines, I'm really happy that Valve decided to stick with one graphics platform and make that experience really good for their initial release. It means getting the code out to as many people ASAP.
Early releases of Canonical's Unity also initially were nVidia-only, IIRC, so I would consider this par for the course. (There's also the difficulty in finding ATI/AMD chips with all the people mining scrypt cryptocurrencies...)
About a year or two ago I gave up trying to make two machines (one with i810G, one with i865G) work with Ubuntu because the drivers seemed to regularly regress.
