Just would like to know if anyone has given it a try yet. I would but my primary drive is only 250 GBs and my secondary drive isn't properly backed up yet.

My motherboard is not UEFI...

This is admittedly unhelpful, but I clicked on the thread thinking it was about cereal.

I forgot about installing it.

Not today. Maybe tomorrow.

@spacerunaway: Steam Os! Now with Gaben marshmallow bits!

From what i saw it looked like it was just linux with Big Picture mode installed on it and looked like more of a hassle to install than i wanted to bother with. When it gets the streaming feature then it maybe worth looking into.

Not until I can dual boot it. I kind of want my system files to be in place.

I laffed at this.

It would be nice to be able skip the Windows license for the few PC games I play. Currently I have a Windows 8 partition, but having to pay over $100 for the OS is a bit much.

I don't have the time or urge to check it out for the next few days. But I do have more or less empty boxes that could be steamified come this weekend. Curious to check it out.

Too early of a beta plus you can't dual boot it yet. Once they start to put in the actual deep-level game optimizations then I might take a look, but for now it's just Linux Big Picture.

I only have one pc so i'm not gonna wipe it for steam os. maybe if I can dual boot at some point or if I get a new pc.

Hmm, hearing about the lack of dual boot (while obviously understandable given it's a beta) makes this unappealing to me at this time. I'll wait for things to progress. Also, I can't find where you download it.

can't you use easybcd or something to set it up as dual boot?

(i'm not really good at this yet)

Yeah if you've got the technical chops, or have the patience to follow a tutorial, you can totally dual boot it (or install it alongside any combination of OSs). It's very open and hackable (imo, a MAJOR reason why you should care about this), so you can essentially do anything you want with it.

After booting it myself, there's very little reason to at this point. Something like Manjaro is substantially easier to install, and comes with Steam. The difference is, Valve is currently working on their own custom kernel, which will likely be highly optimized for gaming. Right now, the results are not so promising. Nonetheless, it's a very exciting work-in-progress with a bright future.

Note: it's also very possible to run this in a VirtualBox instance FO FREE. I don't recommend trying to play any games with this setup, but if you just want to poke around with the OS without much investment, this is what you should do!

I installed it onto a separate SSD on my lounge room machine. At present the installer will nuke the drive it installs to (which it will choose automatically) so if you were to install it you will need to disconnect anything important.

The OS itself if pretty much just big picture mode, however there is an option to switch to a Gnome desktop environment but it's fairly basic. I briefly messed with the Linux flavour of Metro LL and it ran well, however that version is pretty bare bones (no real options just a nebulous "Quality" slider) and doesn't actually appear to be on equal footing with the Windows version fidelity wise.

Currently it only seems to support Stereo sound, there is no option for 5.1 and the custom Nvidia drivers don't interact with gnome so you can't change anything there. The video also falls into the same old nvidia problem of not outputting full range RGB over HDMI when it detects a receiver/TV on the other end. On windows you can work around this with a registry mod, but it's less simple on linux. I tried to force full range rbg under the nvidia settings files in xorg.conf.d but that just made the big picture mode shit itself on boot, had to switch to terminal to revert the changes.

I wish I had my cousin here he's a linux nerd.

I have it, with my steam Machine. It's fine. I haven't poked around in the linux side of it yet. It's essentially big picture. There are a few bugs when working in conjunction with the steam controller. (For example, if you're logged out while playing a game because you sign in on another computer, then you hit the home button, you end up having to log back in, but the login keyboard pops up under the main login window, so you can't actually type.) Those issues are easy to fix and are clearly just bug testing oversights.

For the most part, it's completely fine from the perspective of someone who has only used it to play games. After the christmas break I'll probably dig into the system side of it.

Yes, I've got it installed on a second drive in my living room pc, did it the first night it was released. As stated above, it will wipe the drive it selects for install, so if you have windows (or anything else installed) you'll want a separate drive for this, and you'll want to make sure all other drives are DISCONNECTED!

Anyway, I'm personally loving it. It's definitely early, but I'm excited about the prospects. A lot of people will complain about lack of games and losing access to their back libraries of windows games (which I'm clearly keeping my windows drive around for), but I think they're looking at it the wrong way. I think people need to consider it the equivalent of buying a PS4 or XB1. Not in the sense that it's more like a console (which, in some ways it is) but in the sense that it's a whole new "next-gen" platform, with a catalog that will grow.

But that's the benefit of being a PC gamer, you can jump on the SteamOS bandwagon without abandoning the "last-gen" or even spending a single dime to do it (unless you need to buy a second drive).

I've messed around with it a bit. Played some crusader kings 2 and some l4d2 on it. Both games run worse on steam os than they do on my ubuntu install that already boots right into big picture mode.

The dpi settings they did to make the installation of Gnome 3 more living room friendly were kinda funny but not very effective. Hopefully they just released it way too early, because so far there's no reason for this to be it's own distribution, it'd be much better if they just contributed their patches upstream to an established distro.