Linux in the Living Room: Valve Rekindles Steam Box Speculation

Valve's CEO says announcements about "hardware opportunities" are coming next week.

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It’s been a long time since I rolled my own Linux distribution, back when it wasn’t the hipster thing to say you had a Linux box sitting somewhere, barely used. I was a Linux proponent long before companies like Red Hat (now crazily a multinational, billion-dollar corporation) put it into slick, ready-to-go, increasingly expensive packaging.

But while I’ll grant there are probably more things in heaven and earth you can do with a Linux box than I’ve been dreaming of lately, it’s not something I use as Linux (as opposed to one of its many embedded iterations) nowadays.

I’d still love an open platform like Linux to work (again, as Linux). And I love that Valve wants it to so badly that Valve CEO Gabe Newell’s willing to say crazy-sounding things like Linux “is the future of gaming,” which he just did in New Orleans at LinuxCon 2013.

Remember Steam Box, Valve’s hypothetical PC/console hybrid for the living room? Speculation’s building that a related announcement is imminent, after Newell said the following during one of the show’s keynotes (around the 23 minute market in the video below):

Actually next week we’re going to be rolling out more information about how we get there and what are the hardware opportunities that we see for bringing Linux into the living room, and potentially pointing further down the road to how we can get it even more unified in mobile.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=Gzn6E2m3otg]