Valve has just rolled out a public beta version of SteamOS to the masse. Just in case you were wondering what the heck SteamOS is all about, it happens to be an open-sourced Linux-based operating system, and Valve claims that your experience with it would be most satisfying if you already happen to carry a decent amount of previous experience with the operating system prior to giving the public beta version a go.
SteamOS happens to be a derivative of Debian GNU/Linux. A little bit of history lesson here – SteamOS 1.0, obviously the first version that rolled out, is known as ‘alchemist’, where it will be based on the Debian ‘Wheezy’ (stable 7.1) distribution. Debian is also known to be one of the distributions of the Linux operating system, and Wheezy has been touted to be a current stable release of Debian. There are some major changes made to the public beta version of SteamOS, where among them include backported eglibc 2.17 from Debian testing, the inclusion of different third-party drivers and updated graphics stack, updated kernel tracking to the 3.10 longterm branch, and a custom graphics compositor designed to provide a seamless transition between Steam, its games and the SteamOS system overlay, among others.
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