Windows absolutly destroys Linux and will continue to.

Steam OS and Steam Box are quite litteraly the worst things Valve has EVER done in their entire history.  So many people hate on Windows / MS and yet 8.1 is the best OS to run games on. Period.

To be perfectly honest I see this whole Steam OS crap as some sort of arrogant cocky move by Valve. They think since they rejuvinated PC gaming (which they 100% did) that they should be the ones monotizing the PC market place. Make no mistake this is a power move and not "for the good of the consumer".  Valve want to be the dominant leader in everything PC marketshare and are trying to force their way into owning the PC marketplace.  Which there's nothing wrong with that but let's call it what it is.  This isn't Gaben being some benevolant nice guy, its called how can Gaben and the rest of Valve get consumers 100% into their own ecosystem.

Valves goal here is

1. To convert new / uninformed consumers into buying hardware designed for Valve. Steambox

2. Get as many current PC gamers as possible bought into their own OS. Steam OS

3. Continue to make insane amounts of money from their primary revenue source. Steam.

Their goal is to completly cut out competition in every facet of the PC gaming experience. Their own hardware (not manufactured by them but designed for them), their own OS, and their own store. Essentially they want to turn the PC into a Valve console.

Listen I LOVE Steam, so much so that I have completly put consoles on the backburner outside of exclusives, but this whole Steam OS / Box stuff is something frankly I'm not interested in, and also clearly see for what it is.

@Bold I don't know about that ... Valve did seem pretty genuine about it for the consumers but what the consumers want is not what valve will give. Valve looks like it doesn't have any insidious intentions with their steambox / steam OS plans. It's just that they don't realize that the whole idea is crap and they seem quite shortsighted about it. 

In short Valve has good intentions but SOME parts of their management staff needs to go back to SPECIAL school LOL.

I think your mistaking what I'm saying. Something can be both "good for the consumer" and a power move from a business's point of view.

Valve exists to make money.  End of story. Every business exists for that single purpose. I genuinely belive Valve thinks this system will make consumers happy but they didn't just decide to do this so everyone would say, Wow I sure love Gaben!

They saw an opportunity, saw that they could fill a void they belived MS was leaving open, and thought they could make money off of it.

People really look at these companies all wrong. Neither Valve, Sony, MS, or anyone else for that matter exist just to make us happy. They exist for money, and this is 100% a power move by Valve to monetize their business.

I don't think valve meant to take power away from Microsoft in the PC gaming market. I know what your saying but your conspiracy theory about valve wanting to take over PC gaming is far fetched. 

Companies are supposed to make CUSTOMERS NOT MONEY. The reason why companies build up is the amount of TRUST that customers place in a corporation. Despite the blunders that microsoft pulled with Vista the customers STILL trusted microsoft in the end and microsoft came back with a home run with windows 7. The same applies to Sony with the PS3. It was a MASSIVE FAILURE but the one thing in the end that Sony was able to resolve was CONSUMER TRUST and that is why the PS4 is taking off. 

There are different ways to make money and it is possible to do it without gaining the consumers hate. It is TRUST from the customers that determines the future of a company. The reason you see a ton of gamers giving EA and Nintendo alot of DISDAIN has to do with the fact that they treat their customers poorly. Despite them having alot of success in their products they don't wish to build TRUST. EA wants to continually make iterations of their software to milk it dry. The WII was successful but Nintendo stopped giving out quality software to the userbase and in the end Nintendo only received more animosity from it hence one of the reasons that the WII U is flopping. 

Caps lock for cool.

Also that isn't how it works. The PS4 will be using a version which enables dx 11.2/opengl 4.4...NOT dx 12. 

If DX 12, like all previous dx needs hardware support, it won't take off. Dx 10 and almost 11 were killed for this very reason. Why was dx9 used for 10 years? Because the consoles did not support 10 or 11.  If this holds true and the better selling console only supports mantle over dx12, that is where devs will put their time.

One alternative though is ps4 and pc gets mantle, xbone and pc (again) gets dx12. It all depends on how easy it is or is not to use as all thse new flashy game engines that have just been made only support dx11 and like hell devs will remake a game engine that has not even been released yet.

Once again the PS4 doesn't use DX 12. Any GPUs that can support mantle will also support DX 12 so it pretty much makes mantle irrelevant for the most part. I see absolutely NO REASON why game engines won't support DX 12. The PS4 could also support DX 12 but microsoft won't let them hence why Sony created a custom API in the first place. 

There is no new god damned features in directx 12. It just exposes more parts that are in existing GPUs. I don't see why the PS4 can't support DX 12 for technical reasons. 

That's the thing you won't need new HW with DX12 form modern GPU/CPU... Unlike past versions... They've said it in the presentation... So that argument that was valid for 10 and 11.X is obsolete in that case...

about steam OS and Linux it reminds me my computer science teacher in high school in the 90s saying Linux will be dominating soon... We are still waiting... Actually market shares went down lately... And as a deterrent last time I checked (les than 2 months ago) windows version older than XP had more market shares still than Linux...

so even if by some magic trick every PC gamers were to switch to steam OS it would sill ne dwarfed by MS OSs and even apple...

and I have nothing against Linux or freeBSD I have run them on many aging rigs in the past... Bit I hardly see how it could take off without major support from OEMs and better driver implementation from the private sector outside of the community and I don't see it change for gaming either... They simply don't have the resources and the coordination major corporation have.... Heck without MS opening some of the code it would have even less market share today imo...

I'm not arguing with you - but could you link the part saying any cards that run mantle will run dx12 ? I didn't get to see the whole presentation so I've still not sure how much hardware is needed for dx12 etc.

Though from the sounds of it, dx12 is unique. All previous dx versions have brought in new features eg procdural rendering, tesselation etc. If this is just a performance boost then meh, my PC already trashes consoles so this will be a waste of time for PC folks =/

PS4 doesn't use Mantle. Mantle tries to make PC development more closer to the metal like console development. Consoles already are like that, Mantle would just add another abstraction layer for no gain. PS4 uses a custom API. Even XBox uses a custom API to, heavily based on DX, but not equal. 

DX 12 works on any modern era GPU.

Fermi, Kepler, and Maxwell. Basically if you're playing any modern games on PC your GPU will support DX12.