SteamOS

[Duce]

"running on any living room machine" ??

I have about 50 games on Steam and they run ONLY on windows so what do they mean?  

Any living room machine running on an Intel CPU with Windows 8 as first layer?

Or, buy your games again on a new platform?  

There are nearly 500 games on Steam that run on Linux now.  While that's still a small % of the total number of games Steam offers, many of those near 500 are pretty big names (TF2, L4D2, etc.).

I've not yet had to pay one thin dime to snag the Linux version of any previously purchased Windows only game now offered by Steam for Linux, but YMMV.

I still primarily use Windows for gaming, but Steam for Linux is really improving at a rapid pace.  That being said, I give it about a 50% chance at sticking around on the long term solely because Windows comes on pretty much every PC built and Linux is still a niche OS as a whole (still under 2% or so market share in the desktop space).

[Duce]

I ultimately think creating a dedicated distro as "SteamOS" (eg, will likely be a skinned Ubuntu) will bite them in the rumps.

I liked the idea they originally had - just a client that was pretty much guaranteed to work on Ubuntu (and later, assumedly - other major distros).

IMHO, the whole factional nature of Linux puts a lot of people off, esp. non tech people.  I've always been a pretty big advocate for Linux, especially to people who have older hardware that want to wring some extended life out of it.  Time and time again, I hear "if it's all the same base OS, why is there 200 different flavors of it?" from people that don't understand the distro concept.

Just a few weeks ago a friend got a hand me down computer from his work.  Still a usable machine, but running Windows XP, which is coming to end of life here in another few months.  I recommended Linux for it, as all he really wanted to do with it is browse the web and the like.  He wasn't familiar with linux and spent the entire weekend installing various distros before calling me Monday morning shouting "I wasted my whole weekend trying 10 different variants of Linux and I can't tell the darned difference between any of them!  Which one should I stick with???"  

For us familiar with Linux, we all have our personal preferences - mine is Slack these days, but the sheer variety of distros can be extremely puzzling to people looking in from the fringes.

[Duce]

I am sure steam OS is a lot more than a skin for Linux.

It is, to some extent.  The "slingbox" style of being able to play games on the SteamOS machine is very much custom, but I worry it won't work well.  It still requires a host machine for the games to reside on, though games can be streamed cross platform.  If it works well, it'd be great.  People are missing the true value of SteamOS, and that's the cross platform streaming style gaming, but it's still limited to having to have a host machine with the native version of the game for your respective OS in your local network.  A Windows Steam game won't run on SteamOS natively or "over the cloud", the host machine still needs to be local.

The thing with this is, they are driving home the point you can have a SteamOS machine in your living room, a Linux machine.  If you have another Steam equipped machine on the network, be it a Windows or Mac one, you can stream the games from that machine and its' different OS onto the SteamOS machine even though they are running differing OS's.
Think having a Windows only Steam game on a Windows PC in your home, and being able to play it on the SteamOS machine.  A good concept in theory, and Valve are not foolish enough to think developers will ever adopt Linux for games like they have Windows.

A great concept, but let's hope it works better than how the nVidia Shield works - which is barely workable at all.