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installed, I recommend using one of these virtual-machine containers to get
an idea of what desktop Linux looks like and how it behaves.
Linux is very powerful but also not nearly as well supported as Windows,
especially for custom peripherals. For example, while our K95 keyboard and
M95 mouse will operate under Linux, we won't have the luxury of pro-
grammable keybindings or mouse-button assignments like we do in Windows.
Other peripherals, such as NVIDIA's 3D Vision 2, are simply not supported
under any operating system except Windows.
That said, I ran Linux as my primary desktop for a few years when games,
video editing, and entertainment took a backseat to programming and sys-
tem/network administration. But with the release of some amazing games
and 3D Blu-ray titles, I made the switch back to Windows. I do miss the raw
power, flexibility, and freedom that Linux has to offer, and I may make the
switch again to Linux (or at least to a dual-boot system running Windows
and Linux) with the release of Valve's SteamOS.
SteamOS
Valve Corporation, best known for its Half-Life and Portal games as well as
its popular Steam software-distribution platform, has released its version of
a Linux OS, SteamOS.
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It was created partly in reaction to Microsoft's intent
to compete with Valve and partly due to Valve's intention to not be beholden
to the whims of an OS provider.
As I write this, SteamOS has not yet been released in final form, but you can
download the beta and give it a try.
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You can install it in either dedicated or
dual-boot mode, and it should run quite well on the hardware we assembled
in this topic.
SteamOS, like Ubuntu, is a free OS that anyone with an x86-based computer
can install and run. However, unlike Ubuntu, SteamOS is not designed to be
a general-purpose operating system. Rather, it is optimized for games and
other forms of digital-media entertainment.
Like Ubuntu, SteamOS is also a Debian Linux distribution derivative, but
unlike Ubuntu, SteamOS is being optimized primarily for living-room enter-
tainment. Given that, graphics and sound drivers are being tweaked to take
advantage of high performance and throughput. There are great expectations
that games may run even faster on SteamOS than on Windows running on
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