Valve announces imminent release of SteamOS

[Second Summer]

Thousands of games, millions of users. Everything you love about Steam.
Available soon as a free operating system designed for the TV and the living room.

Steam is coming to a new operating system
As we’ve been working on bringing Steam to the living room, we’ve come to the conclusion that the
environment best suited to delivering value to customers is an operating system built around Steam itself.
SteamOS combines the rock-solid architecture of Linux with a gaming experience built for the big screen.
It will be available soon as a free stand-alone operating system for living room machines.

[...]

More here: http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/SteamOS/

I haven't been into gaming for more than a decade, so I might not know what I'm talking about, but this sounds like a potential "game changer" for the industry and gaming culture.

 

[beancounter]

I don't know. I usually use a mouse and keyboard for the computer games I play.

That might be difficult to do sitting on a couch in the living room.

 

[Snowcone]

Sounds interesting, but I'll just use Steam with the OS I have.

 

[RabbitLuvr]

Husband has been talking about replacing our Roku box with this, and using it for all our living room entertainment. I'm currently objecting on the grounds of:

1. If he's able to play his Steam games in the living room, I'll never get to use the tv again ever. Not cool.

2. It's neat and all to run our Netflix and Amazon Prime through a different device, but it MUST have a graphical interface and easy to use remote. I'm not browsing netflix with a mouse and keyboard from the sofa. I also can't use any remotes more complicated than a Wii remote. (We used to watch DVDs through our PS2, but I could only watch when he was there to work the controller for me. I just never got the hang of those things and can never remember what each of the 246116 buttons does.)

So we'll probably be waiting awhile.