Valve boss Gabe Newell calls Windows 8 a 'catastrophe'

[Don Carlos]

Operating system Windows 8 will be a "catastrophe" for PC game makers, according to Valve Software's boss.

Speaking at the Casual Connect game conference in Seattle, Gabe Newell said the next version of Windows could mean big changes to the PC market.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18996377

Gabe

[GONNAFISTYA]

Well....full disclosure....he's only shitting all over the Windows8 OS because it will horn in on his racket and how Steam sales will be affected by the Windows Store...no other real reason.

[Mat Linnett]

i think there's definitely an element of that GKY, although having seen that execrable internal "Games for Windows" presentation that was doing the rounds a while back, I honestly don't think Gabe has anything to worry about there. Microsoft are looking more and more out of touch with the platform and its users as time goes by.

There's a couple of things that strike me as interesting about the story; politically, Gabe initially made his money as a Microsoft employee, then left to form Valve. That's adds a certain frisson to this statement.

And then there's the hint that Valve may be considering making their own Linux distro.
Linux is a useful tool, but for the longest time has been user-unfriendly at best. Valve bringing to bear a consumer focus on the platform could be just what it needs to make it a viable mainstream OS finally.

[menkent]

isn't google also working on sort of an android OS for PC?

[DTS]

... earning $150,000 (£97,000) a year making virtual hats.

And then there's the hint that Valve may be considering making their own Linux distro.
Linux is a useful tool, but for the longest time has been user-unfriendly at best. Valve bringing to bear a consumer focus on the platform could be just what it needs to make it a viable mainstream OS finally.

And with his experience working at Microsoft, he'd be well placed to make a good - oh wait, Microsoft never made a good OS or even a good program. Not to mention its notoriously overheating hardware. Even its mice were hot.

[bitWISE]

Well....full disclosure....he's only shitting all over the Windows8 OS because it will horn in on his racket and how Steam sales will be affected by the Windows Store...no other real reason.

I think the problem there is MS exercising control over what goes on your PC like Apple does. Sure, desktop mode is still mostly the wild west that we're used to. But isn't Metro a restrictive, approved apps only, model? With clunky mechanisms to switch between the modes and the inability to boot directly into desktop?

[DTS]

All MS ever do is make PCs slower. They made an OS that doesn't crash all the time, so that is progress, but that's not saying much.

[seremtan]

One harbinger of this future was perhaps found, he said, in the success of one Team Fortress player in Kansas who was earning $150,000 (£97,000) a year making virtual hats.

future ain't what it used to be

[Eraser]

In this pool of insightful comments, there's the noisy factor of DTS spitting his grudge like it's 1995.

[Nightshade]

Sounds to me like GFY nailed it (lol at the fat guy instantly understanding the other fat guy) and that Gabe's just being pissy about losing market share. 30% of a game's price going to MS does sound like the perfect excuse to increase what game companies charge, though. I wonder what the rationale is for that?

[DTS]

One harbinger of this future was perhaps found, he said, in the success of one Team Fortress player in Kansas who was earning $150,000 (£97,000) a year making virtual hats.

future ain't what it used to be

Right, I'll get started on making flying cars and jetpacks, non-virtual.

[DTS]

Win7 is the most stable OS out of any i've ever used, which includes 3.1, 95, 98, NT, 2k, ME, XP and Vista
It's also a fucktonne faster than Vista ever was. What we lack is a dedicated gaming OS with no background-running services and unnecessary fluff, which would be nice, although by then you'll mostly just have a powerful console.

1) Those are all MS OSs; it's more stable than previous MS OSs, yeah, I covered that in the rest of my post.
2) "Faster than Vista"? Vista was the slowest MS OS ever. ...

If you want to see an example of a non-bloated OS look at Workbench or the spawn of it, which I haven't used but must be good, AmigaOS. Some Linux afficiando wrote before on a site that AmigaOS is what Linux should be looking at to emulate - that's the metaphorical emulaiton, not the MAME type of emulation.

Edit: The point of mine you missed here, is the OS is so slow that you can tell it's "faster" or "slower", the OS should not be slowing the PC down, just allowing you to use it to run your programs. All that hardware power is wasted on a load of bloated sloppy programming that everything has to run through.

[menkent]

my win7 PC is more stable than and boots as fast as* the macbook pro I had for work last year. there's always going to be some boutique *nix distro that's The l33test ev4R!!!111 but who the fuck cares? no one's heard of it, much less uses it, and its speed is irrelevant because aside from a web browser (that you probably have to manually update and manually reinstall a load of plugins for every few weeks) it doesn't run anything that typical users want.


*granted, the macbook pro had a good deal less CPU speed and memory, so that may have something to do with boot speed... but there's no way in hell I'd drop $2.5k on a Mac Pro tower (+$999 for a monitor!) to get comparable power

[DTS]

"Typical users" want whatever MS tell them they should want. Or Apple, in the case of Apple-fanboys. "Typical users" are too sheep-herded to realise that MS and Apple's shit stinks. Yeah, you can say that Linux needs some (or even loads of) things that it doesn't have, that's not surprising with the MS monopoly going on, but it doesn't make MS's OSs any less shit.

[menkent]

typical users want: web browsing with support for a wide range of embedded media, word processing, a decent media player, a good set of drivers for accessories, and maybe some spreadsheety slideshowy lite-business stuff (but most of that can be done online with google docs and the like). i've never seen a linux distro that did more than one of those without spending hours installing crap from repositories and generally reinstalling with each major update.
i'm not knocking linux. i've had a secondary linux box for playing around (and some coding back in college) for most of the last fourteen years. but you can't compare them to Windows or MacOS. it's like saying a bicycle uses less gas than a car.

[scared?]

I seriously don't think my win7 machine has ever crashed....kids are always playing games and shit on it...never seen a crash in event viewer or otherwise...

[bitWISE]

I love 7. Might not even bother upgrading.

[seremtan]

win7 64bit is the shiznit. now if only garmin could either make a driver for it that didn't cause BSOD, or properly inform their customers that the OS already has a perfectly good driver

[Nightshade]

lol DTS, just STFU you retard.

[Eraser]

Oh, the noise is getting louder...

[Tsakali]

I love 7. Might not even bother upgrading.

they'll just quit supporting it, and probably the slower win8 picks up traction, the sooner w7 will be cock blocked. Is there a support date expiration planned for win7 yet?

[Captain]

There's no reason to downgrade to W8. Just wait for Windows 9 ror

[obsidian]

It's almost a tradition for Microsoft to fuck up every other version of Windows.

[seremtan]

I love 7. Might not even bother upgrading.

they'll just quit supporting it, and probably the slower win8 picks up traction, the sooner w7 will be cock blocked. Is there a support date expiration planned for win7 yet?

lol, i still use xp pro at work (though others have win7), and still get regular patches

[MKJ]

yes. itll be a long time till they ditch win7 support.
our company is MS Gold Partner so we're oblogated to upgrade to the latest version of any MS software within a year of release.
so I guess we'll be Metroing soon.