The BIG picture

[coob]

I just thought i would through up a post here to say
BIG PICTURE = AWESOME!

Honest compared to the Xbox dash its 100% better, no market no "shit"! Litrally i booted it up to have a look and within 1 minute i was surfing around the menu's without a problem. The interface for typing is awesome and what better, THE STORE ACTUALLY WORKS (properly that is).

the internet on it is acctually quite nice and i could see me using it lying in bed with a cuppa, or watching some youtube videos! it also swaps seamlessly from controller to mouse and keyboard replacing all the buttons on screen with there counter parts.

But the important bit of steam the overlay! IT WORKS! and it faster more elegant than the normal one too!

Now this sounds good (it IIIIISSSS) but the one downside i know would cause problems is the system pull, my PC pulls around 3% cpu and 2.37gb ram idle with a few web pages, open steam big picture and it idles around 10% cpu and 2.44gb RAM. Now i think this is a worthy sacrifice for a program that works as smoothly as big picture does but i know a few people who either cant afford the tiny system drain or wont afford it (aka turns all windows settings to win98 mode etc).

Overall i am hugely impressed and with only two glitches so far (from valve!) seems like they have done themselves proud! (glitches were that the zoom in the browser is glitchy like all 9 hells and that the overlay doesnt like super meat boy)

What are everyone else's opinions? also TRY IT its free!

http://store.steampowered.com/bigpicture/ There you go dave

 

[Deep Blue]

Is this an update for the Xbox?

 

[Bloodnok]

Coob, yet again you forgot to link it...

http://store.steampowered.com/bigpicture/

 

[Skull]

Would be a bit more descriptive if you actually mention near the start that it's for STEAM

 

[Negator]

i tried it but dont really see the point. am i missing something?

 

[Skull]

Basically, it's a beta preview of what's to come - that is pretty much a valve commissioned LAN tower built to replace consoles on your TV.

Chances are these boxes will run a flavor of linux (Yes, valve has confirmed that they are taking Steam etc to Linux) and something most likely mini-itx.

 

[Negator]

meh. I still want my xbox to be my console. I suppose it has a niche market but i'm not fond of having a full screen interface when it isn't really necessary.

 

[.AC.]

Its quite unstable at the moment. While it is a beta and is an appropriate showing of what they are wanting to accomplish, using it now feels like choosing form over function.

 

[coob]

Idont know like, I suppose it appeals to me because its slick new and I can use it in my bed casually. I have read a few post on various forums today saying its unstable I haven't had any crashes on my computer at all! Which is a funny thing for me to say ;p. I didn't think steam had actually announced the "steam box" I thought the farthest valve got to announcing it was "if we need to release hardware to do what we think needs to be done then we will do it" or something along those lines...

 

[Negator]

Well i think they have had their hand forced with windows 8 being DIRE for anything that isn't a touch screen interface. I still need to clean that crap off the laptop.

 

[coob]

Yeah I wonder if.steam stopped support for windows would many game manufacturers actually develop for linux ;/

 

[Skull]

Well i think they have had their hand forced with windows 8 being DIRE for anything that isn't a touch screen interface. I still need to clean that crap off the laptop.

Not true - I've been using 8 on and off for a while now and when you're actually sat using it there is no difference in the flow to windows 7, you spend most of the time in the desktop interface and only ever hit metro if you use the start screen.

 

[coob]

So whats the point in using.what imo is effectively bloatware? I mean its cool and all that it is tablet friendly but if the desktop experience is the same what's the point?

 

[Skull]

It's not bloated. It runs REALLY smoothly. Like, Really smooth. And this is on my 5 year old PC. I've not done a clean install comparison between 7 and 8, however I'd actually guess at saying because of some of the things they've trimmed from it (iirc, DWM has been trimmed down, or cut from 8 completely), it would use less ram. (Don't quote me on that, I'm not 100% sure).

The Metro UI is part of the OS, yes. That does not mean that the OS has more processes running, or more ram usage. It's part of the OS, not some crappy imitation or install-on-top kinda thing...
Metro may be designed with tablets in mind, but that does not mean that it's desktop unfriendly. I've used a few metro apps and they're actually really cool. There's a few that are bit iffy, however that could be the version of 8 that I've got (since I think there's a newer version out there that some apps work better with). Once you get into the flow of using 8 then I would say that it's as good as 7.

The Dekstop part of the OS yes, is mostly the same. You may have a metro start screen rather than a menu, but aside from that you wouldn't realise you were using 8. A few other features it brings to the table though - multi-monitor task bars. I know many of us have had this for years now with UltraMon and DisplayFusion, 8 actually brings it in on an OS level. Also, Windows explorer has had the ribbon UI overhaul now, which is actually pretty decent.

Honestly, I would say do not dis it until you have tried it. And when i say tried it, I mean taking the plunge and installing it as a main OS and actually getting yourself using it, rather than seeing screenshots and dissing it.

 

[Negator]

I've been using it for about 3 weeks on the laptop while i was waiting for all the new parts to turn up. If you could just disable metro and have a normal old style start menu i wouldn't mind. But it is going to be the case that for a lot of us long term users stuck in our ways that it will take a 3rd party addon to bring back common functionality.

 

[Skull]

What "common functionality" has been lost exactly? I've not found using the Start screen to be any less efficient than using the start menu. Hell, most of the time on windows 7 I just hit start and type the name of the app and hit enter to launch. This works on windows 8 as well.

That covers applications. The control panel etc is actually accessible from the right hand hotspots. Windows explorer is on the default start screen. I don't see any change other than a layout difference?


Just saying... I personally think it's really decent and if it's cutting down on windows bloat then why not move forward? At times I would compare this to people complaining about facebook bringing in timeline...