After years of teases and delays, Valve finally launched the first Steam Machines last week. But two of its original hardware partners—Origin PC and Falcon Northwest—won’t be shipping those SteamOS systems. And in more bad news, Ars Technica found that cross-platform games perform 28-to-58 percent worse on the same hardware running SteamOS instead of Windows. It’s not just about the smaller library of available games—the same games perform worse on SteamOS.
Given these problems, it’s no surprise a few manufacturers are getting cold feet.
And, for once, some of what it can do looks genuinely useful.
The blog post reads, “We’re introducing a new WhatsApp app for Windows that loads faster and is built with an interface similar to the app's mobile version.”
Since the middle of February, customers of AMD graphics cards have been reporting situations in which Windows installations were entirely bricked after installing new drivers.