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How could you buy someone a laptop with windows on it? They'd have to pay a subscription forever? Or would it be like a phone, where it'd seem odd not paying every month.

Once steam boxes are out and popular, I doubt I'll be using windows again.

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Stream boxes run on Windows...

The parent was referring to "Steam boxes", i.e. http://store.steampowered.com/steamos

That's StreamOS, there's a different. Most of the Steam boxes come with Windows 8 (http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2/186-2840984-5406453...).

The Alienware Alpha is NOT a Steam Machine. It was supposed to be, but Valve couldn't figure out their shit soon enough, so they sold it as a normal small-form-factor PC before the hardware became obsolete.

Steam Machines won't be launched until at least November[0]. Anything launched before then, whether it has SteamOS or Windows configured to boot to Steam is just a PC.

[0] http://store.steampowered.com/sale/steam_machines

I thought they switched to debian or ubuntu.

Not sure, but you can get Windows to boot to Steam anyway, so the OS kinda disappears so you'd be fine with windows 8 or something for a few years.

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