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[–] setitimer 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

That's the downside of using a general purpose OS rather than completely custom hardware and software. There isn't just one Steam Machine, so any fix has to work on every combination of hardware that SteamOS might run on.

On the other hand, there's nothing stopping individual users from enabling this feature if they know it will work on their hardware, or even individual vendors supplying software to make it work. This really just means that the official SteamOS builds from Valve won't have it enabled.

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[–] ChillyHellion [S] 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

That's a really good point. It would probably be a better comparison to compare this functionality to Windows rather than to gaming consoles. Microsoft manages to do it, but Microsoft has more market power in general purpose operating systems, and Microsoft has been in the game for a long time. Maybe this is something that Valve will sort out in time as well.

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[–] setitimer 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

Microsoft manages to do it most of the time, but really, sleep and hibernate functionality has always been pretty spotty in Windows. I can't count the number of times I've opened my laptop bag to find a burning hot computer because it came back on and ran in a padded bag with the lid closed for several hours. And there is no version of Windows that can suspend in the middle of playing a game and resume it.

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[–] ChillyHellion [S] ago 

I know firsthand that Linux systems can have trouble recovering from suspend, but I hadn't thought of how that would impact a SteamOS system. I guess Valve opted to leave the feature out rather than deal with the stability issues. We'll see how that decision pans out in the long run.