I stumbled across this page. Looks steam machines are about a month away for those that pre-ordered back in June. Valve must be very busy right now.
http://www.gamestop.com/pc/consoles/...3-500gb/121859
There will be intense scrutiny on the launch of steam machines. I see steamos/steam machines as a long term play. Overall I think it'll be good for gaming on linux.
I will bet that there will be plenty of people out there bashing the steamos/steam machine release. But that's expected as there is so much at stake.
There's also a lot going on with graphics on linux. The AMD open source drivers are getting a lot of work. The Vulkan project is moving fast. AMD released new proprietary drivers. AMD released new GPUs.