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>They fixed the worst thing about SteamOS: It's now got an Arch base. I'm a little surprised they didn't go with something like Fedora. The kernel / drivers ar

>They fixed the worst thing about SteamOS: It's now got an Arch base. I'm a little surprised they didn't go with something like Fedora. The kernel / drivers are kept just as up-to-date as Arch but the rest of the system is a little more stable.

boomboomsubban 5y ago
Aren't up-to-date libraries fairly important for steam?
- dralley 5y ago
  I said "a little" - Fedora is still more aggressive with updates than Ubuntu or Debian. Just slightly less than Arch. The most important libraries for Steam are things like Mesa, which Fedora updates on a rolling basis along with the kernel.
  - flatiron 5y ago
    fedora will also patch stuff from upstream to include in their distro. for better or worse arch will try to upstream the patch and if they don't like it just keep an older version around if they don't accept it
    - dralley 5y ago
      Both Fedora and Arch share that philosophy, though. There are very very few patches in Fedora compared to the Debian ecosystem - and often the only exceptions are support for features that in the process of being upstreamed, like Firefox' hardware acceleration support that was added by a Red Hat engineer.
      - prg318 5y ago
        This is not always true. Fedora maintains over 100 RedHat exclusive patches for grub2 alone: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/grub2/tree/rawhide https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/grub2/tree/rawhide Some of these are pretty questionable, particularly disabling the use of "grub-install" on UEFI systems (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1917213 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1917213)
  - boomboomsubban 5y ago
    I don't know a ton about this, but I thought their major issue was games needing new versions of some random libraries. Being more up to date than Debian would still put you (presumably) years behind. Mesa and the kernel would be less important, as all the hardware needs to be supported by them on release.
    - dralley 5y ago
      > I don't know a ton about this, but I thought their major issue was games needing new versions of some random libraries. Being more up to date than Debian would still put you (presumably) years behind. That's not the case w/ the Fedora release cycle. Like I said, it's only slightly behind Arch.
- isatty 5y ago
  From my personal experience not really. I’ve steam running on an about 2yo old (at this point) Gentoo system that’s still working perfectly fine. I really should update it but I don’t do much on that system except play a single game.
  - boomboomsubban 5y ago
    My point is that new games can need new libraries, so they're not really factoring in your use case.
caslon 5y ago
dnf adds a layer of complexity that's really unnecessary; pacman keeps things much simpler.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dralley 5y ago
  Admittedly I've never used pacman, but how is the workflow more simple than "dnf update", "dnf install", "dnf remove"? I guess I don't understand what complexity there is to remove in the first place.
  - caslon 5y ago
    dnf is a large and complex tool to manage a format that has miles of backwards compatibility (and, for extra inconsistent fun, random cases of incompatibility, since they forcibly broke spec at some point, without changing the extension of rpm, so while there's the expectation of compatibility, many old packages just won't work at all and you'll have very little clue as to why unless you're familiar with the history of the format), and has a lot more to it than pacman. I'm not talking about the workflow for an end-user: Valve is definitely not going to force people to run terminal commands to update their systems. While pacman's update workflow is way simpler than dnf's, it's just not relevant here. I was primarily talking about the complexity of the tool itself, of updates, and also the complexity of packaging. Arch is a packager's distro, and much of the foundation Arch is built on is the Crux-style "as simple as possible" mindset. There's much less that can go wrong when you're doing much less with much smaller tools. I'm not hating on dnf or rpm, here, for the record. They're fine tools for their use cases.
  - NotEvil 5y ago
    It's all about how it works underhood. The speed of pacman is on another level compare to even dbf
awill 5y ago
I don't think either of those points are correct. 1. Fedora is not a rolling release, so you don't get every single kernel point release like you do in Arch. 2. Steam does not want to do a full Fedora 30 to 31 upgrade every six months. They want to roll. It's a better model, especially when kernel/drivers are improving gaming quickly. 3. Arch has a stable base and gets small updates every day. Regular software services tell us this is a better model than infrequent large updates. Things like RHEL are the exception, but take years of QA, and leave you with old drivers in between releases.
- Conan_Kudo 5y ago
  > 1. Fedora is not a rolling release, so you don't get every single kernel point release like you do in Arch. Wrong. The kernel and mesa stack rolls and is rebased regularly throughout the life of a Fedora release. Fedora is prepping for a rebase to Linux 5.13 for both Fedora 33 and Fedora 34 now: https://fedoramagazine.org/contribute-to-fedora-linux-kernel-5-13-test-week/ https://fedoramagazine.org/contribute-to-fedora-linux-kernel...
  - awill 5y ago
    Bingo, the kernel updates through the life of the fedora release. Then it stops. The life of a console is 8+ years. This needs to be supported for that long. Valve don't want to do multiple dist-upgrades over that time. They just want roll
    - Conan_Kudo 5y ago
      I suspect they're not going to do that with SteamOS. They'll likely freeze the tree and do effectively the dist-upgrade style process themselves.
- dralley 5y ago
  > 1. Fedora is not a rolling release, so you don't get every single kernel point release like you do in Arch. Fedora rolls the kernel. I'm on Fedora 33 (a full release behind), and yet I still have kernel 5.12.15, the exact same as Arch currently has. I don't have any custom repos configured. On rare occasions Fedora even gets new kernels faster than Arch, but usually it's less than a week behind. >2. Steam does not want to do a full Fedora 30 to 31 upgrade every six months. They want to roll. It's a better model, especially when kernel/drivers are improving gaming quickly. Fedora gets constant Mesa updates as well, it's not pinned. Admittedly it's 2 months behind Arch (21.0 vs 21.1)

boomboomsubban 5y ago

Aren't up-to-date libraries fairly important for steam?

dralley 5y ago
I said "a little" - Fedora is still more aggressive with updates than Ubuntu or Debian. Just slightly less than Arch. The most important libraries for Steam are things like Mesa, which Fedora updates on a rolling basis along with the kernel.
- flatiron 5y ago
  fedora will also patch stuff from upstream to include in their distro. for better or worse arch will try to upstream the patch and if they don't like it just keep an older version around if they don't accept it
  - dralley 5y ago
    Both Fedora and Arch share that philosophy, though. There are very very few patches in Fedora compared to the Debian ecosystem - and often the only exceptions are support for features that in the process of being upstreamed, like Firefox' hardware acceleration support that was added by a Red Hat engineer.
    - prg318 5y ago
      This is not always true. Fedora maintains over 100 RedHat exclusive patches for grub2 alone: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/grub2/tree/rawhide https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/grub2/tree/rawhide Some of these are pretty questionable, particularly disabling the use of "grub-install" on UEFI systems (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1917213 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1917213)
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  I don't know a ton about this, but I thought their major issue was games needing new versions of some random libraries. Being more up to date than Debian would still put you (presumably) years behind. Mesa and the kernel would be less important, as all the hardware needs to be supported by them on release.
  - dralley 5y ago
    > I don't know a ton about this, but I thought their major issue was games needing new versions of some random libraries. Being more up to date than Debian would still put you (presumably) years behind. That's not the case w/ the Fedora release cycle. Like I said, it's only slightly behind Arch.
isatty 5y ago
From my personal experience not really. I’ve steam running on an about 2yo old (at this point) Gentoo system that’s still working perfectly fine. I really should update it but I don’t do much on that system except play a single game.
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  My point is that new games can need new libraries, so they're not really factoring in your use case.

caslon 5y ago

dnf adds a layer of complexity that's really unnecessary; pacman keeps things much simpler.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dralley 5y ago
Admittedly I've never used pacman, but how is the workflow more simple than "dnf update", "dnf install", "dnf remove"? I guess I don't understand what complexity there is to remove in the first place.
- caslon 5y ago
  dnf is a large and complex tool to manage a format that has miles of backwards compatibility (and, for extra inconsistent fun, random cases of incompatibility, since they forcibly broke spec at some point, without changing the extension of rpm, so while there's the expectation of compatibility, many old packages just won't work at all and you'll have very little clue as to why unless you're familiar with the history of the format), and has a lot more to it than pacman. I'm not talking about the workflow for an end-user: Valve is definitely not going to force people to run terminal commands to update their systems. While pacman's update workflow is way simpler than dnf's, it's just not relevant here. I was primarily talking about the complexity of the tool itself, of updates, and also the complexity of packaging. Arch is a packager's distro, and much of the foundation Arch is built on is the Crux-style "as simple as possible" mindset. There's much less that can go wrong when you're doing much less with much smaller tools. I'm not hating on dnf or rpm, here, for the record. They're fine tools for their use cases.
- NotEvil 5y ago
  It's all about how it works underhood. The speed of pacman is on another level compare to even dbf

awill 5y ago

I don't think either of those points are correct. 1. Fedora is not a rolling release, so you don't get every single kernel point release like you do in Arch. 2. Steam does not want to do a full Fedora 30 to 31 upgrade every six months. They want to roll. It's a better model, especially when kernel/drivers are improving gaming quickly. 3. Arch has a stable base and gets small updates every day. Regular software services tell us this is a better model than infrequent large updates. Things like RHEL are the exception, but take years of QA, and leave you with old drivers in between releases.

Conan_Kudo 5y ago
> 1. Fedora is not a rolling release, so you don't get every single kernel point release like you do in Arch. Wrong. The kernel and mesa stack rolls and is rebased regularly throughout the life of a Fedora release. Fedora is prepping for a rebase to Linux 5.13 for both Fedora 33 and Fedora 34 now: https://fedoramagazine.org/contribute-to-fedora-linux-kernel-5-13-test-week/ https://fedoramagazine.org/contribute-to-fedora-linux-kernel...
- awill 5y ago
  Bingo, the kernel updates through the life of the fedora release. Then it stops. The life of a console is 8+ years. This needs to be supported for that long. Valve don't want to do multiple dist-upgrades over that time. They just want roll
  - Conan_Kudo 5y ago
    I suspect they're not going to do that with SteamOS. They'll likely freeze the tree and do effectively the dist-upgrade style process themselves.
dralley 5y ago
> 1. Fedora is not a rolling release, so you don't get every single kernel point release like you do in Arch. Fedora rolls the kernel. I'm on Fedora 33 (a full release behind), and yet I still have kernel 5.12.15, the exact same as Arch currently has. I don't have any custom repos configured. On rare occasions Fedora even gets new kernels faster than Arch, but usually it's less than a week behind. >2. Steam does not want to do a full Fedora 30 to 31 upgrade every six months. They want to roll. It's a better model, especially when kernel/drivers are improving gaming quickly. Fedora gets constant Mesa updates as well, it's not pinned. Admittedly it's 2 months behind Arch (21.0 vs 21.1)