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My own personal experience with Arch & Debian Sid is that Sid is noticeably more stable than Arch, long term. Maybe Valve thinks it's easier to address the stab

My own personal experience with Arch & Debian Sid is that Sid is noticeably more stable than Arch, long term. Maybe Valve thinks it's easier to address the stability problems on an Arch-based distribution rather than deal getting the latest versions of stuff on something Debian-based? I'm also sure that Valve's system is going to have a smaller set of software than I'd use on an Arch desktop anyway, so there's less surface area for stuff to break.

caslon 5y ago
It seems to me that most people finding Arch unstable find it so because they rampantly abuse the AUR. I'm not implying this is something that you, personally, would do, but it seems to be the case in most "Arch is unstable" scenarios.
- klodolph 5y ago
  I might have one or two packages from AUR, but mostly I don't touch it. I've had a number of discussions in meetups about stability and Arch over the years and have encountered plenty of people who switched from Arch to Debian or Ubuntu because of stability problems with Arch. I have a hard time imagining that it's mostly down to AUR. Maybe the people using lots of AUR are complaining a lot, and the people who don't just quietly switch distros?
  - deadbunny 5y ago
    Quite possible. The number of packages in the main arch repos is a lot smaller than the number in Debian/Ubuntu. I would imagine the kind of people you're talking about are leaning on the AUR or packages found by default (and thus more heavily tested) in Debian/Ubuntu.
II2II 5y ago
Has there ever been an analysis to see what is most likely to break on a rolling distribution? I have been using Arch for years, and have only had a couple of hardware related issues. If that is typical, rolling distributions may not even be an issue when the vendor has tight control over the product and can isolate hardware related packages in their own repository.
- klodolph 5y ago
  In my own experience, the hardware support that breaks is the GPU. For me, the GPU has broken occasionally (once every couple years) regardless of distribution, unless I'm using an Intel GPU or an older GPU with mainline support. I'm sure that Valve is going to install a much smaller set of core software than a typical desktop, though.
  - Nullabillity 5y ago
    Looks like the Deck is using an AMD GPU, which tend to have good mainline support.
jcelerier 5y ago
> My own personal experience with Arch & Debian Sid is that Sid is noticeably more stable than Arch, long term. I have the exact opposite experience, I used to use sid and had to do full-blown reinstall every couple months because e.g. dpkg would break too much and I wouldn't be able to install anything, or once, even boot and ended up migrating to arch despite the warnings - never had to reinstall the distro once since then
- klodolph 5y ago
  Do you remember when that happened? I vaguely remember that I used to experience problems installing packages in Aptitude and it would make me "fix" them without a way forward that I liked, but that was years ago.
  - jcelerier 5y ago
    eh, I switched to arch around.... 2013/2014 ? after an especially bad crash with sid. Never used aptitude, only apt-get. Since then I'm carrying the same "distro" from computer to computer.
    - klodolph 5y ago
      Aptitude is mostly a front-end to apt-get, but if you try to install some impossible combination of packages or get your packages in a weird state, aptitude offers solutions to fix it.
- Liskni_si 5y ago
  I've been running a mixed testing/sid install since 2005 and not once did I have to reinstall. Even managed to cross-grade from i386 to amd64 a couple years ago.
- seba_dos1 5y ago
  I'd been using Debian sid for almost 10 years and now use Arch for more than 5 years. Sid is definitely much more stable, as in "not requiring manual interventions", than Arch is. In fact it was actually a bit "too stable" for my taste because it effectively becomes frozen together with 'testing' right before a new 'stable' gets released. That said, never had to reinstall either of them. Had my system broken by pacman in ways dpkg would handle much better, but it was fixable anyway.

caslon 5y ago

It seems to me that most people finding Arch unstable find it so because they rampantly abuse the AUR. I'm not implying this is something that you, personally, would do, but it seems to be the case in most "Arch is unstable" scenarios.

klodolph 5y ago
I might have one or two packages from AUR, but mostly I don't touch it. I've had a number of discussions in meetups about stability and Arch over the years and have encountered plenty of people who switched from Arch to Debian or Ubuntu because of stability problems with Arch. I have a hard time imagining that it's mostly down to AUR. Maybe the people using lots of AUR are complaining a lot, and the people who don't just quietly switch distros?
- deadbunny 5y ago
  Quite possible. The number of packages in the main arch repos is a lot smaller than the number in Debian/Ubuntu. I would imagine the kind of people you're talking about are leaning on the AUR or packages found by default (and thus more heavily tested) in Debian/Ubuntu.

II2II 5y ago

Has there ever been an analysis to see what is most likely to break on a rolling distribution? I have been using Arch for years, and have only had a couple of hardware related issues. If that is typical, rolling distributions may not even be an issue when the vendor has tight control over the product and can isolate hardware related packages in their own repository.

klodolph 5y ago
In my own experience, the hardware support that breaks is the GPU. For me, the GPU has broken occasionally (once every couple years) regardless of distribution, unless I'm using an Intel GPU or an older GPU with mainline support. I'm sure that Valve is going to install a much smaller set of core software than a typical desktop, though.
- Nullabillity 5y ago
  Looks like the Deck is using an AMD GPU, which tend to have good mainline support.

jcelerier 5y ago

> My own personal experience with Arch & Debian Sid is that Sid is noticeably more stable than Arch, long term. I have the exact opposite experience, I used to use sid and had to do full-blown reinstall every couple months because e.g. dpkg would break too much and I wouldn't be able to install anything, or once, even boot and ended up migrating to arch despite the warnings - never had to reinstall the distro once since then

klodolph 5y ago
Do you remember when that happened? I vaguely remember that I used to experience problems installing packages in Aptitude and it would make me "fix" them without a way forward that I liked, but that was years ago.
- jcelerier 5y ago
  eh, I switched to arch around.... 2013/2014 ? after an especially bad crash with sid. Never used aptitude, only apt-get. Since then I'm carrying the same "distro" from computer to computer.
  - klodolph 5y ago
    Aptitude is mostly a front-end to apt-get, but if you try to install some impossible combination of packages or get your packages in a weird state, aptitude offers solutions to fix it.
Liskni_si 5y ago
I've been running a mixed testing/sid install since 2005 and not once did I have to reinstall. Even managed to cross-grade from i386 to amd64 a couple years ago.
seba_dos1 5y ago
I'd been using Debian sid for almost 10 years and now use Arch for more than 5 years. Sid is definitely much more stable, as in "not requiring manual interventions", than Arch is. In fact it was actually a bit "too stable" for my taste because it effectively becomes frozen together with 'testing' right before a new 'stable' gets released. That said, never had to reinstall either of them. Had my system broken by pacman in ways dpkg would handle much better, but it was fixable anyway.