37 ms·

Why Valve Is Switching from Debian to Arch for Steam Deck's Linux OS

117 points by jrepinc 5y ago

__s 5y ago
Curious why they didn't go with sid. Maybe because Arch is intended to be rolling release, so it's less likely that regressions are overlooked as "well that's what sid is for, catching regressions" (I use Arch on my desktop & WSL w/ Debian testing at work)
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Debian testing is the closest thing Debian has to a "proper" rolling release. It comes with some mild drawbacks like half-baked security support (sometimes security fixes can get tangled with complex transitions and thus be somewhat delayed compared to sid) and the converse issue of long feature/transition freezes when approaching a stable release. But it's not clear that Arch is to be preferred in practice.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  A lot of people have an irrational fear of Sid because it's called Unstable. And yet the use "rolling" distributions that often contains exactly the same software.
  - dv_dt 5y ago
    I think many steer clear of sid because of the security policy: Please note that security updates for "unstable" distribution are not managed by the security team. Hence, "unstable" does not get security updates in a timely manner. [1] [1] https://www.debian.org/releases/sid/ https://www.debian.org/releases/sid/
    - goodpoint 5y ago
      This phrasing is very misleading. Sid/Unstable and Testing track upstream releases. If an upstream developer releases a new version to fix a vulnerability, Sid gets the upstream fix just like other rolling distro. If a version in Testing has a vulnerability and Testing entered a pre-release freeze the fix gets backported. If a version in Stable has a vulnerability the fix gets backported. This is designed to provide the "best of both worlds".
      - dv_dt 5y ago
        While this does cover quite a bit, I think there is a little more that the security team does in terms of coordination, encouraging or even making timely package updates. It’s understandable that some would fall on either side of being ok with that gap or not.
  - Delk 5y ago
    I haven't been regularly using Debian in about 15 years now, so I don't know how things are nowadays. But back in the day when I was running Debian unstable on my desktop, temporary breakages in dependencies or in individual packages weren't that uncommon. I think sometimes some functionality was broken for a while when there was some kind of a transition going on. Those were entirely understandable given sid's nature, and it was much more reliable and functional than one would have expected from an "unstable" active development OS distro. It wasn't unstable in the sense of crashing or being generally buggy, and it was generally quite possible to use it as an everyday desktop. It did, at least back then, require more active administration and a corresponding mindset than a fire-and-forget stable release would, though. Sid might of course work as a basis for a distro for someone like Valve, but I think they'd need to do something similar to what Ubuntu does with freezes and weeding out issues before releases, or at the least have some kind of a delay before updates were pushed to non-testing devices if they based directly on the unstable release.
- kwk1 5y ago
  The drawback to using sid in this way is that every 2 years during the release freeze, regular uploads to it taper off or halt. Depending on the maintainer, uploads of new releases etc. may continue into the experimental branch, but those packages have to be pulled in manually, and continuing to upload in this manner is not always done. In principle, though, sid+experimental has the capacity to be analogous to a true rolling release.
- cat199 5y ago
  not at all involved here, but i'd think managment of the full system from source (as might be needed for low level support e.g. kernel/libc patches) would be easier on arch than debian. Too bad for most linuces we still cant build the base system in a single step like we have been able to do since the dawn of time in traditional unices.
- kop316 5y ago
  From [1]: This [Debian Sid] distribution will never get released; instead, packages from it will propagate into testing and then into a real release. sid is not a release, it is a staging area for packages to roll into a release. [1] https://www.debian.org/releases/sid/ https://www.debian.org/releases/sid/
  - LeoPanthera 5y ago
    This is pretty misleading. sid is a "release", it's just "always released". You can absolutely upgrade to sid, run it, and get daily updates, at the much higher risk of breakage of your system.
    - kop316 5y ago
      er...what? "This distribution will never get released; instead, packages from it will propagate into testing and then into a real release." is a literal quote from https://www.debian.org/releases/sid/ https://www.debian.org/releases/sid/
      - LeoPanthera 5y ago
        I understand what it says, but it's misleading. The packages are "released" in the sense that they are in a repository that you can use to install a functional OS. See for yourself. http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/sid/main/ http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/sid/main/
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    "Rolling release" is a bit of an oxymoron. "continuously updated and never released" would be more correct. It's like saying that a git repository that never gets version tags is "released on every commit".
unethical_ban 5y ago
TLDR Valve wants the more frequent update schedule provided by Arch, presumably so that changes they need can be part of official arch releases vs. maintaining their own branches of debian packages that would need merged periodically.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
  Yeah hopefully this means their effort is primarily going upstream as opposed to YetAnotherDistro/YetAnotherDebianRepository
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
Every time my friends show me arch, they always boast about how great their setup is (it's so stable, everything works out of the box !) then proceed to demo great features. But then this little thing doesnt work yet because, they say, they haven't configure it correctly. And this little one, it's nothing mind you, it never worked. And this one, just a small detail, but it broke yesterday. We have a different definition of the box. And so I go back to my Ubuntu LTS. I really want to try arch but I'm not 20 anymore, fiddling with my workstation is not as fun as it used to be. I just want to use it. Maybe with the steam deck it will become so battle tested it will turn into the most stable distro ever. I think their decision makes sense though, they don't want to have to craft every update and spend too much time on it. It's a good strat for them.
- voidfunc 5y ago
  This was pretty much my experience with Arch and long long ago, Gentoo (where I really started with Linux). Then I adopted Fedora and never looked back for several years. Even more recently I have been using WSL inside of Windows... and it actually covers most of my use cases well enough. I dont have the time or patience anymore to keep up with distro's like Arch, but I also get that some people love tinkering and figuring out how to make their system work like its some kind of puzzle. Edit: One thing about Arch, its possible to dig yourself a real bad hole if you don't keep updating regularly and I get that's sort of the point, but it can cause a lot of issues if for example, you go on vacation for a few weeks.
  - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
    Yeah, that could be a problem with the deck, consoles players are not great at keepong their stuff up to date. My switched stay offline for months. Besides, I wanna play, not update, so If I see an update prompt I delay, and if I can't I hate the product.
  - jyxent 5y ago
    Yeah, I was wondering about the Arch updates too. I had a machine that wasn't updated for a long time and had to go through the process of updating small bits at a time with archived packages: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_Linux_Archive https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_Linux_Archive
mgarfias 5y ago
Didn’t read the article, but I imagine it’s because Debian had gone straight to hell.
paco3346 5y ago
As an Arch user I wonder if this means I'll get better native support of Steam on my desktop. I wouldn't say there are any major issues right now but every little bit that makes the experience better is one more reason I can stop keeping a Windows install around.
smoldesu 5y ago
Frankly, this is a good move for both the users who don't care and the users who do. If you just want to own a Steam Deck for the Steam interface, you can do that. The fact that it's just an x86 Ryzen chip at the end of the day guarantees you at least 10 more years of kernel upgrades, and the current state of Proton makes me confident that it can "just work". For the people who do care about digging in, we can ascertain that they own $400+ enthusiast hardware, they want to tinker to their hearts content. Arch is just "better" at providing custom Proton builds, hunting down esoteric 32-bit libraries, and maintaining "gaming" software like Feral Gamemode, Lutris, Retroarch and Mangohud. No, it won't be stable, but gaming on Windows is not getting any better, nor will it get any better with Windows 11 cutting support for 80% of the world's active computers.
deng 5y ago
Is this the same Valve that still ships Steam on Linux with almost 10 year old libraries, which it never bothered to update? Debian is bleeding edge compared to that.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  steam.i686
dylan-m 5y ago
I'm really curious to see how they plan to deliver system updates. Arch always makes me think of highly customized systems with per-package updates. For a little handheld with limited battery life, relatively short uptime, and a straightforward use case (so only enthusiasts who are capable of jumping through hoops are going to care whether they can install some other system-level packages), that makes very little sense. So I'm really hoping SteamOS 3 uses ostree. I haven't seen examples of people doing that with Arch, but I imagine it's quite possible.
- swiley 5y ago
  The could release the source to steam and let the community fix the issues with it (since they've struggled so much with this.) The problem is that one of the primary selling points to publishers is that it prevents you from running games you might have on your machine (DRM.) That is: The biggest feature of steam besides configuring Wine for you is that it doesn't work most of the time.
oneplane 5y ago
I don't really see any argument against of for either distro here. And then there is de false argument that Debian 'groups updates in to a big update', which is also not really the case. I suppose the real issue I personally take is the wording used here; updates aren't "just updates" and haven't been for a long time, not even in commercial-desktop-land. You have updates that just do things like security and bug fixes, and then there are feature updates, and then you have major changes. In Debian's case, you don't get major updates of packages within a single Debian release. If you started with GNOME2 for example, you don't get GNOME3 until the next Debian release. But you do get GNOME 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 etc. (this is just an example, not a real versioning or naming scheme) What the article makes it seem is that you don't get minor updates either. Or bug fixes. Perhaps this is a result of trying to 'dumb down' the intricacies of downstream vs. upstream packaging, distributions and multi-project releases. At the same time, the whole argument doesn't make any sense anyway: if you are Valve, you control your own releases and your own distribution. It matters a whole lot less what 'upstream' vendor your use is doing, because you can always do whatever you want in your own distro. Or better yet, you can take what upstream does, and use backports to get major core changes into your current version. And if that isn't enough, you can take a look at the many bistro-derivatives, including the likes of Ubuntu; they are (sometimes loosely) based on an existing long-term distro but with a lot of local modifications/replacements on top of that. Because Valve is already making their own distro, it is unlikely to really matter what 'upstream' they use, the only big change would be the standards they uphold (be it packaging methods, like dpkg vs. rpm) or openness (DFSG vs. "I'll just drop this binary in here and see what happens later"). Better yet, if Debian wasn't a good fit, they could have gone with Ubuntu instead. Or any other derivative. It smells like a 'we wanted something different but not really deal with licensing/legal' combined with 'the new guy runs arch on his Thinkpad so yeah'. In the end if matters a whole lot less than your average distro-war; Valve still just has a distro, they still release it, and they still support it. It's just more hobby-like than production-like at this time. Switching to some SONiC-SAI type architecture would have made more sense.
LeoPanthera 5y ago
Arch I'm sure is a great choice when someone else (Valve, in this case) is configuring and administrating it for you. When you're doing it yourself, every Arch user seems to have a list of things which "aren't working today". I've been using openSUSE Tumbleweed for a while, which has all the advantages of a rolling distribution like Arch (and their repo is enormous), but also comes with Yast, their frankly amazing graphical administration tool which handles everything. It doesn't seem that common, at least in the USA, but I recommend it.
- COGlory 5y ago
  I hopped around distros, starting with Ubuntu/Kubuntu, and then I switched to Manjaro (my first rolling release) because I was sick of ppas for newer software. Manjaro broke frequently, however. Finally found my home on openSUSE Tumbleweed. It's great because I have tons of new packages, but honestly it's never broken once for me (and if it did, btrfs snapshots would let me quickly revert). I think that having SUSE behind it maybe helps the stability? But I have no concrete knowledge of the testing process that goes into Tumbleweeed.
  - doubled112 5y ago
    OpenSUSE does a fair amount of automated testing before publishing a new snapshot. http://open.qa/ http://open.qa/ here, and the OpenSUSE specific instance here https://openqa.opensuse.org/ https://openqa.opensuse.org/
- maxnoe 5y ago
  The thing is, if it doesn't worl on arch, chances are good that it doesn't work on any other Linux Desktop OS.
  - LeoPanthera 5y ago
    That has not been my experience at all.
    - 5y ago
lijogdfljk 5y ago
I wonder how long it'll be before this type of platform uses an "immutable" system like NixOS. Not that NixOS is the best for this right now, but the offerings of an obscenely concrete configuration based OS seem amazing for this type of hardware. Worse for the user experience if users want to self-install stuff, but still.
thrill 5y ago
Valve missed an opportunity to implement (again) the dual boot partition concept that worked so well for CoreOS, before Redhat bought them and "discontinued" the very good idea. Deploying a complete and coherent and well tested base layer that has built-in fallback, and then deploying games as signed containers would have been a robust system. Instead they picked yet another upgrade complexity mess.
- TomasBaneUK 5y ago
  There was a video from Collabora talking about Valve, immutability and different possibilities of deployment. I don't have the time to find and rewatch it but I'm not sure this article confirms that they will just do regular updates even if they say they are small. It could be interpreted in many ways. Maybe the video was only about the Steam Runtime.
- jatone 5y ago
  you're overestimate the complexity here. these are homogeneous devices it'll be very easy to update them safely. the other approaches are actually more complex and error prone due to bit rot. having a frequently updated system ensure you're constantly exercising the code paths involved. and your change differential for regression testing is much smaller.
yepthatsreality 5y ago
I’ll just install Debian on it anyways.
sammorrowdrums 5y ago
The reason is ChimeraOS (used to be GamerOS) which completely took over SteamOS’s position as a big picture Steam Linux OS, and the method used on top of Arch base was such that you as a user didn’t have to generally customise anything, and no manual updating etc. I can’t believe the article wouldn’t even mention it, very poor research as it was the case that proved that the Debian stable base was ultimately a poor choice for both keeping pace with the latest graphics stack and even worse for upgrading the base requiring users to reinstall. I’ve been using Chimera for a while now, and really excited to see Valve are going that direction. https://chimeraos.org/about https://chimeraos.org/about
- TomasBaneUK 5y ago
  Yeah no. You want to stick with the established base Linux distros that have corporate backing or people that know what they are doing. Don't swim down the river and like hardware peripherals don't use anything that associates itself with gamers.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
KingMachiavelli 5y ago
NixOS would be a great OS for the Steam deck. Arch certainly has a lot of advantages and was my go-to for the last 10 years before rencetly switching to NixOS. I actually used Arch as the base OS for a few linux computer labs (~100 machines) and it was both a joy and a headache. I really enjoyed being able to package proprietary software like Matlab & Mathematica. It was also nice that students had access to the latest software. However, the stability of the boot process and upgrades was not fun. Identical machines running what should have been the same configuration would drift over time. I used Ansible to template a lot of the configuration but it would basically be a full time job to keep track of everything. Random machines would end up with a broken Pacman keyring causing updates to fail, etc. Somehow partial upgrades were occuring which would break the boot process. While 90% of software was easy to package, the other 10% were research projects that would make a lot of assumptions regarding what system C++ libraries were available. So far with NixOS, it is very stable. Unless you are activelly messing with the bootloader settings, it's almost impossible to break since you can select a previous configuration at boot time. While packageing software is not as easy as Arch, having a per-application dependency tree is extreamly helpful. That said NixOS is currently going through a lot of changes and missing a few things: 1. No easy secure boot configuration. 2. Networking configuration is sort of in a flux between network-manager & systemd-networkd. 3. Packages are typically fairly up-to-date but the consistency is pretty variable. TLDR; I am curious how Valve is handeling OS upgrades on the Steam Deck. My experience in using pacman -Syu in a unattended* manner was anything but smooth. I would not be suprised if system partitions are RO and/or updated via a disk image.
- Dracophoenix 5y ago
  How would you compare Nix with Guix? Do you see the latter replacing the former?
  - KingMachiavelli 5y ago
    I only briefly looked at Guix. I think there is an arguement that it has a better language. Besides that I'm not sure what one gains compared to NixOS. Overall Guix looked nice but it is very opinionated on the free-software issue which really hurts its adoptability. It is also a niche sibling of an already niche distro so I doubt it would be used in (real) production any time soon. The community & related projects around NixOS are also very compelling. Structured flakes like devos [1] and developer tools like direnv/nix-shell make getting started very easy. I'm not sure if the same can be said about Guix (I'll admit I having been keeping a close eye on it). The darwin (MacOS) compatability is also a huge selling point since a lot of MacOS developers already need tools like Homebrew. [1] https://github.com/divnix/devos https://github.com/divnix/devos
TomasBaneUK 5y ago
I like Arch because it's a "containment" distro just like Manjaro. It keeps a lot of the most toxic gamer and ricing community isolated in some form. Thank god Valve picked that. Don't get triggered by what I'm saying, there are plenty of great people in the Arch community and the software is great but what I said is still true in many ways. The forums and even their reddit is very hard to interact with, I always had to walk on eggshells. Another great thing is their wiki and I use it all the time. Weird that the article doesn't mention KDE Plasma as I believe it's another reason why they need rapid development. They are finishing some huge migrations like Wayland and refining their theme and applications so it's even more accessible to less technical folks. I was scared to death when the reviewers were using Plasma docked because it needs a lot of testing before it's ready. That's natural when you are making big changes.
jraph 5y ago
I wonder if they considered openSUSE Tumbleweed as a base rolling release and if so, why they picked Arch. Is it because openSUSE Tumbleweed is less popular? Too "opinionated" / "customized, with Yast and all? Or just that (someone in) the team is more proficient in Arch? openSUSE seems more robust than Arch overall, and especially for updates for which you are not particularly expected to read the document before updatinopenSUSE seems more robust than Arch overall, and especially for updates for which you are not particularly expected to read the document before updating [1]. It would seem that just using openSUSE Tumbleweed instead of Arch would mean less maintenance work for Valve because of this. I guess they need to test and validate updates before pushing them to the device anyway. KDE/Plasma is also a first class desktop environment on openSUSE, so it would also be a good fit, since they are adopting this desktop environment. Maybe Arch is more "KISS" and therefore easier to hack? I also wonder if they considered Gentoo, which would help them tweak the (optimization-related) compilation flags for customized builds? [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance#Read_before_upgrading_the_system https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance#Read_bef...
4rt 5y ago
a lot of this recent media coverage seems like a ploy to negotiate cheaper windows licenses out of microsoft.
devwastaken 5y ago
The entire point of proton is gaming on linux. By nature arch linux will be the best supported platform for it now, which is a disservice to those that use the most popular distro's of debian/ubuntu. I cannot reasonably expect even technical users to configure arch correctly, nor be able to maintain or, nor have a good experience. Valve's taking the easy path that doesn't benefit the community. But I thought that was obvious from the fact they're putting out a handheld device that can barely play games.

117 points by jrepinc 5y ago

__s 5y ago

Curious why they didn't go with sid. Maybe because Arch is intended to be rolling release, so it's less likely that regressions are overlooked as "well that's what sid is for, catching regressions" (I use Arch on my desktop & WSL w/ Debian testing at work)

zozbot234 5y ago
Debian testing is the closest thing Debian has to a "proper" rolling release. It comes with some mild drawbacks like half-baked security support (sometimes security fixes can get tangled with complex transitions and thus be somewhat delayed compared to sid) and the converse issue of long feature/transition freezes when approaching a stable release. But it's not clear that Arch is to be preferred in practice.
goodpoint 5y ago
A lot of people have an irrational fear of Sid because it's called Unstable. And yet the use "rolling" distributions that often contains exactly the same software.
- dv_dt 5y ago
  I think many steer clear of sid because of the security policy: Please note that security updates for "unstable" distribution are not managed by the security team. Hence, "unstable" does not get security updates in a timely manner. [1] [1] https://www.debian.org/releases/sid/ https://www.debian.org/releases/sid/
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    This phrasing is very misleading. Sid/Unstable and Testing track upstream releases. If an upstream developer releases a new version to fix a vulnerability, Sid gets the upstream fix just like other rolling distro. If a version in Testing has a vulnerability and Testing entered a pre-release freeze the fix gets backported. If a version in Stable has a vulnerability the fix gets backported. This is designed to provide the "best of both worlds".
    - dv_dt 5y ago
      While this does cover quite a bit, I think there is a little more that the security team does in terms of coordination, encouraging or even making timely package updates. It’s understandable that some would fall on either side of being ok with that gap or not.
- Delk 5y ago
  I haven't been regularly using Debian in about 15 years now, so I don't know how things are nowadays. But back in the day when I was running Debian unstable on my desktop, temporary breakages in dependencies or in individual packages weren't that uncommon. I think sometimes some functionality was broken for a while when there was some kind of a transition going on. Those were entirely understandable given sid's nature, and it was much more reliable and functional than one would have expected from an "unstable" active development OS distro. It wasn't unstable in the sense of crashing or being generally buggy, and it was generally quite possible to use it as an everyday desktop. It did, at least back then, require more active administration and a corresponding mindset than a fire-and-forget stable release would, though. Sid might of course work as a basis for a distro for someone like Valve, but I think they'd need to do something similar to what Ubuntu does with freezes and weeding out issues before releases, or at the least have some kind of a delay before updates were pushed to non-testing devices if they based directly on the unstable release.
kwk1 5y ago
The drawback to using sid in this way is that every 2 years during the release freeze, regular uploads to it taper off or halt. Depending on the maintainer, uploads of new releases etc. may continue into the experimental branch, but those packages have to be pulled in manually, and continuing to upload in this manner is not always done. In principle, though, sid+experimental has the capacity to be analogous to a true rolling release.
cat199 5y ago
not at all involved here, but i'd think managment of the full system from source (as might be needed for low level support e.g. kernel/libc patches) would be easier on arch than debian. Too bad for most linuces we still cant build the base system in a single step like we have been able to do since the dawn of time in traditional unices.
kop316 5y ago
From [1]: This [Debian Sid] distribution will never get released; instead, packages from it will propagate into testing and then into a real release. sid is not a release, it is a staging area for packages to roll into a release. [1] https://www.debian.org/releases/sid/ https://www.debian.org/releases/sid/
- LeoPanthera 5y ago
  This is pretty misleading. sid is a "release", it's just "always released". You can absolutely upgrade to sid, run it, and get daily updates, at the much higher risk of breakage of your system.
  - kop316 5y ago
    er...what? "This distribution will never get released; instead, packages from it will propagate into testing and then into a real release." is a literal quote from https://www.debian.org/releases/sid/ https://www.debian.org/releases/sid/
    - LeoPanthera 5y ago
      I understand what it says, but it's misleading. The packages are "released" in the sense that they are in a repository that you can use to install a functional OS. See for yourself. http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/sid/main/ http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/sid/main/
- goodpoint 5y ago
  "Rolling release" is a bit of an oxymoron. "continuously updated and never released" would be more correct. It's like saying that a git repository that never gets version tags is "released on every commit".

unethical_ban 5y ago

TLDR Valve wants the more frequent update schedule provided by Arch, presumably so that changes they need can be part of official arch releases vs. maintaining their own branches of debian packages that would need merged periodically.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
Yeah hopefully this means their effort is primarily going upstream as opposed to YetAnotherDistro/YetAnotherDebianRepository

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

Every time my friends show me arch, they always boast about how great their setup is (it's so stable, everything works out of the box !) then proceed to demo great features. But then this little thing doesnt work yet because, they say, they haven't configure it correctly. And this little one, it's nothing mind you, it never worked. And this one, just a small detail, but it broke yesterday. We have a different definition of the box. And so I go back to my Ubuntu LTS. I really want to try arch but I'm not 20 anymore, fiddling with my workstation is not as fun as it used to be. I just want to use it. Maybe with the steam deck it will become so battle tested it will turn into the most stable distro ever. I think their decision makes sense though, they don't want to have to craft every update and spend too much time on it. It's a good strat for them.

voidfunc 5y ago
This was pretty much my experience with Arch and long long ago, Gentoo (where I really started with Linux). Then I adopted Fedora and never looked back for several years. Even more recently I have been using WSL inside of Windows... and it actually covers most of my use cases well enough. I dont have the time or patience anymore to keep up with distro's like Arch, but I also get that some people love tinkering and figuring out how to make their system work like its some kind of puzzle. Edit: One thing about Arch, its possible to dig yourself a real bad hole if you don't keep updating regularly and I get that's sort of the point, but it can cause a lot of issues if for example, you go on vacation for a few weeks.
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  Yeah, that could be a problem with the deck, consoles players are not great at keepong their stuff up to date. My switched stay offline for months. Besides, I wanna play, not update, so If I see an update prompt I delay, and if I can't I hate the product.
- jyxent 5y ago
  Yeah, I was wondering about the Arch updates too. I had a machine that wasn't updated for a long time and had to go through the process of updating small bits at a time with archived packages: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_Linux_Archive https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_Linux_Archive

mgarfias 5y ago

Didn’t read the article, but I imagine it’s because Debian had gone straight to hell.

paco3346 5y ago

As an Arch user I wonder if this means I'll get better native support of Steam on my desktop. I wouldn't say there are any major issues right now but every little bit that makes the experience better is one more reason I can stop keeping a Windows install around.

smoldesu 5y ago

Frankly, this is a good move for both the users who don't care and the users who do. If you just want to own a Steam Deck for the Steam interface, you can do that. The fact that it's just an x86 Ryzen chip at the end of the day guarantees you at least 10 more years of kernel upgrades, and the current state of Proton makes me confident that it can "just work". For the people who do care about digging in, we can ascertain that they own $400+ enthusiast hardware, they want to tinker to their hearts content. Arch is just "better" at providing custom Proton builds, hunting down esoteric 32-bit libraries, and maintaining "gaming" software like Feral Gamemode, Lutris, Retroarch and Mangohud. No, it won't be stable, but gaming on Windows is not getting any better, nor will it get any better with Windows 11 cutting support for 80% of the world's active computers.

deng 5y ago

Is this the same Valve that still ships Steam on Linux with almost 10 year old libraries, which it never bothered to update? Debian is bleeding edge compared to that.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
steam.i686

dylan-m 5y ago

I'm really curious to see how they plan to deliver system updates. Arch always makes me think of highly customized systems with per-package updates. For a little handheld with limited battery life, relatively short uptime, and a straightforward use case (so only enthusiasts who are capable of jumping through hoops are going to care whether they can install some other system-level packages), that makes very little sense. So I'm really hoping SteamOS 3 uses ostree. I haven't seen examples of people doing that with Arch, but I imagine it's quite possible.

swiley 5y ago
The could release the source to steam and let the community fix the issues with it (since they've struggled so much with this.) The problem is that one of the primary selling points to publishers is that it prevents you from running games you might have on your machine (DRM.) That is: The biggest feature of steam besides configuring Wine for you is that it doesn't work most of the time.

oneplane 5y ago

I don't really see any argument against of for either distro here. And then there is de false argument that Debian 'groups updates in to a big update', which is also not really the case. I suppose the real issue I personally take is the wording used here; updates aren't "just updates" and haven't been for a long time, not even in commercial-desktop-land. You have updates that just do things like security and bug fixes, and then there are feature updates, and then you have major changes. In Debian's case, you don't get major updates of packages within a single Debian release. If you started with GNOME2 for example, you don't get GNOME3 until the next Debian release. But you do get GNOME 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 etc. (this is just an example, not a real versioning or naming scheme) What the article makes it seem is that you don't get minor updates either. Or bug fixes. Perhaps this is a result of trying to 'dumb down' the intricacies of downstream vs. upstream packaging, distributions and multi-project releases. At the same time, the whole argument doesn't make any sense anyway: if you are Valve, you control your own releases and your own distribution. It matters a whole lot less what 'upstream' vendor your use is doing, because you can always do whatever you want in your own distro. Or better yet, you can take what upstream does, and use backports to get major core changes into your current version. And if that isn't enough, you can take a look at the many bistro-derivatives, including the likes of Ubuntu; they are (sometimes loosely) based on an existing long-term distro but with a lot of local modifications/replacements on top of that. Because Valve is already making their own distro, it is unlikely to really matter what 'upstream' they use, the only big change would be the standards they uphold (be it packaging methods, like dpkg vs. rpm) or openness (DFSG vs. "I'll just drop this binary in here and see what happens later"). Better yet, if Debian wasn't a good fit, they could have gone with Ubuntu instead. Or any other derivative. It smells like a 'we wanted something different but not really deal with licensing/legal' combined with 'the new guy runs arch on his Thinkpad so yeah'. In the end if matters a whole lot less than your average distro-war; Valve still just has a distro, they still release it, and they still support it. It's just more hobby-like than production-like at this time. Switching to some SONiC-SAI type architecture would have made more sense.

LeoPanthera 5y ago

Arch I'm sure is a great choice when someone else (Valve, in this case) is configuring and administrating it for you. When you're doing it yourself, every Arch user seems to have a list of things which "aren't working today". I've been using openSUSE Tumbleweed for a while, which has all the advantages of a rolling distribution like Arch (and their repo is enormous), but also comes with Yast, their frankly amazing graphical administration tool which handles everything. It doesn't seem that common, at least in the USA, but I recommend it.

COGlory 5y ago
I hopped around distros, starting with Ubuntu/Kubuntu, and then I switched to Manjaro (my first rolling release) because I was sick of ppas for newer software. Manjaro broke frequently, however. Finally found my home on openSUSE Tumbleweed. It's great because I have tons of new packages, but honestly it's never broken once for me (and if it did, btrfs snapshots would let me quickly revert). I think that having SUSE behind it maybe helps the stability? But I have no concrete knowledge of the testing process that goes into Tumbleweeed.
- doubled112 5y ago
  OpenSUSE does a fair amount of automated testing before publishing a new snapshot. http://open.qa/ http://open.qa/ here, and the OpenSUSE specific instance here https://openqa.opensuse.org/ https://openqa.opensuse.org/
maxnoe 5y ago
The thing is, if it doesn't worl on arch, chances are good that it doesn't work on any other Linux Desktop OS.
- LeoPanthera 5y ago
  That has not been my experience at all.
  - 5y ago

lijogdfljk 5y ago

I wonder how long it'll be before this type of platform uses an "immutable" system like NixOS. Not that NixOS is the best for this right now, but the offerings of an obscenely concrete configuration based OS seem amazing for this type of hardware. Worse for the user experience if users want to self-install stuff, but still.

thrill 5y ago

Valve missed an opportunity to implement (again) the dual boot partition concept that worked so well for CoreOS, before Redhat bought them and "discontinued" the very good idea. Deploying a complete and coherent and well tested base layer that has built-in fallback, and then deploying games as signed containers would have been a robust system. Instead they picked yet another upgrade complexity mess.

TomasBaneUK 5y ago
There was a video from Collabora talking about Valve, immutability and different possibilities of deployment. I don't have the time to find and rewatch it but I'm not sure this article confirms that they will just do regular updates even if they say they are small. It could be interpreted in many ways. Maybe the video was only about the Steam Runtime.
jatone 5y ago
you're overestimate the complexity here. these are homogeneous devices it'll be very easy to update them safely. the other approaches are actually more complex and error prone due to bit rot. having a frequently updated system ensure you're constantly exercising the code paths involved. and your change differential for regression testing is much smaller.

yepthatsreality 5y ago

I’ll just install Debian on it anyways.

sammorrowdrums 5y ago

The reason is ChimeraOS (used to be GamerOS) which completely took over SteamOS’s position as a big picture Steam Linux OS, and the method used on top of Arch base was such that you as a user didn’t have to generally customise anything, and no manual updating etc. I can’t believe the article wouldn’t even mention it, very poor research as it was the case that proved that the Debian stable base was ultimately a poor choice for both keeping pace with the latest graphics stack and even worse for upgrading the base requiring users to reinstall. I’ve been using Chimera for a while now, and really excited to see Valve are going that direction. https://chimeraos.org/about https://chimeraos.org/about

TomasBaneUK 5y ago
Yeah no. You want to stick with the established base Linux distros that have corporate backing or people that know what they are doing. Don't swim down the river and like hardware peripherals don't use anything that associates itself with gamers.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

KingMachiavelli 5y ago

NixOS would be a great OS for the Steam deck. Arch certainly has a lot of advantages and was my go-to for the last 10 years before rencetly switching to NixOS. I actually used Arch as the base OS for a few linux computer labs (~100 machines) and it was both a joy and a headache. I really enjoyed being able to package proprietary software like Matlab & Mathematica. It was also nice that students had access to the latest software. However, the stability of the boot process and upgrades was not fun. Identical machines running what should have been the same configuration would drift over time. I used Ansible to template a lot of the configuration but it would basically be a full time job to keep track of everything. Random machines would end up with a broken Pacman keyring causing updates to fail, etc. Somehow partial upgrades were occuring which would break the boot process. While 90% of software was easy to package, the other 10% were research projects that would make a lot of assumptions regarding what system C++ libraries were available. So far with NixOS, it is very stable. Unless you are activelly messing with the bootloader settings, it's almost impossible to break since you can select a previous configuration at boot time. While packageing software is not as easy as Arch, having a per-application dependency tree is extreamly helpful. That said NixOS is currently going through a lot of changes and missing a few things: 1. No easy secure boot configuration. 2. Networking configuration is sort of in a flux between network-manager & systemd-networkd. 3. Packages are typically fairly up-to-date but the consistency is pretty variable. TLDR; I am curious how Valve is handeling OS upgrades on the Steam Deck. My experience in using pacman -Syu in a unattended* manner was anything but smooth. I would not be suprised if system partitions are RO and/or updated via a disk image.

Dracophoenix 5y ago
How would you compare Nix with Guix? Do you see the latter replacing the former?
- KingMachiavelli 5y ago
  I only briefly looked at Guix. I think there is an arguement that it has a better language. Besides that I'm not sure what one gains compared to NixOS. Overall Guix looked nice but it is very opinionated on the free-software issue which really hurts its adoptability. It is also a niche sibling of an already niche distro so I doubt it would be used in (real) production any time soon. The community & related projects around NixOS are also very compelling. Structured flakes like devos [1] and developer tools like direnv/nix-shell make getting started very easy. I'm not sure if the same can be said about Guix (I'll admit I having been keeping a close eye on it). The darwin (MacOS) compatability is also a huge selling point since a lot of MacOS developers already need tools like Homebrew. [1] https://github.com/divnix/devos https://github.com/divnix/devos

TomasBaneUK 5y ago

I like Arch because it's a "containment" distro just like Manjaro. It keeps a lot of the most toxic gamer and ricing community isolated in some form. Thank god Valve picked that. Don't get triggered by what I'm saying, there are plenty of great people in the Arch community and the software is great but what I said is still true in many ways. The forums and even their reddit is very hard to interact with, I always had to walk on eggshells. Another great thing is their wiki and I use it all the time. Weird that the article doesn't mention KDE Plasma as I believe it's another reason why they need rapid development. They are finishing some huge migrations like Wayland and refining their theme and applications so it's even more accessible to less technical folks. I was scared to death when the reviewers were using Plasma docked because it needs a lot of testing before it's ready. That's natural when you are making big changes.

jraph 5y ago

I wonder if they considered openSUSE Tumbleweed as a base rolling release and if so, why they picked Arch. Is it because openSUSE Tumbleweed is less popular? Too "opinionated" / "customized, with Yast and all? Or just that (someone in) the team is more proficient in Arch? openSUSE seems more robust than Arch overall, and especially for updates for which you are not particularly expected to read the document before updatinopenSUSE seems more robust than Arch overall, and especially for updates for which you are not particularly expected to read the document before updating [1]. It would seem that just using openSUSE Tumbleweed instead of Arch would mean less maintenance work for Valve because of this. I guess they need to test and validate updates before pushing them to the device anyway. KDE/Plasma is also a first class desktop environment on openSUSE, so it would also be a good fit, since they are adopting this desktop environment. Maybe Arch is more "KISS" and therefore easier to hack? I also wonder if they considered Gentoo, which would help them tweak the (optimization-related) compilation flags for customized builds? [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance#Read_before_upgrading_the_system https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance#Read_bef...

4rt 5y ago

a lot of this recent media coverage seems like a ploy to negotiate cheaper windows licenses out of microsoft.

devwastaken 5y ago

The entire point of proton is gaming on linux. By nature arch linux will be the best supported platform for it now, which is a disservice to those that use the most popular distro's of debian/ubuntu. I cannot reasonably expect even technical users to configure arch correctly, nor be able to maintain or, nor have a good experience. Valve's taking the easy path that doesn't benefit the community. But I thought that was obvious from the fact they're putting out a handheld device that can barely play games.