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

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.