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Why SteamOS Switched from Debian to Arch Linux

73 points by kristianpaul 5y ago

PikachuEXE 5y ago
Previous related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28119317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28119317
- dundarious 5y ago
  This RPS article adds nothing to that original PC Gamer piece. From the RPS article: > PC Gamer got the scoop on this. Valve designer Lawrence Yang told them: "So, Arch Linux, one of the main reasons - there's a couple - but the main reason is the rolling updates of Arch allows us to have more rapid development for SteamOS 3.0. We were making a bunch of updates and changes to specifically make sure that things work well for Steam Deck, and Arch just ended up being a better choice for them."
  - ekianjo 5y ago
    Even the orignal PCGamer piece was too much fluff to say "Arch has more frequent updates because its a rolling release". THat's all they had to say.
edgyquant 5y ago
Would not ubuntu or fedora be better if you wanted faster release? In my experience when I used to run arch (~4 years ago) I had breaking changes every couple of months where with Fedora I never had one except when I was the culprit by adding a graphics card with proprietary drivers.
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  No, Arch uses recent kernel and releases packages significantly quicker than what is available on Ubuntu/Fedora. I'd like to say I've been running Arch for 4 years now and any breaking change was directly due to my own action(s). With them largely in control of the OS, I doubt there would ever be a breaking change that could not be quickly reverted via adequate snapshots and ability to boot a backup root file image.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  Been running arch for nearly 10 years and the only couple of breaking changes I had were either from ignorance or not reading special update instructions. Also Arch is far more up to date than those you mention (sometimes by many months.) You're not confusing it with another distro?
  - Jasper_ 5y ago
    Do Steam Deck users have to read those special update instructions as well? That sounds like a pain. Why can't it just be automatic
    - nerdwaller 5y ago
      Them using an arch base doesn’t mean they’ll be running arch as if it was the same end user of a manual arch installation. I’d bet steam is using arch as the base and acting as canonical or whoever vetting (and automating) the upstream changes.
- nerdwaller 5y ago
  I’ve been running arch for 11 years, I’ve only had breaking changes a small handful of times, all of which were covered in an alert (email) of what to run to carry on. The only one that wasn’t was an upstream issue on chrome that was a secondary browser for me anyway. Ubuntu wouldn’t be a faster release, as it’s not rolling release. However Fedora would be in a similar step as arch.
- diffeomorphism 5y ago
  Ubuntu has Canonical to deal with. If that were not an issue why base steamOS on debian ( but runtime on ubuntu)? Same for fedora and red hat.
tempfs 5y ago
Debian testing is a thing and has to be more stable than Arch which was absolutely not the last time that I used it.
- speed_spread 5y ago
  Absolutely not what? Did you accidentally the bottle?
  - tempfs 5y ago
    If this comment is the best that you have to offer, why even bother? Are you drunk?
libcg 5y ago
I've been running Arch on multiple machines for 10 years at this point. Been through the systemd transition. In my experience there is very little breakage, and it's easier to deal with than a huge upgrade every 6 months or more. I'm guessing Valve will not deploy Arch packages directly to the Deck, but instead do weekly/monthly releases that are properly QA'd. It should be very smooth while giving them flexibility to deploy the patches they didn't upstream yet.
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  Even if they did release packages directly, it is trivial to create automatic snapshots that should breakage occur, relevant system directories can be reverted.
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    No, not if such breakage causes data loss and damage. Edit: Did everyone replying here forget we're talking about an embedded device, a game console, before responding? It behooves Valve to do QA above and beyond what Arch has done is what I'm saying. Valve wouldn't want to take the chance of just passing on upstream Arch directly. Devices may end up bricked, customers upset, etc. Testing is good actually. Furthermore, their hardware may not even be something Arch tests on, so it could literally brick the device if they just passed through updates.
    - likeclockwork 5y ago
      Highly improbable.
    - encryptluks2 5y ago
      You mean like those caused by Mac and Windows updates? No OS is perfect, so I'm sure like any device you use, making backups of data critical to you is still necessary. You know what else can cause data loss? Your hard drive breaking.
    - volta83 5y ago
      I use btrfs snapshot with arch just for this, and they've saved me multiple times. Its like Apple's Time Machine, but also covers system files.
renewiltord 5y ago
One unfortunate thing with rolling releases is that you shouldn’t fall too far behind. I had to move abroad for a bit and left my desktop behind. That’s fine. I’ve done this sort of thing before and I just boot it up, apt update, apt upgrade, and I’m good. With Pac-Man I hit a thing where it wouldn’t upgrade. It couldn’t get me up to date from a year ago. Had to give it up then because this sort of thing happens to me. Put a desktop in storage a while ago during the pandemic and I’m going to go back to it in a couple of months. It’s Ubuntu, I’m confident I’ll be fine. Could have been a Layer 8 error, but I’ve just completed my second decade of Linux in my early thirties so I kind of grew up with this stuff.
- secondaryacct 5y ago
  Yeah having been on many distro for 20 years I just gave up on Windows-like (or MacOS) upgrade experience and just split everything that is important in a NAS, everything transient personnal in a home partition totally isolated from the distro, and the rest in a distro partition that can break any day with no consequence. I even do that too with the NAS since ive been fucked before by an upgrade tainting the same partition all the data was in (stupid of me to trust btrfs). There s no attempt at building a comfortable product, but that s fine.
  - renewiltord 5y ago
    Oh recovery was easy because I follow the same separation of / and /home (and some other stuff, like I have /var/lib/pgsql/data on this other SSD). But ultimately I like booting up and getting to work. Maybe I’ll fuck with DKMS and Nvidia a little but that’s it. Oh man, rough luck with the btrfs there. I got bitten by the XFS zeroing out bug back in the day so I empathize.
- mickael-kerjean 5y ago
  Same experience and same conclusion except I did the move back to ubuntu a year ago. I guess there's 3 type of user, the one who care about latest and greatest, the ones who don't and the one who aren't sure yet. I went for the third one to the second one
- 5y ago
SilverRed 5y ago
I think that Fedora SilverBlue would have been the perfect OS for these kinds of consumer products. Arch is great and probably very rarely breaks but if it does, there is very few ways to recover the situation other than instructing users to reinstall the OS. With something like fedora silverblue, if an update fails, The system can reboot in to the previous OS image without issue. It also ensures that there is a known state for the OS without having to deal with the fact that users may have changed things which breaks an update.
- nerdwaller 5y ago
  > Arch is great and probably very rarely breaks but if it does, there is very few ways to recover the situation other than instructing users to reinstall the OS. Is there any citation to support this? I’ve run arch for 11 years, never once on that same computer did I have to reinstall the OS. On the rest that have been running it for 2y and 5y they’ve never had that issue, nor instruction.
  - ISO-morphism 5y ago
    I have the same experience with Arch. If anything has ever been borked a quick search and at worst Ctrl-Alt-F3 to get to a different TTY and running some commands has fixed whatever it was. I've never needed recovery or a separate boot device. Meanwhile, I've had a few fiascos with Ubuntu dist upgrades.
    - SilverRed 5y ago
      >at worst Ctrl-Alt-F3 to get to a different TTY and running some commands has fixed whatever it was. For the average user of a hand held gaming console you may as well tell them to pop the back off and replace the chips on the PCB. At most you could tell them to hold a button combo to factory reset but ideally you would want some way to roll back the whole OS state to the previous working version. Silverblue allows this to happen in a fairly elegant way by making the OS an image file and mounting it as read only so a roll back is simply mounting an older image.
  - 5y ago
vzaliva 5y ago
Summary in a tweet: "Arch updates faster than Debian."
9front 5y ago
Arch Linux is great! As a rolling release it needs "Patch Tuesday" type of updates. Falling behind just few weeks leads to a broken system. Over time too many .pacold, .pacsave and .pacnew files are polluting the filesystem, requiring manual intervention.
- AdrianoKF 5y ago
  I've recently discovered pacdiff [0] to solve that problem, which helped me clean up about 30 leftover .pac[diff|new] files from my everyday desktop machine. [0]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Pacnew_and_Pacsave#pacdiff https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Pacnew_and_Pacsave#p...
- zufallsheld 5y ago
  > Falling behind just few weeks leads to a broken system. Not really. Arch is rock stable, Even if you update only one every two months.
fosshogg 5y ago
how many kids with steamdeck will say "BTW I USE ARCH" after this?
- keeganpoppen 5y ago
  hopefully all of them ;D
mcbuilder 5y ago
I've run arch on probably a dozen or more physical machines (more if you count VMs) over the last 12 years. I can count the number of breaking updates on 1 hand. The talk about it being unstable may have been sort of true 10 years ago, but now it's just complete FUD.
- cookiengineer 5y ago
  I mean, everybody blaming Arch for being breaking and unstable...as if Debian or Ubuntu never were unstable. Quick to forget all the Mir, GNOME, wayland messups, huh? The huge difference with Arch is that it's usually recoverable, no matter what's broken. And that's what I like the most about it.
  - seba_dos1 5y ago
    Debian is more recoverable though. dpkg is much more robust regarding rollbacks and installation failures in cases that pacman (by design) simply does not handle at all. It's much easier to break something in Arch and not notice at all until things start layering up (although it also means it's easier to fix things up "just enough", while Debian will give you hard time until the issue is resolved completely).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
neilv 5y ago
The parting words of the article, on what seems to be a site for PC gamers, looks significant to me: > but I need a reason to get into Linux and stick with it. Valve’s work might get me there. How many PC gamers an article with this title will reach, I don't know, but getting more people thinking about "Linux" seems good (even if the open systems guts are in a somewhat closed appliance). Especially when gaming has been keeping a lot of expensive home PCs on Windows -- thereby keeping a lot of other things people do on Windows.

73 points by kristianpaul 5y ago

Previous related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28119317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28119317

dundarious 5y ago
This RPS article adds nothing to that original PC Gamer piece. From the RPS article: > PC Gamer got the scoop on this. Valve designer Lawrence Yang told them: "So, Arch Linux, one of the main reasons - there's a couple - but the main reason is the rolling updates of Arch allows us to have more rapid development for SteamOS 3.0. We were making a bunch of updates and changes to specifically make sure that things work well for Steam Deck, and Arch just ended up being a better choice for them."
- ekianjo 5y ago
  Even the orignal PCGamer piece was too much fluff to say "Arch has more frequent updates because its a rolling release". THat's all they had to say.

edgyquant 5y ago

Would not ubuntu or fedora be better if you wanted faster release? In my experience when I used to run arch (~4 years ago) I had breaking changes every couple of months where with Fedora I never had one except when I was the culprit by adding a graphics card with proprietary drivers.

encryptluks2 5y ago
No, Arch uses recent kernel and releases packages significantly quicker than what is available on Ubuntu/Fedora. I'd like to say I've been running Arch for 4 years now and any breaking change was directly due to my own action(s). With them largely in control of the OS, I doubt there would ever be a breaking change that could not be quickly reverted via adequate snapshots and ability to boot a backup root file image.
guerrilla 5y ago
Been running arch for nearly 10 years and the only couple of breaking changes I had were either from ignorance or not reading special update instructions. Also Arch is far more up to date than those you mention (sometimes by many months.) You're not confusing it with another distro?
- Jasper_ 5y ago
  Do Steam Deck users have to read those special update instructions as well? That sounds like a pain. Why can't it just be automatic
  - nerdwaller 5y ago
    Them using an arch base doesn’t mean they’ll be running arch as if it was the same end user of a manual arch installation. I’d bet steam is using arch as the base and acting as canonical or whoever vetting (and automating) the upstream changes.
nerdwaller 5y ago
I’ve been running arch for 11 years, I’ve only had breaking changes a small handful of times, all of which were covered in an alert (email) of what to run to carry on. The only one that wasn’t was an upstream issue on chrome that was a secondary browser for me anyway. Ubuntu wouldn’t be a faster release, as it’s not rolling release. However Fedora would be in a similar step as arch.
diffeomorphism 5y ago
Ubuntu has Canonical to deal with. If that were not an issue why base steamOS on debian ( but runtime on ubuntu)? Same for fedora and red hat.

tempfs 5y ago

Debian testing is a thing and has to be more stable than Arch which was absolutely not the last time that I used it.

speed_spread 5y ago
Absolutely not what? Did you accidentally the bottle?
- tempfs 5y ago
  If this comment is the best that you have to offer, why even bother? Are you drunk?

libcg 5y ago

I've been running Arch on multiple machines for 10 years at this point. Been through the systemd transition. In my experience there is very little breakage, and it's easier to deal with than a huge upgrade every 6 months or more. I'm guessing Valve will not deploy Arch packages directly to the Deck, but instead do weekly/monthly releases that are properly QA'd. It should be very smooth while giving them flexibility to deploy the patches they didn't upstream yet.

encryptluks2 5y ago
Even if they did release packages directly, it is trivial to create automatic snapshots that should breakage occur, relevant system directories can be reverted.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  No, not if such breakage causes data loss and damage. Edit: Did everyone replying here forget we're talking about an embedded device, a game console, before responding? It behooves Valve to do QA above and beyond what Arch has done is what I'm saying. Valve wouldn't want to take the chance of just passing on upstream Arch directly. Devices may end up bricked, customers upset, etc. Testing is good actually. Furthermore, their hardware may not even be something Arch tests on, so it could literally brick the device if they just passed through updates.
  - likeclockwork 5y ago
    Highly improbable.
  - encryptluks2 5y ago
    You mean like those caused by Mac and Windows updates? No OS is perfect, so I'm sure like any device you use, making backups of data critical to you is still necessary. You know what else can cause data loss? Your hard drive breaking.
  - volta83 5y ago
    I use btrfs snapshot with arch just for this, and they've saved me multiple times. Its like Apple's Time Machine, but also covers system files.

renewiltord 5y ago

One unfortunate thing with rolling releases is that you shouldn’t fall too far behind. I had to move abroad for a bit and left my desktop behind. That’s fine. I’ve done this sort of thing before and I just boot it up, apt update, apt upgrade, and I’m good. With Pac-Man I hit a thing where it wouldn’t upgrade. It couldn’t get me up to date from a year ago. Had to give it up then because this sort of thing happens to me. Put a desktop in storage a while ago during the pandemic and I’m going to go back to it in a couple of months. It’s Ubuntu, I’m confident I’ll be fine. Could have been a Layer 8 error, but I’ve just completed my second decade of Linux in my early thirties so I kind of grew up with this stuff.

secondaryacct 5y ago
Yeah having been on many distro for 20 years I just gave up on Windows-like (or MacOS) upgrade experience and just split everything that is important in a NAS, everything transient personnal in a home partition totally isolated from the distro, and the rest in a distro partition that can break any day with no consequence. I even do that too with the NAS since ive been fucked before by an upgrade tainting the same partition all the data was in (stupid of me to trust btrfs). There s no attempt at building a comfortable product, but that s fine.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  Oh recovery was easy because I follow the same separation of / and /home (and some other stuff, like I have /var/lib/pgsql/data on this other SSD). But ultimately I like booting up and getting to work. Maybe I’ll fuck with DKMS and Nvidia a little but that’s it. Oh man, rough luck with the btrfs there. I got bitten by the XFS zeroing out bug back in the day so I empathize.
mickael-kerjean 5y ago
Same experience and same conclusion except I did the move back to ubuntu a year ago. I guess there's 3 type of user, the one who care about latest and greatest, the ones who don't and the one who aren't sure yet. I went for the third one to the second one
5y ago

SilverRed 5y ago

I think that Fedora SilverBlue would have been the perfect OS for these kinds of consumer products. Arch is great and probably very rarely breaks but if it does, there is very few ways to recover the situation other than instructing users to reinstall the OS. With something like fedora silverblue, if an update fails, The system can reboot in to the previous OS image without issue. It also ensures that there is a known state for the OS without having to deal with the fact that users may have changed things which breaks an update.

nerdwaller 5y ago
> Arch is great and probably very rarely breaks but if it does, there is very few ways to recover the situation other than instructing users to reinstall the OS. Is there any citation to support this? I’ve run arch for 11 years, never once on that same computer did I have to reinstall the OS. On the rest that have been running it for 2y and 5y they’ve never had that issue, nor instruction.
- ISO-morphism 5y ago
  I have the same experience with Arch. If anything has ever been borked a quick search and at worst Ctrl-Alt-F3 to get to a different TTY and running some commands has fixed whatever it was. I've never needed recovery or a separate boot device. Meanwhile, I've had a few fiascos with Ubuntu dist upgrades.
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    >at worst Ctrl-Alt-F3 to get to a different TTY and running some commands has fixed whatever it was. For the average user of a hand held gaming console you may as well tell them to pop the back off and replace the chips on the PCB. At most you could tell them to hold a button combo to factory reset but ideally you would want some way to roll back the whole OS state to the previous working version. Silverblue allows this to happen in a fairly elegant way by making the OS an image file and mounting it as read only so a roll back is simply mounting an older image.
- 5y ago

vzaliva 5y ago

Summary in a tweet: "Arch updates faster than Debian."

9front 5y ago

Arch Linux is great! As a rolling release it needs "Patch Tuesday" type of updates. Falling behind just few weeks leads to a broken system. Over time too many .pacold, .pacsave and .pacnew files are polluting the filesystem, requiring manual intervention.

AdrianoKF 5y ago
I've recently discovered pacdiff [0] to solve that problem, which helped me clean up about 30 leftover .pac[diff|new] files from my everyday desktop machine. [0]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Pacnew_and_Pacsave#pacdiff https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Pacnew_and_Pacsave#p...
zufallsheld 5y ago
> Falling behind just few weeks leads to a broken system. Not really. Arch is rock stable, Even if you update only one every two months.

fosshogg 5y ago

how many kids with steamdeck will say "BTW I USE ARCH" after this?

keeganpoppen 5y ago
hopefully all of them ;D

mcbuilder 5y ago

I've run arch on probably a dozen or more physical machines (more if you count VMs) over the last 12 years. I can count the number of breaking updates on 1 hand. The talk about it being unstable may have been sort of true 10 years ago, but now it's just complete FUD.

cookiengineer 5y ago
I mean, everybody blaming Arch for being breaking and unstable...as if Debian or Ubuntu never were unstable. Quick to forget all the Mir, GNOME, wayland messups, huh? The huge difference with Arch is that it's usually recoverable, no matter what's broken. And that's what I like the most about it.
- seba_dos1 5y ago
  Debian is more recoverable though. dpkg is much more robust regarding rollbacks and installation failures in cases that pacman (by design) simply does not handle at all. It's much easier to break something in Arch and not notice at all until things start layering up (although it also means it's easier to fix things up "just enough", while Debian will give you hard time until the issue is resolved completely).

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

neilv 5y ago

The parting words of the article, on what seems to be a site for PC gamers, looks significant to me: > but I need a reason to get into Linux and stick with it. Valve’s work might get me there. How many PC gamers an article with this title will reach, I don't know, but getting more people thinking about "Linux" seems good (even if the open systems guts are in a somewhat closed appliance). Especially when gaming has been keeping a lot of expensive home PCs on Windows -- thereby keeping a lot of other things people do on Windows.