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I'm still curious about why they picked Arch over Debian or a BSD. The article claims it's because Arch is "lightweight," but then why not pick a smaller distr

I'm still curious about why they picked Arch over Debian or a BSD. The article claims it's because Arch is "lightweight," but then why not pick a smaller distro? My best guess would be familiarity (Valve can afford to buy the best developers, and lots of great folks enjoy the fiddlyness of Arch), hackability, and insanely fantastic documentation of Arch

kkfx 2y ago
I wonder why Arch as well, because it's a rolling distro so a terrible model for a commercial/production product/service, but why no *BSD is easy: bad modern hw support, Debian because of a rock solid base but extremely old distro with many issues especially in customizing it (I'm serious D/I and preseed are HORRIFIC). So I wonder why not NixOS since it's safe updates (an update essentially can't break anything, not necessarily true for database etc outside Nix but still much saver than any other non-declarative distro) and effortless rollbacks, customization etc. It's community is problematic right now, but it's still the most complete modern distro we have, with Guix due to the GNU design a bit behind and all the others FAR behind.
- mmis1000 2y ago
  Steam does a lot of upstream graphic/proton works. A distro like debian that update once a year is going to be a bad idea. It means a fix in graphic stack or proton will either, 1. deliver after a whole year, and get actually feedback after two years. 2. require a lot of backport so steam can actually use it. Rolling update in the other end, suits well with the changing nature of graphic stacks.
kbolino 2y ago
BSDs are off the table because Proton, the set of extensions to Wine for playing video games, uses Linux-specific system calls. Also, the major graphics hardware vendors don't release their first-party drivers for anything other than Windows and Linux. While open source drivers exist, they are not good enough for the latest games or the latest hardware.
- BSDobelix 2y ago
  > the set of extensions to Wine for playing video games, uses Linux-specific system calls. I have wine/proton on FreeBSD and FreeBSD has also a Linuxlator (a Linux system call translator), so no blocker here. But you are right, if you want a open-platform (opposed to Playstation), Linux is probably the better choice atm.
- craftkiller 2y ago
  FreeBSD package of proton: https://www.freshports.org/emulators/wine-proton https://www.freshports.org/emulators/wine-proton The steamdeck runs an AMD chip, which unlike nvidia, is an official first-party open source graphics driver with a decade of development behind it. It works for literally every game I've ever thrown at it. FreeBSD also runs the same open source driver.
  - kbolino 2y ago
    This is good to know. I'd be interested to see a comparison in performance of the same (recent) game on the same hardware with Windows vs. Linux vs. FreeBSD; I assume there will be a small penalty from Windows to Linux (in general) and a larger one from Windows to FreeBSD, just because the games are not optimized for the best way to do things on the other platforms. Syscall emulation gets you comparable functionality but not necessarily comparable performance, given there's mismatch between the underlying abstractions. On the driver front, even if it's just nVidia that's holding things back [edit: apparently they're not], that's still going to affect most PC gamers.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  > Also, the major graphics hardware vendors don't release their first-party drivers for anything other than Windows and Linux. https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/ lists official drivers for FreeBSD and Solaris (which also apparently are used by illumos). In fact, I suspect they have a better time than Linux on account of having actual stable driver ABIs.
  - 2y ago
aquova 2y ago
Keep in mind that they did originally pick Debian. SteamOS 1 & 2 were Debian based (used for their ill-fated Steam Machine and Steam Link products), then switched to Arch-based for SteamOS 3
- seba_dos1 2y ago
  Steam Link did not use SteamOS.
- NekkoDroid 2y ago
  > Steam Link I will not accept ill talk of the Steam Link slander /s I got mine for 6€ new when they stopped production. Don't use it much, but its nice to have that when I have a system no where close to an actual TV.

kkfx 2y ago

I wonder why Arch as well, because it's a rolling distro so a terrible model for a commercial/production product/service, but why no *BSD is easy: bad modern hw support, Debian because of a rock solid base but extremely old distro with many issues especially in customizing it (I'm serious D/I and preseed are HORRIFIC). So I wonder why not NixOS since it's safe updates (an update essentially can't break anything, not necessarily true for database etc outside Nix but still much saver than any other non-declarative distro) and effortless rollbacks, customization etc. It's community is problematic right now, but it's still the most complete modern distro we have, with Guix due to the GNU design a bit behind and all the others FAR behind.

mmis1000 2y ago
Steam does a lot of upstream graphic/proton works. A distro like debian that update once a year is going to be a bad idea. It means a fix in graphic stack or proton will either, 1. deliver after a whole year, and get actually feedback after two years. 2. require a lot of backport so steam can actually use it. Rolling update in the other end, suits well with the changing nature of graphic stacks.

kbolino 2y ago

BSDs are off the table because Proton, the set of extensions to Wine for playing video games, uses Linux-specific system calls. Also, the major graphics hardware vendors don't release their first-party drivers for anything other than Windows and Linux. While open source drivers exist, they are not good enough for the latest games or the latest hardware.

BSDobelix 2y ago
> the set of extensions to Wine for playing video games, uses Linux-specific system calls. I have wine/proton on FreeBSD and FreeBSD has also a Linuxlator (a Linux system call translator), so no blocker here. But you are right, if you want a open-platform (opposed to Playstation), Linux is probably the better choice atm.
craftkiller 2y ago
FreeBSD package of proton: https://www.freshports.org/emulators/wine-proton https://www.freshports.org/emulators/wine-proton The steamdeck runs an AMD chip, which unlike nvidia, is an official first-party open source graphics driver with a decade of development behind it. It works for literally every game I've ever thrown at it. FreeBSD also runs the same open source driver.
- kbolino 2y ago
  This is good to know. I'd be interested to see a comparison in performance of the same (recent) game on the same hardware with Windows vs. Linux vs. FreeBSD; I assume there will be a small penalty from Windows to Linux (in general) and a larger one from Windows to FreeBSD, just because the games are not optimized for the best way to do things on the other platforms. Syscall emulation gets you comparable functionality but not necessarily comparable performance, given there's mismatch between the underlying abstractions. On the driver front, even if it's just nVidia that's holding things back [edit: apparently they're not], that's still going to affect most PC gamers.
yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
> Also, the major graphics hardware vendors don't release their first-party drivers for anything other than Windows and Linux. https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/ lists official drivers for FreeBSD and Solaris (which also apparently are used by illumos). In fact, I suspect they have a better time than Linux on account of having actual stable driver ABIs.
- 2y ago

aquova 2y ago

Keep in mind that they did originally pick Debian. SteamOS 1 & 2 were Debian based (used for their ill-fated Steam Machine and Steam Link products), then switched to Arch-based for SteamOS 3

seba_dos1 2y ago
Steam Link did not use SteamOS.
NekkoDroid 2y ago
> Steam Link I will not accept ill talk of the Steam Link slander /s I got mine for 6€ new when they stopped production. Don't use it much, but its nice to have that when I have a system no where close to an actual TV.