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Well... Arch community is very kind and very active, but Arch is a rolling distro, a paradigm essentially incompatible with stable production systems. I wonder

by kkfx 2y ago

Well... Arch community is very kind and very active, but Arch is a rolling distro, a paradigm essentially incompatible with stable production systems. I wonder why not choosing NixOS or a custom Guix System (due to the non-free stuff) instead since their model offer effortless rollbacks and safe updates.

alias_neo 2y ago
Valve could offer their own device snapshotting/versioning, and frankly it may not even be a real issue since the device can just be reinstalled with the "factory image" at worst. They have been putting a lot of work into upstream packages to provide the Proton compatibility, and they'll likely want to keep getting those packages into users hands as quickly as possible. For fast moving development in this space, it makes sense to have a base of packages that aren't outdated right out of the gate.
- kkfx 2y ago
  Reinstalling from images is resource intensive and take time and bandwidth than a simple "reboot into the old verision", while with NixOS all they need is provide their own channel. On Arch they could provide their own repos as well, of course, but a thing is keeping some derivations in sync, testing them etc, another is keeping a classic distro "de-facto semi-fork", it's again an order of magnitude more complex, resource intensive and time consuming. It's much simpler and faster a declarative ecosystem and developing with it then the classic model, astonishingly faster and simpler. I know many have never tried so do not know, but the IT at Valve I expect should be a bit beyond "the many who have never tried", so well, just curious why.
  - alias_neo 2y ago
    I understand where you're coming from, I love NixOS and it seems like it could be well suited in a way, but it is extremely complex to learn Nix, and it doesn't have the scale or support Arch does, on top of being a massive departure from the typical distro and I think Valve want the Steam Deck to be a straight up portable PC. Being pragmatic about it, I just don't think NixOS was ever a contender.

by kkfx 2y ago

alias_neo 2y ago

Valve could offer their own device snapshotting/versioning, and frankly it may not even be a real issue since the device can just be reinstalled with the "factory image" at worst. They have been putting a lot of work into upstream packages to provide the Proton compatibility, and they'll likely want to keep getting those packages into users hands as quickly as possible. For fast moving development in this space, it makes sense to have a base of packages that aren't outdated right out of the gate.

kkfx 2y ago
Reinstalling from images is resource intensive and take time and bandwidth than a simple "reboot into the old verision", while with NixOS all they need is provide their own channel. On Arch they could provide their own repos as well, of course, but a thing is keeping some derivations in sync, testing them etc, another is keeping a classic distro "de-facto semi-fork", it's again an order of magnitude more complex, resource intensive and time consuming. It's much simpler and faster a declarative ecosystem and developing with it then the classic model, astonishingly faster and simpler. I know many have never tried so do not know, but the IT at Valve I expect should be a bit beyond "the many who have never tried", so well, just curious why.
- alias_neo 2y ago
  I understand where you're coming from, I love NixOS and it seems like it could be well suited in a way, but it is extremely complex to learn Nix, and it doesn't have the scale or support Arch does, on top of being a massive departure from the typical distro and I think Valve want the Steam Deck to be a straight up portable PC. Being pragmatic about it, I just don't think NixOS was ever a contender.