A Linux distribution like Ubuntu, Arch or Gentoo provides a platform for users to configure their system. The distro is a toolkit for finishing up a generic OS into the specific workstation needed by the user to do their work.
Steam Deck on the other hand has one job to do: launch /opt/steam and run things linked against libsteam. The end user won’t be doing anything with the OS itself.
Accordingly, the underlying distro just doesn’t seem that interesting. What about the distro could possibly be surfaced to the end user/gamer that they would care about?
It’s not like Steam will apt dist-upgrade their device: upgrades will be a complete reimage.
Ubuntu is good as a stable platform, but it's probably too slow moving.
If you upgrade often and you break stuff people will scream at you, so you need extensive testing of 3rd party games before you release an update of your os, which will naturally limit you anyway.
Since it's based on arch, I assume they will pull the latest software from arch, test it, and push out updates as they are verified.
With PC games, at least in my humble experience, you pretty much always need the latest drivers to run things well (especially so on Linux). With AAA games you will likely need to download several different driver updates within the first month to make it play reasonably well.
My understanding of Arch, is that it's more focused on providing systems which are more up-to-date/current than strictly "stable." [1] This is a pretty big advantage for Valve/Steam/Gamers since its less likely they'll be stuck having to back-port a sea of changes to a dying, but stable, LTS version. Instead they'll be on a platform with a community that prioritizes it. In all honesty, it'll probably make for a more reliable/stable gaming experience since patches will be easier/quicker to ship.
[1] Just to note, I'm not saying Arch is unstable in case someone reads it as that. I honestly was thinking of giving it a go this weekend (currently on a Debian based system), and this is probably the kick I needed to do it.
Steam (via Proton, mostly) already does a lot of development work, and it doesn't care which distro it's on. "Oh no, I updated my kernel and now my graphics drivers don't load at all!" is incredibly common, even with DKMS. Sometimes (mostly) bugs get fixed in Mesa or whatever. Often, new subtle bugs are introduced when a new Wayland/Pipewire/whatever feature goes GA. Having as few moving pieces as possible (by using an LTS distro, or at least something which isn't rolling with upstream and has a modicum of QA) lets you optimize the pieces you need to without worrying that this or that API is going to change underneath you.
Intel and AMD drivers do not have this issue, and Valve was smart enough to not go with NVIDIA, but "I want to be up to date" is a terrible experience.
Additionally, it generally makes for a much less reliable/stable experience (gaming or otherwise) because `pacman -Syu` may at any point break something because you didn't read the release notes, or "mostly" stable features were committed upstream then released so the userbase can put them through their paces and report bugs the developers didn't encounter.
Users of Arch/Fedora Rawhide/whatever accept this, but someone who buys an OEM gaming machine does not need or want this.
Just to note, I AM saying that Arch is unstable. I've been using Linux for 20 years, and I've had my time with Gentoo and Arch. 99% of the tinkering users do is reproducing the work of professional developers at distro vendors who spend a lot of time and effort making sure you never encounter the problems Arch users revel in fixing at all. Sure, you can tell yourself that means you "know" more about the system. But that is time invested that you could have spent doing REAL THINGS, and solving REAL PROBLEMS which are not un-breaking your distro.
> Sure, you can tell yourself that means you "know" more about the system. But that is time invested that you could have spent doing REAL THINGS, and solving REAL PROBLEMS which are not un-breaking your distro.
You can start a sysadmin career with that kind of experience.
Not necessarily on Arch specifically, mind you, but a ton of the experience I had that led to me getting my first tech job was breaking stuff and then figuring out how I broke it. It's a great learning experience.
Historically, sure, but with the leaps and bounds Intel and AMD graphics drivers have made (in no small part thanks to Valve!), we can leave Nvidia in the dust. With said FOSS drivers, "I want to be up to date" is a perfectly reasonable desire and does indeed get the best results as far as gaming goes.
That said, I agree that Arch wouldn't be my first choice for something I'd expect non-technical users to maintain. If Valve really wants a rolling release and close-to-cutting-edge kernel/driver versions, distros like openSUSE Tumbleweed could readily do that (with, at worst, an extra repo for bleeding-edge kernels, though I've yet to find that necessary on my openSUSE-running gaming laptop) without anything even vaguely resembling Arch's maintainability nightmare.
For the uninitiated; In programming, "stable" often refers to the programming interface or features a software developer can count on being available for a particular version of a given piece of code (library, server, etc). To the end user, "stable" often is taken to mean "How often does it crash? Rarely or never? It's stable."
First, it's worth keeping in mind that this Steam Deck is for all purposes and intents a fixed-spec system. Valve will control all of the most major components that make various end-user support problems appear (fixed CPU, GPU, RAM, motherboard, controllers, storage, etc.)
Now, with that in mind, if you use a system that has a release cadence like Ubuntu, if you want to fix issues, you must report them upstream and backport them into your current system. This is workable, but it is implicitly predicated on the assumption that the backport is the only way to deliver the fix to users in a reasonable timeframe. Otherwise you would have to wait 6 months for Ubuntu to release anything.
If you use a rolling system like Arch that is much closer to the very latest versions, the same process above occurs. But the window for those changes to appear downstream (from reporting the issue to the person receiving the fix) is much smaller. If this window becomes small enough, say "I report an issue and a patch is issued and released in 48 hours", it often means you don't have to backport or maintain the backport for long. If you're maintaining less backports concurrently, or even none at all, that means you have less workload and can focus on diagnosing real issues with up to date code.
Finally, and this is the important part: it doesn't matter for who they want to buy this. I don't think Valve intends this to be seen as a console, but as a portable PC, and I don't think PC gamers who use Steam (and thus are the target market) are unexperienced with the fact games might not work and bugs need to be reported. It's part of PC gaming culture at this point to complain about bugs in PC games. They actually will probably want one anyway because it will make their massive investment in their Steam library all the more available. And if you're some die-hard guy who likes this thing because it's Linux, well, Proton is basically as good as it's ever going to get at this rate, and it's objectively made Linux gaming massively more available, so, you just gotta deal. (Proton's very existence gives developers less of a reason to deal with native Linux ports when they can just target Windows and let the magical translation layer fix it instead. So actually the focus will be going into making Proton better instead to fix these issues, and that is actually probably the best way forward to ensure older games can be available, too.)
There are a thousand confounding variables in this equation and I'm sure you can line up to list them or whatnot. But the important thing here is that in all cases there are social expectations about how the maintainers of each upstream project and distro fix issues, and on what timescale, and how users respond to them. That's why they think this will work.
As far as why Arch, I think it’s a great “build your Linux OS” distribution that gives you a solid foundation to expand into the bespoke system of your dreams. On my desktop, I have a personalized computing experience using Wayland + Sway, PipeWire and only the software I use. That same DIY principle makes Arch a compelling option for anyone looking to build their own distro; Manjaro is one such example and it’s the distro I used before making the full dive into Arch.
You should be able to accomplish the same thing by using your own pacman repos with compiled binaries that have the right USE flags. They all have the same hardware after all.
Anyway, from my own experience, the video decoding performance of gentoo-on-rpi-64bit was somehow nowhere close to LibreELEC, on the same hardware. Perhaps there is a lesson to be learnt there...
As for the games themselves, Valve's been workin' hard on their Steam Linux Runtime containerized game thingy, and Proton sorta "containerizes" (WINE prefixes) things, so that allows for a reasonably stable environment for any given game which already runs well in those scenarios.
TL;DR: I doubt Valve will have too many problems keepin' this thing fairly stable from an end-user point of view unless you start hackin' around on it changing too much, then it's all on you what happens next. ;)
What makes you think so? The desktop environment will be powered by KDE Plasma.
>Accordingly, the underlying distro just doesn’t seem that interesting.
Valve is pretty clear that in addition to having a gaming mode they want the device to be a full-fledged (linux-based) PC.. hopefully with everything that entails.
>What about the distro could possibly be surfaced to the end user/gamer that they would care about?
Maybe nothing in "gaming mode," but in "desktop mode", it's Arch running KDE Plasma. It's essentially a Linux-based PC with a gaming option. (Or vice-versa, depending on your primary use case and point-of-view.)
Given the fact that the desktop mode exists and is leaned on as an important feature, I'd assume a lot of underlying functionality will be exposed.
>It’s not like Steam will apt dist-upgrade their device: upgrades will be a complete reimage.
I too am interested to see how they will handle this, but based on their website copy I would not be surprised if you could at least apt-get upgrade the desktop portion, with the gaming mode running either on top or separate from it.
So yeah, not exactly an exciting story, more like a practical solution.
So, what is SteamOS?
SteamOS is a public release of our Linux-based operating system. The base system draws from Debian 8, code named Debian Jessie. Our work builds on top of the solid Debian core and optimizes it for a living room experience. Most of all, it is an open Linux platform that leaves you in full control. You can take charge of your system and install new software or content as you want.