Why SteamOS Switched from Debian to Arch Linux
rockpapershotgun.com
rockpapershotgun.com
> 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."
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.
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.
Its like Apple's Time Machine, but also covers system files.
My Arch based desktop tends to break more often because it has a lot more stuff installed. Since I use it daily, though, it's pretty quick to roll with the punches.
I ran Arch but moved back to a LTS , it is not about stability but mostly I don't want surprises, my file manager works fine for me now , who knows the next version would remove or break something that will be maybe fixed in a different version but would also introduce a new bug.
For my IDE I keep 3 versions just in case some bug or stupid UI change is introduced, for people like my I think as stable base where you can update only the programs that you want/need is a better solution. I also have the option and used it to get backported kernels and nvidia drivers to get better vulkan support - I am at that point in live where I would dread to see that there is an update pending and there is a new kernel or video driver version available.
So right now, if i run a system upgrade (pacman -Syu) my system would not boot.
- i had to exclude linux (nvidia,nvidia-utils) from my pacman system upgrade.
- even then most stuff seems to work, except for steam... however, i don't see any log messages that indicate whats wrong.
- so my current conclusion is not to upgrade for another week or so and then try again...
Also, during the gnome 4 transition I had a similar issue that i had to wait "several" updates until the system upgrade wouldn't break my desktop.
[0]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Pacnew_and_Pacsave#p...
Not really. Arch is rock stable, Even if you update only one every two months.
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.
There s no attempt at building a comfortable product, but that s fine.
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.
It would be awesome if pacman had an easy way to check what kind of keys are missing, and would automatically try to obtain them...because sometimes I had gpg/pgp problems, too, and these kind of problems are kinda unnecessary.
I still use arch, but it's not without warts.
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.
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.
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.
I'm sure you could imagine countless ways that a update could possibly break things.
Reinstalled the OS and didn't even have to restore a single dotfile.
Edit: You may have to update your live USB packages first so run `mount -o remount,size=4G /run/archiso/cowspace && pacman -Syu` (cowspace is a ramdisk so make sure you've got the memory)
Edit2: I really hoped "and didn't even have to restore a single dotfile" was enough of a clue that this was tongue-in-cheek. I migrated to Arch a few months ago after two decades of Windows so as far as OS reinstalls go, this was like Microsoft sending me a giant settlement check with triple damages.
I don't seem to have those problems any more though.
It's not acceptable to say "oh its ok you can just open the terminal to fix and I haven't had an issue in 2 years". It has to be essentially perfect or able to recover itself from any kind of software fault without much user intervention.
Nope, the competition is GPD and other UMPCs. Valve is quite clear about the fact that this is a PC, not a game console. It's a portable gaming PC, but not a console. It's a general purpose computer. I expect a lot of people to install Windows on it, too.
For consumer level hardware this is essential to make sure it never ends up "bricked". The average user can not and will not reinstall an OS manually so if the OS gets in a bad state, the whole device is ewaste now.
NixOs is based on Nix, which doesn't use containers but links binaries against specific versions of dynamic libraries to resolve dependency issues and allow for reliable installations.
Collabora's SingularityOS they built for Valve for the original SteamOS was going to use ostree, but for various reasons (poor ones), they didn't ship that.
What are you talking about? Whenever things break in Arch, I fix them in my own install, either by downgrading a package that may be causing problems, or worst case with a USB stick which can enable me to chroot in the system again. Never had to reinstall anything from scratch.
On top of that, Valve will use its own repositories and you can be sure that for a SINGLE device, they will test things and make sure they don't break when they roll things out. That's a non-issue from the get go.
An immutable OS gives a huge safety layer by allowing all mistakes to be rolled back automatically.
This is not a Switch.
Also Arch is far more up to date than those you mention (sometimes by many months.) You're not confusing it with another distro?
Ubuntu wouldn’t be a faster release, as it’s not rolling release. However Fedora would be in a similar step as arch.
> 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.
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.