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Comment by edgyquant | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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