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Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

I believe Valve is working on a SteamOS 3 image for general purpose PCs and confirmed it publicly, but we don’t know the release date.

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This is great news, have to say i love they keep taking whacks at it.

Just remember its not out of altruism. It's very beneficial to Valve to be able to eliminate their Windows dependency. I will say, it is good when incentives align for the benefit of the consumer.

I don't think many people expect companies to do things out of altruism, but, as you say, we are happy when our interests and theirs align.

That’s the point of markets.

Three ways to get someone to do something:

* make them love you

* pay them

* make them fear you

Markets incentivize behavior that would otherwise require altruism or fear.

> Just remember its not out of altruism.

I’ve always been curious what point is being made when people say this. Care to expand on it?

At least in my case, the point being made when I say "Just remember it's not out of altruism" is to remember that it's not out of altruism.

Why is it important to be reminded of that?

If it's based on Arch (insane rolling release crap idea) then I won't be using it.

I've been using Gentoo Linux (which is also a rolling-release distro) since the early 2000s (maybe 2002?).

Even taking into account the libpng upgrade disaster in the early-to-mid 2000s, it's the most sane, most stable, least-trouble-free distro I've used.

I've wanted to find some other good distro, but all the ones I've tried either

a) Only ship ancient packages in their official repositories, requiring me to go to unofficial sources to get oh so many up-to-date versions of things.

b) Inevitably do something pants-on-head retarded as part of normal operation (nearly always during upgrades) and require me to bust out my Linux sysadmin skills to unwedge the system

or (sometimes) both "a)" and "b)".

You don't like rolling-release distros? That's fine, more power to you. They've been working fine for me for (oh dear god, I'm so old) ~20 years.

Gentoo stable (aka not ~arch) might be rolling release but can also be surprisingly conservative, often getting new versions even after Debian stable.

Gentoo testing (aka ~arch) does come with occasional surprises (although most common is some package update failing to build) but still worth it compared to having to deal with big updates or even reinstalls.

Yeah, agreed on both counts.

I run testing on my desktop, and stable-with-some-exceptions on my servers and router.

For the past couple of decades, I've been periodically looking for other equally-no-surprises distros so that I can stop burning so much power on building from source, and, man, I don't think I'm ever going to find one.

Of course it will be, that's what the Decks run now. They don't update in the same way or pace as regular Arch, though. pacman is basically disabled. You're encouraged to do everything through flatpak and appimage, and then the occasional blessed system update comes through for the other parts.

Using a non rolling release distro as a desktop makes 0 sense. You're holding off on upgrades, forcing 1 gigantic upgrade at once that will never be tested. Do you have a dev or staging environment for your desktop upgrades? Why not do small incremental updates all the time?

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