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Comment by jokethrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Interesting read! The A/B upgrade sounds a bit overkill, you can always just pop up a live distro or install a recovery system (on an old version) in a partition in case something goes wrong.

I recently moved to Arch after a few years of NixOS (preceded by years of Arch) and I think the fears of the author are misplaced.

Arch is definitely a very serious and mature distro and I'd trust them more than Valve.

The quality of the packages available for Arch is what made me move from NixOS. The main repos are updated really fast and AUR has a lot of useful packages.

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> The A/B upgrade sounds a bit overkill, you can always just pop up a live distro or install a recovery system (on an old version) in a partition in case something goes wrong.

You and I can, the overwhelming majority of computer users cannot. Valve clearly focuses on building for the average person, something that Linux distributions (as much as I love them) still don’t really do (well).

The system automatically recovering from a failed upgrade is essential in a low-maintenance OS at this point.

I can too, but I have better things to do than fix boot issues on my Steam Deck. I just want it to work.

No way steam deck users should be expected to boot a live distro to fix a botched upgrade. It needs to be seamless and behind the curtain.

> The A/B upgrade sounds a bit overkill, you can always just pop up a live distro or install a recovery system (on an old version) in a partition in case something goes wrong.

Could, sure, but we have the technology to make it unnecessary and disk isn't that expensive, so why not?

The Steam Deck is essentially a Chromebook for video games, so ChromeOS's unbreakable partition scheme seems like a reasonable idea.

> The quality of the packages available for Arch is what made me move from NixOS.

Can you give some examples of this please?

I generally find the NixOS packages high quality.

Unless you care about packages from lang package managers like pip...

You can get those, but its more work on NixOS if not already packaged.

I'm undecided on what I think about this since... I frequently get bitten by reproducibility issues of pip packages.

Anything packaged in nixplgs generally rarely fails for me, especially in the more complex cases of cuda/pytorch.

I suppose I'm more likely to want "pytorch except" where that except is a newer dependency or build flag improving performance.

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