I'm going to show my lack of linux history here... why not Debian? Are they really building something that is native to ubuntu that you wouldn't work in <insert-debian-fork crunchbang or mint>?
But... # pacman -S nvidia nvidia-utils
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NVIDIA
Is all I did for the work install, took longer to finish the setup but thats more due to me having 2 monitors than anything else, one is mad simple. Can't speak to the ati stuff. I know SuSe is about as simple as well.
Yes. Yes it is.
I'd say Arch is pretty simple, just not easy [0]. Easy would be inserting the install cd, walking away, coming back and being able to hit the internet. Which is fine, if that's all you want to do. Arch installation isn't easy, it's simple, and more importantly it works. When I install windows from scratch you know what it comes with? Nothing. No drivers, no programs, nothing. Not even an ethernet driver for me to get the other drivers. Arch comes with all of it out of the box, you just need to go through the tutorial so you can choose which things in the box you actually want.
Arch is simple in that if I go to any scary looking file in /etc and open it up I won't be completely baffled by what's in it. I can randomly shut down any service running on my machine and I know my box will keep chugging and I can recover from it. There's no weird services that I don't know what they do, no scripts that run on startup that I can't understand let alone find. There aren't inter-dependencies that I don't know about. When I run ps aux I can account for every single thing running.
And even then, the package management is simple AND easy. I have never had a problem installing something with pacman, not once. There's this oft-repeated line about upgrades breaking systems, but I've never seen it. If an upgrade fails I look at the front page of archlinux.org and see that some manual commands are needed, copy-paste them and voila things work. I've used arch on three computers now, two laptops and a very old desktop, and have never had any problems. I know there's going to be some horror stories, but I can counter any of them with a quick search for the same in windows. Problems upgrading happen, but they're not common, and not something that's inherent to Arch like I've seen people suggest.
[ ] Desktop
[ ] Server
[ ] Embedded
[ ] Custom
This ultimately comes down to a user interface issue, but it's different than the kind of user interface often associated with the HN crowd. It's more like an API user interface, be that a web or programming library API. A crucial feature of good APIs is 'graceful degradation' in terms of easiness/control. Take a look at the libcURL library[1]. cURL has 3 levels of access: "easy," "share," and "multi." If you don't care about a lot of features and just want to download a webpage, the easy interface will get you what you want in a few lines of code. If you have something more complicated, you can go all the way down to the multi interface to access many of the raw functions of the API.
They key takeaway is giving the user control of her complexity level. If I'm a sysadmin compiling an image meant to be deployed on thousands of servers, then something like Arch would be pretty great -- I can fine-tune things how I want. If I'm just a random developer, then I would like to stick to 'sane defaults,' with the option to revisit those defaults later if needed.
I really don't care what cron I have, don't force me to pick one against my will.
I dunno what I'm doing that's so magical; I just install the dang thing.
But having installed Linux back in 1997 and dealing with X11Rwhatever it was back then and minicom and all that jazz, kinda makes my view of hard a bit off of what most people view as hard.
One nice thing about Arch though is the ArchWiki: it has copious amounts of documentation on software that is usually applicable to other distros. A good example is https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Awesome
They wrote on that post that they do indeed want to support other distro's in the future. I suspect they just want to get some stability before committing to a wide range of distro's. Ubuntu is very popular, so it makes sense.
Distro's can take the .deb files and extract them through their package managers to fit their systems, probably without much hassle.
Saying that, Ubuntu is popular, there may be some commercial connections with Canonical, and picking one distribution to do the testing should streamline their efforts.
In any case, the client may very well run on Debian, it just won't be officially tested or certified by Valve (for now).
I was seriously hoping for a Valve distro, which would be perfectly tuned for all things media (they hired the SDL guy). Maybe have Steam as the package manager for everything.
Instead, they just joined a camp - this is not good.
The other way they could have approached it was to support Android - not as a playing system, but rather as a console device connected to peripherals - and sponsored some project to run Android apk on Linux with access to the sound and graphics layer (SDL?? )
This is exactly what they should be doing, not further fragmenting an already gratuitously fragmented market.
Every time some commercial vendor makes a move into Linux and people start bickering about distros I just /facepalm.
However, the Linux market is already fragmented. And even worse, it is deeply religious. Just google for the bickering that ensued when Meego chose rpm over deb. People have already started talking about why not Arch, etc.
The point that you are missing is that, if anyone could unify the Linux fragmentation it is Valve. Steam is a killer app, and I can totally see people migrating towards a distro built around it (and laptops certified for it).
I want Valve to succeed - how will it succeed in a severely fragmented market ? Can it justify the cost of its Linux team then ? Android is having a similar problems in version fragmentation. People have posted articles here on how they are unable to justify multiple version (distro?) development. Multiply that problem by a thousand - different audio toolkits, poor driver compatibilities. I am not able to see how they are going to succeed, unless they unify atleast the multimedia toolkits (something like CoreAudio)
Anybody willing to switch distros just to run a game might as well just install a Windows partition.
Would certainly take me significantly more than half an hour to switch to Fedora though since I would need to re-learn the package manager, move all my settings across and figure out the subtle differences in configuration etc.
If Valve wants to make their own console, which is the more likely case, they can license Ubuntu support for cheaper than they could make a terrible distro and it would be win-win-win (which is, of course, better than a win-win scenario).
The only real differences in package management for I'd say 95% of use cases is if you type 'yum' or 'apt-get' before typing 'install whatever'.
If someone comes up with a upgradeable open pc-based console of sort running steam, well THIS could be the final nail in the traditional PCs coffin. Actually loving playing games on a desktop I hope that doesn't happen any time soon!
If the attitude towards fragmentation is to fork a new distro for every application, am I supposed to restart my computer every time I want to task switch or run hundreds of virtual machines?
There are some specialised situations where a custom distro makes sense, like appliance type applications (smoothwall, backtrack etc)
Games in the Humble Indie Bundle releases have Linux builds. (.tar.gz or .bin) I haven't had major issues beyond installing the libraries that I get prompted are missing. That could get automated, especially now PackageKit abstracts away from the details of different package management utilities.
Also, you could cover a huge portion of the linux market by just supporting Ubuntu and Fedora. Other distros (e.g Arch) have a community that has some experience in repackaging these for their distro.
They could probably solve a lot of issues with fragmentation by establishing steam in a chrooted environment on the system so that it could maintain it's own versions of certain libraries etc. This could then be targeted by developers as opposed to targeting a specific distro. In essence, a "distro within a distro".
And why would a new distro make sense? Now you can have gaming if you just install ~~Windows~~ ValveLinux.
Where they could provide value though is to create a stable platform cross distro that is well supported for game/app developers. Anything that allows porting to Linux without worrying about distro fragmentation is a good thing.
Besides when it comes to more esoteric distros I'm sure they will be able to tap into the community to help bring it there.