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Comment by rPlayer6554 | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting that Valve and Framework seem to be throwing their eggs in the Arch basket over Debian/Ubuntu. When I got my first computer, I installed Ubuntu because it was dominant. Maybe it still is for the average Linux downloader, but why are the Hardware companies more into Arch?

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We also sponsor Debian. We are distro-agnostic and pick our sponsorships largely based on what we see Framework Laptop owners using in our post-purchase surveys and community polls.

That's awesome

This is the way

Great to see this! I have two Framework Desktops running with CachyOS, for AI workloads, software development and light gaming. Great machines! I wish the header for the power button and LEDs was rotated 180 degrees so the NanoKVM doesn’t need extra cable adapters.

Ive bought 5 of your laptops and have used cachyos on all of them so i hope i skewed your results lol

Thanks for the clarification. Glad to see your support for the open source community.

You need a minimal base OS to have the flexibility to build your own stuff on top of it, and you don't want to be at the behest of another corporation. That rules out Fedora, Suse, and Ubuntu. You also need it to be popular and have good hardware support. So the only two realistic options are Arch and Debian.

My guess is that Arch is easier to build on top of because they have a stronger culture of leaving packages as unmodified as possible relative to their upstream sources, whereas Debian maintainers seem to have the opposite culture. A Debian system has a lot of Debian-isms in it overall, whereas the Arch-isms tend to be more like generic sensible defaults rather than OS idosyncrasies.

NixOS would also be a contender, and would have the advantage of being reproducible. It may be surprising but Nixpkgs has a lot of packages

> over Debian/Ubuntu

And over Fedora/RHEL. If I had to guess, it could be that new entrants find it easier to submit changes to Arch Linux packages [1]. ChromeOS also steered away from Debian-based distributions, choosing a Gentoo base.

[1] https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages

They're not though. They're supporting debian and bazzite which is fedora based and have worked with fedora extensively. See https://frame.work/de/en/blog/framework-sponsorships

I'd think it's because they're introducing updates to address issues w/ the hardware quickly and want a rolling-release distro so users can get the updates faster.

Debian testing is about as stable as it gets while also being a rolling distribution. The promotion of package updates from unstable to testing does not take that long either depending on the severity. I would venture a guess that there is more to it.

Testing doesn't get timely security updates. Arch is more like Sid anyway.

Community also likely plays a role. Arch users are typically more proactive at fixing things themselves and contributing.

Personally I'd also think it would be a better engineering choice for Valve to base SteamOS on Fedora Atomic, as it supports the immutable OS paradigm a lot better imo. Especially now with progress in bootc/oci/ostree.

If only Arch supported Arm.

I run Arch Linux on my M1, is that not arm?

Core arch linux doesn't support it, it's an offshoot.

No, you run an Arch derivative.

> Arch Linux is an independently developed, x86-64 general-purpose GNU/Linux distribution that strives to provide the latest stable versions of most software by following a rolling release model.

- https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_Linux

> This page complements the Installation guide with instructions specific to Apple Macs. The Arch installation image supports Apple Macs with Intel processors, but neither PowerPC nor Apple Silicon processors.

(emphasis mine)

- https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Mac

(FWIW, I understand that there is benefit to good coverage of a narrower scope, but I do wish Arch would fold https://archlinuxarm.org/ into the main project and be officially multi-arch, but that is not the world we live in.)

Arch package manager here, there is ongoing work behind the scenes to support multiple architectures (aarch64, riscv, etc), but as our volunteers (myself included) are doing this in our free time, progress is up in the air.

That's great to hear:) Given the long-term existence of eg. https://archlinux32.org/ and https://archlinuxarm.org/ I had always assumed that this was purely a question of policy and that Arch had no interest in supporting anything else. I found https://rfc.archlinux.page/0032-arch-linux-ports/ ; is there anything else I could read to catch up on the state of things?

Debian (or Ubuntu) is a great base if you want to run one program on top of it.

Arch (or even Gentoo) is great if you want to do more detailed customizations of various things.

I use Linux for 20 years and I study programming for 10 years, bought 100 programming books, so a linux distribution is basically a programming language container. Slackware was for lisp. Now instead of kiss its simple ain’t easy with clojure. Debian is very tightly tied to perl with both communities bent on reproducibility. (Tho rust is replacing perl). Red hat and ibm is a Java shop. Centos is a scala platform at cern. Ubuntu and Python is a data science platform. Sure is a better Debian like ruby is a better Perl. And here we come to arch, when 10 years ago after a brief stunt with Perl basics I started learning c# the first thing I did is try to run the excercises on the raspberry pi. But because of some hard float soft float something they didn’t work. So I had to jailbreak the raspberry pi and run this new distro on it, the arch Linux. Where it just worked. You see ethics of ai and maybe like data science require the system to be fsf endorsed free system that’s what Debian gnu linux reason detre is. And Debian as Steve Jobs with Java were like against mono, you shall not pass. But for a gaming platform that’s a little bit different. Ex red had ceo now works at unity this mono fork. Ms bought blizzard, they want into this gaming thing badly. So that’s why steam os is arch now, less strict than Debian on the Libre side of things. The rest is history. :D

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