Debian... mostly just because it's what I'm most familiar with. I don't have strong opinions on distros.
No, just because the Steamdeck's distro is built on Arch, and so you can piggyback on what they are doing.
I don't see why 'piggyback on what [Steam deck is] doing' wouldn't work just as well on any distro, you'd just have a load of extra stuff you're not using too.
That's nothing against Arch, it's what I use, I'm just saying really the only magic is in doing less.
You might be right in terms of a desktop environment. But Arch does have its own opinions, eg it picks systemd by default. And it gives you a default kernel that has a few patches applied and a config picked for you.
> I don't see why 'piggyback on what [Steam deck is] doing' wouldn't work just as well on any distro, you'd just have a load of extra stuff you're not using too.
Yes, that was in my original comment. However setting up all the configs take a bit of time, and with Arch you can just literally copy large parts of the config files from the Steam deck.
One advantage that Arch has over many distros: as a rolling distributions it's usually easier to get up-to-date packages, you mostly get them by default.
What changed?
I've ran testing on my home server, though since it's a bit old now I've switched it over to stable when testing switched to stable.
The testing happens in Debian Sid.
If you want to help Debian test the next release and actually report issues choose Debian testing.
I wonder how many potential users have been scared off by the name... Maybe Debian devs like it that way, less annoying desktop users to support.
I feel bad for the unsolicited distro plug though especially since you already have a solution that works well and you are familiar with, but I thought it might still be useful to mention it. I'm not sure if uBlue would even be better vs your current setup. Seems like netboot would still be needed to get the latest version without an extra reboot.
I download the nvidia drivers directly from nvidia. Their installer script is actually pretty decent and then I don't have to worry about whether the distro packages are up-to-date.
Also, I have a pretty unusual setup: my machines netboot from an shared iSCSI volume, setting up a local copy-on-write overlay on each machine.
SteamOS is based on Arch, so I'm sure it would be possible to make it do anything Arch can do. But I don't know Arch -- I know Debian. So I was a lot more comfortable installing Debian and tweaking it the way I needed, then installing Steam on top.