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Comment by arcfour | Hacker News Reader

> And of course, as always, those for which it works will tell you you're doing-it-wrong™ .

This sounds like you are rejecting help because you have made up your mind in frustration already.

Because you are doing it wrong. If you want an OS that just works, you should use Ubuntu or Fedora. Why is SteamOS based on Arch then? Because Valve wants to tweak things in it and tinker with it themselves to get it how they like.

You don't.

So use an OS that requires less from you and that tries to just work out of the box, not one that is notorious for being something you break and tinker with constantly (Arch).

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I've been using Arch for 15 years, it's not like I'm suddenly discovering the concept of the distro.

But when something crashes with no error message whatsoever, it makes it a tiny bit harder to troubleshoot.

Especially when so many people answer, just like I had predicted, "works on my machine". Which would only be a gotcha if I had implied it worked on no machine whatsoever. Which I didn't.

I'll tinker some more and I'll be sure to post my findings if I get these games to work.

Well then look at the logs? Sure it's not as in-your-face, but steam/proton does log and I'm fairly sure that a combination of at most setting a command invocation parameter, looking at the game logs and system logs will show you the exact problem and given that these games run just fine for a lot of people, the fix is probably trivial.

> Well then look at the logs?

Counter point: I don’t have to look at the logs to discover obscure error reports to spend my weekend debugging something which works flawlessly on Windows. We shouldn’t have to do that.

You don't have to look at logs either in case of games and hardware combos that do run flawlessly on Linux, which is a huge chunk of all games.

But feel free to try to run a game with a missing video card driver (as you likely miss something like that) and the like on windows. I would say it's an even worse experience.

Possibly because you won’t have as many logs to look at on Windows, merely given the option of sending a proprietary dump blob to the developer’s bug tracker, and then hoping they eventually fix whatever mystery issue is affecting you. God help you if it’s the overzealous DRM or anticheat from some other game that likely isn’t present in their QA machines.

I am using Arch and all the games I played on Steam (at least 20, not the ones mentioned above) worked perfectly.

One thing that I do though is get most games at least one year after release, when probably many issues are fixed. I had tons of issues many years ago, with buggy games bought immediately after release (on Windows back then), so now I changed strategy...

Ubuntu is based on Debian Sid which is considered as the least stable release in Debian community.

This is a non sequitur because "stability" in Debian has a specific meaning and Canonical also does things to ensure their release works properly.

Canonical doesn't have capacity to change over 60000 packages prepared by Debian community.

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