[HN Gopher] Why Valve Is Switching from Debian to Arch for Steam...
___________________________________________________________________
Why Valve Is Switching from Debian to Arch for Steam Deck's Linux
OS
Author : jrepinc
Score : 90 points
Date : 2021-08-09 17:00 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pcgamer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pcgamer.com)
| paco3346 wrote:
| As an Arch user I wonder if this means I'll get better native
| support of Steam on my desktop. I wouldn't say there are any
| major issues right now but every little bit that makes the
| experience better is one more reason I can stop keeping a Windows
| install around.
| oneplane wrote:
| I don't really see any argument against of for either distro
| here. And then there is de false argument that Debian 'groups
| updates in to a big update', which is also not really the case.
|
| I suppose the real issue I personally take is the wording used
| here; updates aren't "just updates" and haven't been for a long
| time, not even in commercial-desktop-land. You have updates that
| just do things like security and bug fixes, and then there are
| feature updates, and then you have major changes. In Debian's
| case, you don't get major updates of packages within a single
| Debian release. If you started with GNOME2 for example, you don't
| get GNOME3 until the next Debian release. But you do get GNOME
| 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 etc. (this is just an example, not a real
| versioning or naming scheme)
|
| What the article makes it seem is that you don't get minor
| updates either. Or bug fixes. Perhaps this is a result of trying
| to 'dumb down' the intricacies of downstream vs. upstream
| packaging, distributions and multi-project releases.
|
| At the same time, the whole argument doesn't make any sense
| anyway: if you are Valve, you control your own releases and your
| own distribution. It matters a whole lot less what 'upstream'
| vendor your use is doing, because you can always do whatever you
| want in your own distro. Or better yet, you can take what
| upstream does, and use backports to get major core changes into
| your current version. And if that isn't enough, you can take a
| look at the many bistro-derivatives, including the likes of
| Ubuntu; they are (sometimes loosely) based on an existing long-
| term distro but with a lot of local modifications/replacements on
| top of that.
|
| Because Valve is already making their own distro, it is unlikely
| to really matter what 'upstream' they use, the only big change
| would be the standards they uphold (be it packaging methods, like
| dpkg vs. rpm) or openness (DFSG vs. "I'll just drop this binary
| in here and see what happens later"). Better yet, if Debian
| wasn't a good fit, they could have gone with Ubuntu instead. Or
| any other derivative.
|
| It smells like a 'we wanted something different but not really
| deal with licensing/legal' combined with 'the new guy runs arch
| on his Thinkpad so yeah'. In the end if matters a whole lot less
| than your average distro-war; Valve still just has a distro, they
| still release it, and they still support it. It's just more
| hobby-like than production-like at this time. Switching to some
| SONiC-SAI type architecture would have made more sense.
| jraph wrote:
| I wonder if they considered openSUSE Tumbleweed as a base rolling
| release and if so, why they picked Arch.
|
| Is it because openSUSE Tumbleweed is less popular? Too
| "opinionated" / "customized, with Yast and all? Or just that
| (someone in) the team is more proficient in Arch?
|
| openSUSE seems more robust than Arch overall, and especially for
| updates for which you are not particularly expected to read the
| document before updatinopenSUSE seems more robust than Arch
| overall, and especially for updates for which you are not
| particularly expected to read the document before updating [1].
|
| It would seem that just using openSUSE Tumbleweed instead of Arch
| would mean less maintenance work for Valve because of this. I
| guess they need to test and validate updates before pushing them
| to the device anyway.
|
| KDE/Plasma is also a first class desktop environment on openSUSE,
| so it would also be a good fit, since they are adopting this
| desktop environment.
|
| Maybe Arch is more "KISS" and therefore easier to hack?
|
| I also wonder if they considered Gentoo, which would help them
| tweak the (optimization-related) compilation flags for customized
| builds?
|
| [1]
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance#Read_bef...
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| I'll just install Debian on it anyways.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Frankly, this is a good move for both the users who don't care
| and the users who do.
|
| If you just want to own a Steam Deck for the Steam interface, you
| can do that. The fact that it's just an x86 Ryzen chip at the end
| of the day guarantees you at least 10 more years of kernel
| upgrades, and the current state of Proton makes me confident that
| it can "just work".
|
| For the people who _do_ care about digging in, we can ascertain
| that they own $400+ enthusiast hardware, they want to tinker to
| their hearts content. Arch is just "better" at providing custom
| Proton builds, hunting down esoteric 32-bit libraries, and
| maintaining "gaming" software like Feral Gamemode, Lutris,
| Retroarch and Mangohud. No, it won't be stable, but gaming on
| Windows is not getting any better, nor will it get any better
| with Windows 11 cutting support for 80% of the world's active
| computers.
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| NixOS would be a great OS for the Steam deck. Arch certainly has
| a lot of advantages and was my go-to for the last 10 years before
| rencetly switching to NixOS.
|
| I actually used Arch as the base OS for a few linux computer labs
| (~100 machines) and it was both a joy and a headache. I really
| enjoyed being able to package proprietary software like Matlab &
| Mathematica. It was also nice that students had access to the
| latest software.
|
| However, the stability of the boot process and upgrades was not
| fun. Identical machines running what should have been the same
| configuration would drift over time. I used Ansible to template a
| lot of the configuration but it would basically be a full time
| job to keep track of everything. Random machines would end up
| with a broken Pacman keyring causing updates to fail, etc.
| Somehow partial upgrades were occuring which would break the boot
| process.
|
| While 90% of software was easy to package, the other 10% were
| research projects that would make a lot of assumptions regarding
| what system C++ libraries were available.
|
| So far with NixOS, it is very stable. Unless you are activelly
| messing with the bootloader settings, it's almost impossible to
| break since you can select a previous configuration at boot time.
| While packageing software is not as easy as Arch, having a per-
| application dependency tree is extreamly helpful.
|
| That said NixOS is currently going through a lot of changes and
| missing a few things: 1. No easy secure boot configuration. 2.
| Networking configuration is sort of in a flux between network-
| manager & systemd-networkd. 3. Packages are typically fairly up-
| to-date but the consistency is pretty variable.
|
| TLDR; I am curious how Valve is handeling OS upgrades on the
| Steam Deck. My experience in using pacman -Syu in a _unattended*
| manner was anything but smooth. I would not be suprised if system
| partitions are RO and /or updated via a disk image._
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Arch I'm sure is a great choice when someone else (Valve, in this
| case) is configuring and administrating it for you.
|
| When you're doing it yourself, every Arch user seems to have a
| list of things which "aren't working today".
|
| I've been using openSUSE Tumbleweed for a while, which has all
| the advantages of a rolling distribution like Arch (and their
| repo is enormous), but also comes with Yast, their frankly
| amazing graphical administration tool which handles _everything_.
|
| It doesn't seem that common, at least in the USA, but I recommend
| it.
| COGlory wrote:
| I hopped around distros, starting with Ubuntu/Kubuntu, and then
| I switched to Manjaro (my first rolling release) because I was
| sick of ppas for newer software. Manjaro broke frequently,
| however. Finally found my home on openSUSE Tumbleweed. It's
| great because I have tons of new packages, but honestly it's
| never broken once for me (and if it did, btrfs snapshots would
| let me quickly revert).
|
| I think that having SUSE behind it maybe helps the stability?
| But I have no concrete knowledge of the testing process that
| goes into Tumbleweeed.
| maxnoe wrote:
| The thing is, if it doesn't worl on arch, chances are good that
| it doesn't work on any other Linux Desktop OS.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| That has not been my experience at all.
| __s wrote:
| Curious why they didn't go with sid. Maybe because Arch is
| intended to be rolling release, so it's less likely that
| regressions are overlooked as "well that's what sid is for,
| catching regressions"
|
| (I use Arch on my desktop & WSL w/ Debian testing at work)
| cat199 wrote:
| not at all involved here, but i'd think managment of the full
| system from source (as might be needed for low level support
| e.g. kernel/libc patches) would be easier on arch than debian.
|
| Too bad for most linuces we still cant build the base system in
| a single step like we have been able to do since the dawn of
| time in traditional unices.
| kop316 wrote:
| From [1]: This [Debian Sid] distribution will never get
| released; instead, packages from it will propagate into testing
| and then into a real release.
|
| sid is not a release, it is a staging area for packages to roll
| into a release.
|
| [1] https://www.debian.org/releases/sid/
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| This is pretty misleading. sid is a "release", it's just
| "always released".
|
| You can absolutely upgrade to sid, run it, and get daily
| updates, at the much higher risk of breakage of your system.
| kop316 wrote:
| er...what?
|
| "This distribution will never get released; instead,
| packages from it will propagate into testing and then into
| a real release." is a literal quote from
| https://www.debian.org/releases/sid/
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I understand what it says, but it's misleading. The
| packages are "released" in the sense that they are in a
| repository that you can use to install a functional OS.
| See for yourself.
| http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/sid/main/
| goodpoint wrote:
| "Rolling release" is a bit of an oxymoron.
|
| "continuously updated and never released" would be more
| correct.
|
| It's like saying that a git repository that never gets
| version tags is "released on every commit".
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Debian testing is the closest thing Debian has to a "proper"
| rolling release. It comes with some mild drawbacks like half-
| baked security support (sometimes security fixes can get
| tangled with complex transitions and thus be somewhat delayed
| compared to sid) and the converse issue of long
| feature/transition freezes when approaching a stable release.
| But it's not clear that Arch is to be preferred in practice.
| goodpoint wrote:
| A lot of people have an irrational fear of Sid because it's
| called Unstable.
|
| And yet the use "rolling" distributions that often contains
| exactly the same software.
| Delk wrote:
| I haven't been regularly using Debian in about 15 years now,
| so I don't know how things are nowadays. But back in the day
| when I was running Debian unstable on my desktop, temporary
| breakages in dependencies or in individual packages weren't
| that uncommon. I think sometimes some functionality was
| broken for a while when there was some kind of a transition
| going on.
|
| Those were entirely understandable given sid's nature, and it
| was much more reliable and functional than one would have
| expected from an "unstable" active development OS distro. It
| wasn't unstable in the sense of crashing or being generally
| buggy, and it was generally quite possible to use it as an
| everyday desktop.
|
| It did, at least back then, require more active
| administration and a corresponding mindset than a fire-and-
| forget stable release would, though.
|
| Sid might of course work as a basis for a distro for someone
| like Valve, but I think they'd need to do something similar
| to what Ubuntu does with freezes and weeding out issues
| before releases, or at the least have some kind of a delay
| before updates were pushed to non-testing devices if they
| based directly on the unstable release.
| dv_dt wrote:
| I think many steer clear of sid because of the security
| policy:
|
| Please note that security updates for "unstable" distribution
| are not managed by the security team. Hence, "unstable" does
| not get security updates in a timely manner. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.debian.org/releases/sid/
| goodpoint wrote:
| This phrasing is very misleading.
|
| Sid/Unstable and Testing track upstream releases.
|
| If an upstream developer releases a new version to fix a
| vulnerability, Sid gets the upstream fix just like other
| rolling distro.
|
| If a version in Testing has a vulnerability and Testing
| entered a pre-release freeze the fix gets backported.
|
| If a version in Stable has a vulnerability the fix gets
| backported.
|
| This is designed to provide the "best of both worlds".
| kwk1 wrote:
| The drawback to using sid in this way is that every 2 years
| during the release freeze, regular uploads to it taper off or
| halt. Depending on the maintainer, uploads of new releases etc.
| may continue into the experimental branch, but those packages
| have to be pulled in manually, and continuing to upload in this
| manner is not always done. In principle, though,
| sid+experimental has the capacity to be analogous to a true
| rolling release.
| TomasBaneUK wrote:
| I like Arch because it's a "containment" distro just like
| Manjaro. It keeps a lot of the most toxic gamer and ricing
| community isolated in some form. Thank god Valve picked that.
| Don't get triggered by what I'm saying, there are plenty of great
| people in the Arch community and the software is great but what I
| said is still true in many ways. The forums and even their reddit
| is very hard to interact with, I always had to walk on eggshells.
| Another great thing is their wiki and I use it all the time.
|
| Weird that the article doesn't mention KDE Plasma as I believe
| it's another reason why they need rapid development. They are
| finishing some huge migrations like Wayland and refining their
| theme and applications so it's even more accessible to less
| technical folks. I was scared to death when the reviewers were
| using Plasma docked because it needs a lot of testing before it's
| ready. That's natural when you are making big changes.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| TLDR
|
| Valve wants the more frequent update schedule provided by Arch,
| presumably so that changes they need can be part of official arch
| releases vs. maintaining their own branches of debian packages
| that would need merged periodically.
| [deleted]
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Yeah hopefully this means their effort is primarily going
| upstream as opposed to
| YetAnotherDistro/YetAnotherDebianRepository
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| I wonder how long it'll be before this type of platform uses an
| "immutable" system like NixOS. Not that NixOS is the best for
| this right now, but the offerings of an obscenely concrete
| configuration based OS seem amazing for this type of hardware.
|
| Worse for the user experience if users want to self-install
| stuff, but still.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Every time my friends show me arch, they always boast about how
| great their setup is (it's so stable, everything works out of the
| box !) then proceed to demo great features.
|
| But then this little thing doesnt work yet because, they say,
| they haven't configure it correctly. And this little one, it's
| nothing mind you, it never worked. And this one, just a small
| detail, but it broke yesterday. We have a different definition of
| the box.
|
| And so I go back to my Ubuntu LTS. I really want to try arch but
| I'm not 20 anymore, fiddling with my workstation is not as fun as
| it used to be. I just want to use it.
|
| Maybe with the steam deck it will become so battle tested it will
| turn into the most stable distro ever.
|
| I think their decision makes sense though, they don't want to
| have to craft every update and spend too much time on it. It's a
| good strat for them.
| pletnes wrote:
| In arch, everything works straight out of the box. However the
| box is very small, and you need a lot of other boxes, to get a
| <<normal>> working system that can write code and play music
| and tile windows and...
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Fedora is a decent compromise, always very solid and I've
| actually come to like the default Gnome nowadays so I don't
| really need to tweak anything.
|
| With flatpaks/snaps being so ubiquitous it doesn't really
| matter much at this point anyway.
| xfalcox wrote:
| That is one of the reasons I'm running Manjaro, like many
| replies here.
|
| I get new hardware support and access to the many only-arch-
| pre-packaged software, in a more stable base.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Perhaps it's easier because it's a static set of hardware.
| mcbuilder wrote:
| You're describing exactly the Arch Philosophy though, not
| constantly broken mind you, but as vanilla (close to upstream)
| as possible. It's not supposed to be an "out of the box" distro
| at all, as in everything works out of the box.
|
| When you sign up to Arch, yeah I think you sign up for a lot of
| tweaking that would be done for you already. Luckily there is
| the excellent Arch Wiki to hold your hand through much of it.
| handrous wrote:
| I feel that way about Linux generally. I didn't realize how
| much stuff I wasn't doing just because it rarely worked and
| often broke things (drag and drop as a general interaction, for
| instance), how much time I was spending keeping things sorta
| working, and how many little broken things I was just _not even
| noticing_ because I was so used to them, until I finally
| (mostly) abandoned it as a desktop OS after ~10 years as a
| desktop Linux user.
| hanklazard wrote:
| That's a bummer. Have you tried pop!_os? Really stable and
| usable in my experience on any recent gen Lenovo CX1.
| handrous wrote:
| _Very much_ not a fan of recent Gnome last time I tried it
| (some months ago). Performance is so very bad. Dropped
| frames everywhere (maybe blame Linux for generally having
| fine-grained performance that isn 't exactly _bad_ but is
| more variable and unpredictable than other platforms) and
| generally sluggish. Used to like Gnome, but back then it
| was much lighter than KDE, but now the tables have (much to
| my surprise) entirely turned.
|
| I like the idea of pop!_os but part of the flagship
| experience is a big ol' Javascript extension on top of
| Gnome. I can't imagine I'd find that enjoyable.
|
| Last time I had a Linux working and I didn't hate the
| experience was a "so small I could drown it in a tub"
| install/config of Void with mostly Suckless tools/programs.
| I find Linux to be most tolerable in those kinds of
| configs, these days. Doesn't do much, but what it does do
| actually works and behaves fairly consistently. Start
| trying to get fancy, and the machine begins to feel haunted
| in a hurry.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Funnily I just did. My machine has now one entry in grub
| that doesn't work because pop didn't bother to sign the
| kernel or prompt me for it and I'm using secure boot.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Even as an ubuntu fan I can see I have to tweak a little my
| machine, at least more so than a mac or windows user.
|
| It's stable enough for me, and I see that as the price to pay
| for more freedom and flexibility, but I can understand one
| wanting to get down to close to zero fiddling and pay premium
| for OSX to be done with it.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| This comment is kinda true of anything. Even with WSL there
| are a bunch of things that "just work" better on Linux than
| Windows. Even with Steam there are a bunch of things that
| "just work" better on Windows than Mac.
|
| I think in general finding the right tool is more about
| finding the thing whose inadequacies are least inconvenient
| to you personally rather than looking for some mythical tool
| that works well for everyone, in every case.
| handrous wrote:
| Windows for games, macOS for anything that might qualify as
| work. Linux for single-application multimedia appliances,
| probably on an RPi so the install is just a dd command and
| the platform's got enough eyes on it that it'll almost
| certainly Just Work with minimal tinkering. Linux on
| servers, but eyeing FreeBSD pretty hard.
| hughrr wrote:
| CentOS is good about a year after first release. But all the
| packages are ancient.
| SemiNormal wrote:
| That's kind of the point of CentOS (or was). Sacrificing
| newer packages for stability.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I wonder to what extent they were showing you the new features
| that they'd mostly added, because they were proud of them. Most
| of the stuff I actually use on my install is fully set up, but
| I wouldn't show it to a friend, because it is boring work
| stuff.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| It's based on Arch, it's not purely Arch. Valve takes Arch and
| distributes their own configured version. I don't see how that
| would make SteamOS unstable unless Valve makes a mistake in
| testing.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| I had a similar experience, used Arch for awhile got tired of
| random things breaking, then I overcorrected and switched to
| Debian, thinking that infrequent changes would mean less
| breakage. That came with its own problems with things not
| working, especially if you let Debian fall out of date and it
| becomes un-upgradable. I also landed on Ubuntu LTS for my Linux
| needs, reasonably up-to-date, longer support cycles (a decade
| for security) than Debian versions, allowing me to be lazier
| than I could otherwise get away with managing other Linux
| distros.
|
| However, the Steam Deck only has three main hardware
| configurations and Valve presumably has a team dedicated to
| making sure it runs correctly. So Arch may be a really good
| value proposition for them.
| beermonster wrote:
| They will only have the required software dependencies and
| configuration they need to support those combined
| hardware/software configurations. So it should be easier for
| them to regression test and ensure stability even with Arch
| as a base.
|
| Looks like they want to have the ability to be fairly agile
| and not getting locked into a platform for 2+ years
| wayneftw wrote:
| If you're not into fiddling but you still want a nice rolling
| release, you can try an Arch based distro.
|
| I use Manjaro and it's been nothing but smooth sailing for a
| few years now. I have it on 4 machines - a home desktop, a work
| desktop, a laptop and an old Mac Pro from 2012.
| boudin wrote:
| I don't think it will make arch more stable. It would require a
| good amount of change on the way the whole package repositories
| are tested. I'm quite sure that Steam Deck will have its own
| repositories so that they can validate upstream changes before
| pushing those to the Steam Deck users.
| swiley wrote:
| There's also going the opposite direction and throwing out
| everything that requires any non trivial amount of
| configuration. I've been pretty happy doing this.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Yeah, I don't even change my wallpaper anymore
| [deleted]
| oblak wrote:
| This is what I came to say. Arch is fine but you are expected
| to babysit your PC and perform maintenance every week. And do
| that for each and every build in the house.
|
| Things break often and I am not interested in fixing them. And
| that's not taking into account wife and kids builds. It took me
| a while to realize the Arch crowd largely doesn't get that not
| everyone is exciting to thinker with their OS all the time. I
| get it. I really do. But I am old
|
| As you say, hopefully Valve's efforts are going to help with
| that. In fact, there's hardly a chance they won't because they
| business depends on it, at least long term.
| VortexDream wrote:
| I think people are making too much of Arch in this case. They
| aren't going to put Arch on Steam Deck and call it a day. It'll
| be more like putting Manjaro on it. Except it isn't Manjaro,
| it's their own distro based on Arch that they'll be managing
| and distributing. And honestly, Manjaro is one of the most
| stable, easy to use Linux distros I've used and it's based on
| Arch (in the same way that SteamOS will be based on Arch). So
| people need to calm their tits.
|
| The endless criticism of everything needs to stop.
| chmod775 wrote:
| I have a 6 years old arch installation, and an Ubuntu
| installation that has been going and was regularly updated to a
| recent release for about as long.
|
| I spend more time just trying to have up-to-date software on
| that Ubuntu installation than I spend time configuring anything
| about the arch installation. Granted, sometimes you need to
| edit some files after an update (oh device names changed again
| in pulseaudio so your volume hotkeys need to be fixed!), but
| that's usually a matter of seconds because I already know how
| everything fits together. When a package is totally broken for
| some reason, I just downgrade it.
|
| Meanwhile on Ubuntu your only option for getting up to date
| versions of Jameica/Hibiscus, pretty much any mapping software
| that OSM contributors/users would want to use, and a bucket
| list of other productivity software that tends to be useless if
| outdated, is to compile from source (don't forget to fix
| incompatibilities with Ubuntu's libraries!) or manual
| downloads. Oh I forgot to mention Subsurface and TurtleSport.
| Don't get me started about those. Bonus points for Ubuntu not
| having disabled the built-in version checks in a lot of
| software (it's usually just a compile time options or command
| line argument!), so it nags users that they're running outdated
| software when there's no way to upgrade!
|
| At this point I'm convinced the only noteworthy software that
| Ubuntu manages to have acceptably recent versions of is
| Firefox. If all you want to do is browse web, Ubuntu might be
| less work.
|
| I'm not surprised Ubuntu is trying to move to snap packages.
| That's their last ditch attempt at getting their house in
| order.
|
| Arch will always at least have an automatically installing AUR
| package for you with a version that isn't from 2018.
| lukeschlather wrote:
| For me I find PPAs typically make getting the latest versions
| of software where I want the bleeding edge painless. And I
| don't need to also have everything bleeding edge the way Arch
| forces me to.
| jogu wrote:
| PPAs work great until they don't, because it's just some
| random guy building the packages half of the time.
|
| The last time I seriously tried to use Ubuntu was probably
| 8-10 years ago and I ran into a lot of trouble trying to
| get up to date graphics drivers via PPAs. I also remember
| being tired of having to go find a random PPA for every
| piece of software I wanted. Most of the time I would just
| find some random blog that provided a "PPA for up-to-date
| package X" and ultimately felt like what I was doing wasn't
| really any better than downloading random MSIs like you
| would on Windows.
|
| With Arch though you get the AUR which quite literally has
| every piece of software you could ever want and is at least
| managed and maintained in a central place so you're not
| just adding random PPAs for everything.
| maxnoe wrote:
| LTS is after all only a euphemism for outdated software ;)
| voidfunc wrote:
| This was pretty much my experience with Arch and long long ago,
| Gentoo (where I really started with Linux).
|
| Then I adopted Fedora and never looked back for several years.
| Even more recently I have been using WSL inside of Windows...
| and it actually covers most of my use cases well enough.
|
| I dont have the time or patience anymore to keep up with
| distro's like Arch, but I also get that some people love
| tinkering and figuring out how to make their system work like
| its some kind of puzzle.
|
| Edit: One thing about Arch, its possible to dig yourself a real
| bad hole if you don't keep updating regularly and I get that's
| sort of the point, but it can cause a lot of issues if for
| example, you go on vacation for a few weeks.
| jyxent wrote:
| Yeah, I was wondering about the Arch updates too. I had a
| machine that wasn't updated for a long time and had to go
| through the process of updating small bits at a time with
| archived packages:
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_Linux_Archive
| jorams wrote:
| > One thing about Arch, its possible to dig yourself a real
| bad hole if you don't keep updating regularly and I get
| that's sort of the point, but it can cause a lot of issues if
| for example, you go on vacation for a few weeks.
|
| Any changes that could be problematic are announced on the
| site and the arch-announce mailing list. It's really not a
| matter of weeks. I've gone many months without updating,
| without any problems.
| snarkypixel wrote:
| > Any changes that could be problematic are announced on
| the site and the arch-announce mailing list
|
| Yeah.. once I did a normal upgrade and it fucked my whole
| system. I asked for help and I was told that exact sentence
| "read the mailing list, it was announced". Thanks, but no
| thanks.
| krageon wrote:
| > announced on the site and the arch-announce mailing list
|
| Perhaps there exists some subculture of folks that delight
| in having to read a set of articles published in the time
| between the last update and today before they do so again,
| but I have never encountered it.
| jorams wrote:
| You really don't have to. If you're subscribed to the
| mailing you just get an email every month or two. Most of
| the time it either won't apply to you, or it'll just be a
| nice-to-know. Every once in a long time (last time for me
| was 18 months ago) you'll actually have to remember for
| the next time you upgrade. Otherwise you can just upgrade
| and you'll be fine.
|
| It's honestly incredibly low-maintenance. You just have
| to spend a relatively long time setting things up first.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| If I have to read doc or something online so that my OS
| stays usable, it's already game over
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Yeah, that could be a problem with the deck, consoles players
| are not great at keepong their stuff up to date. My switched
| stay offline for months. Besides, I wanna play, not update,
| so If I see an update prompt I delay, and if I can't I hate
| the product.
| readflaggedcomm wrote:
| That's not my experience, but Manjaro is even more tweak-free.
|
| I suspect they will do like those Arch derivatives do: holding
| back updates for testing, which is easy when you target known
| hardware.
| throw37388 wrote:
| OpenSuse is much better option for rolling distro. It has
| automated testing before packages are merged, more stable.
| dgan wrote:
| I second that. Automatic snapshots are priceless
| ex_amazon_sde wrote:
| Debian has a big CI system to do end-to-end integration test
| https://ci.debian.net/ and
| https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds
|
| It also provides continuous snapshots:
| https://snapshot.debian.org/
| TomasBaneUK wrote:
| >Maybe with the steam deck it will become so battle tested it
| will turn into the most stable distro ever.
|
| Being a rolling release goes directly against that. It might be
| the most stable rolling release together with openSUSE
| Tumbleweed. When you combine it with a modern filesystem and
| features like snapshots it really feels solid.
|
| In the context of the Steam Deck they can just test and
| hold/fix bugs so that's a very different scenario.
|
| There are just too many changes everywhere and different
| hardware, software combinations, to expect a bug free
| experience. Not even Apple with a different release model can
| manage that and they control everything and have most of the
| hardware combinations to test. Many DEs and bigger applications
| need a few point releases to be better but maybe you're talking
| only about the base distro if it's even possible to make that
| distinction.
| nanis wrote:
| What are these things that do not work? Asking as someone who's
| been using Arch consistently on my laptop and on a long-lived
| VPS since 2007 ... Original VPS install was maintained just
| through regular updates (including the transition from 32-bit
| to 64-bit). I did reinstall on the laptop for that.
|
| Meanwhile, $work server images have been Ubuntu LTS, CentOS,
| and AL2 with updates introducing breakage several times a year.
| Cu3PO42 wrote:
| Some friends had significant issues with screen sharing on
| Wayland on Arch. Pipewire wouldn't work correctly, or only
| allow sharing one screen, but not another.
|
| As far as I can tell, they have resolved these issues now,
| but it was a pain point.
| beermonster wrote:
| Pipewire itself has had some issues as it's still
| relatively new. But I've found the last few releases have
| ironed them out. bleeding edge is more the issue than Arch
| Cu3PO42 wrote:
| I agree it's related to maturity, but on the other hand
| Pipewire was working just fine for me on Fedora without
| further setup.
|
| I understand they're different distros with different
| philosophies, but in the end I do need my screen sharing
| to work no questions asked.
| d_tr wrote:
| You are referring to great features, but Arch just uses the
| same upstream packages as everyone else and in a more vanilla
| form, so it seems like it's about user customization.
|
| If so, why is this the distribution's fault? The installation
| is a bit cumbersome but other than that you do not _need_ to do
| much.
|
| I personally keep my configuration small and tidy, following a
| "bang for the buck" approach and have not faced any issues.
| Perhaps my usage patterns are just simpler, but even Steam
| works fine.
| trey-jones wrote:
| This is a decent comment, and I get it. I also don't want to
| fool with my setup too much anymore. I use Manjaro for my
| primary system, and it's great though. I don't want to manage
| the software that I use everyday through SNAPs or however you
| do it on Ubuntu nowadays.
|
| I just want the very latest of a short(ish) list of things,
| lets say arbitrarily within about 2 weeks of release, which is
| what Manjaro basically gives me. pamac
| upgrade -a
|
| Done. Or even better, most of the time:
| pacman -Syu
|
| This could be great for a games platform, because you'll get
| the latest CPU bytecode, and eg. Vulkan, and graphics drivers
| as well as the latest compatibility tools. Usually it's best to
| have the latest.
|
| Anyway for Steam deck my first reaction is that they will need
| to:
|
| 1. Do like Manjaro and hold updates for a period of time before
| distributing them.
|
| 2. Provide some sort of one-click revert for when an update
| randomly prevents your device from booting. These are basically
| the only big problems that I encounter anymore - it usually
| takes 20 minutes to an hour to figure out which package is the
| problem and fix it, but you don't want to be doing that on your
| $600 steam deck.
|
| Edit: As far as updates that brick your system go, my first
| experience with Arch was that if you don't keep up with the
| rolling releases, you will brick your system guaranteed when
| you update. So we'll see how that goes. That was 10+ years ago,
| and maybe it's not as bad now.
| [deleted]
| maxerickson wrote:
| The last 2 or 3 years I've had 2 or 3 high friction updates
| on Arch.
|
| More than 0, but not a lot.
| hendersoon wrote:
| I've had maybe three or four high-friction upgrades on
| Ubuntu over the past 15 years, where it wouldn't boot
| properly until I fixed the problem. So yeah it's /better/,
| but it's far from flawless.
|
| Note I don't stick to LTS releases. If I only upgraded to
| the X.1 LTS releases I expect it would have been smoother.
| trey-jones wrote:
| This aligns with my experience.
| deng wrote:
| Is this the same Valve that still ships Steam on Linux with
| almost 10 year old libraries, which it never bothered to update?
| Debian is bleeding edge compared to that.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| steam.i686
| mgarfias wrote:
| Didn't read the article, but I imagine it's because Debian had
| gone straight to hell.
| dylan-m wrote:
| I'm really curious to see how they plan to deliver system
| updates. Arch always makes me think of highly customized systems
| with per-package updates. For a little handheld with limited
| battery life, relatively short uptime, and a straightforward use
| case (so only enthusiasts who are capable of jumping through
| hoops are going to care whether they can install some other
| system-level packages), that makes very little sense. So I'm
| really hoping SteamOS 3 uses ostree. I haven't seen examples of
| people doing that with Arch, but I imagine it's quite possible.
| swiley wrote:
| The could release the source to steam and let the community fix
| the issues with it (since they've struggled so much with this.)
|
| The problem is that one of the primary selling points to
| publishers is that it prevents you from running games you might
| have on your machine (DRM.) That is: The biggest feature of
| steam besides configuring Wine for you is that it doesn't work
| most of the time.
| sammorrowdrums wrote:
| The reason is ChimeraOS (used to be GamerOS) which completely
| took over SteamOS's position as a big picture Steam Linux OS, and
| the method used on top of Arch base was such that you as a user
| didn't have to generally customise anything, and no manual
| updating etc. I can't believe the article wouldn't even mention
| it, very poor research as it was the case that proved that the
| Debian stable base was ultimately a poor choice for both keeping
| pace with the latest graphics stack and even worse for upgrading
| the base requiring users to reinstall. I've been using Chimera
| for a while now, and really excited to see Valve are going that
| direction. https://chimeraos.org/about
| TomasBaneUK wrote:
| Yeah no. You want to stick with the established base Linux
| distros that have corporate backing or people that know what
| they are doing. Don't swim down the river and like hardware
| peripherals don't use anything that associates itself with
| gamers.
| [deleted]
| thrill wrote:
| Valve missed an opportunity to implement (again) the dual boot
| partition concept that worked so well for CoreOS, before Redhat
| bought them and "discontinued" the _very good idea_. Deploying a
| complete and coherent and well tested base layer that has built-
| in fallback, and then deploying games as signed containers would
| have been a robust system. Instead they picked yet another
| upgrade complexity mess.
| TomasBaneUK wrote:
| There was a video from Collabora talking about Valve,
| immutability and different possibilities of deployment. I don't
| have the time to find and rewatch it but I'm not sure this
| article confirms that they will just do regular updates even if
| they say they are small. It could be interpreted in many ways.
| Maybe the video was only about the Steam Runtime.
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