Does anyone know why SteamOS is based on arch rather than Debian?
Does anyone know why SteamOS is based on arch rather than Debian?
Just got a steam deck and immediately checked out the desktop mode, and I was somewhat surprised to see KDE and pacman as opposed to GNOME and apt, I have nothing against the former though a strong preference for the latter, anyone know why Volvo went in this direction?
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All of the things others have said are excellent points, I would also like to point out that if you go to the steam hardware survey and select Linux only you'll see that Arch is the most used distro (after SteamOS), and that was also the case when the Steam Deck was announced in July 2021 https://web.archive.org/web/20220806051441/https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/
And from my personal experience there's a reason for that, other than the I use Arch btw meme, despite most ports having Ubuntu in mind, and despite Ubuntu being the more user friendly distro, games just work on Arch. It's a weird thing where gaming on all of my arch machines is very painless, but gaming on the Ubuntu ones is frustrating, there's always something not right, it feels like the machine is chugging, or the driver decides not to work, or the game shows a black screen, or prime decides not today, etc, etc. I admit this is personal experience, and others might have the exact opposite, and that this is kind of biased because as a general rule people who use Arch tend to be more knowledgeable about Linux than people who use Ubuntu, but from replying on several Linux forums it's generally people with Ubuntu that have problems with games and people with Arch usually report that "it just works" for them.
Reminds me of the time I had a nvidia GPU laptop and was distro hopping like a rabbit on crack trying to find something stable. Surprisingly enough it was Arch that proved to be the most stable and what I ended up sticking to.
Yup, been using Arch for around 16 years, never had a problem with an Nvidia card and the vast majority of my GPUs were Nvidia. Every time I hear the horror stories of prime and bumblebee I really couldn't relate because everything just works for me.... A couple of years back however my company gave me a laptop with a company approved OS (Ubuntu), and while I don't know who's exactly to blame here (but I have my suspicions), I've had to use prime-select to set the OS to work always with the Nvidia GPU, otherwise external monitors work like shit.
It could be that ThinkPads are shit compared to Acer (and every other brand I've had in the past) laptops, it could be that the i7 on that laptop has a shitty GPU and can't handle the external monitors. But I'm 90% sure that if I put Arch there it would just work, and I wouldn't almost burn myself with a 99°C laptop that's constantly running a GPU that's not meant to.