Please understand that I haven’t tried or installed Arch Linux yet. From what I understand by reading and watching related videos, Arch is often breaks and a lot of time is required to fix issues. But I have also read comments from arch users who claim that arch has only crashed or caused them problems only a couple of times in a year.
Wouldn’t a stable or non rolling release distro be a great choice for the Steam Deck?? Also, how frequently do the packages get updated on steam os?
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Probably because rolling distros get updates for new hardware sooner. The Steam Deck was using a brand new AMD APU at the time so it probably benefited from being on the latest kernel and mesa.
Arch really isn’t that bad. I haven’t had too many breakages, and when it does break, they’re usually fixed super fast or they’re easy enough to workaround, whereas I often have to wait weeks or months for bug fixes in more stable distros. Now, would I hand it to my grandma? Not unless I am the one doing the updates for her, but it isn’t the ticking time-bomb that non-Arch users like to say it is.
I read this article a couple of years ago about the subject. Apparently, one part was ease and rapidity of rolling updates with the likes of Arch, and another part of wanting a bit more experimental nature of Arch versus steady-as-she-goes and stable Debian. It’s a rather neat discussion and debate.
Valve devs said they like Arch because it allows them to update steam deck faster than other distros. Looks like they’re skilled enough to limit the downsides of an unstable distro in order to get the latest and greatest package versions.
Arch is actually really stable if you keep it updated. Where it gets ya is if you don’t update it for a couple months or longer.
I just pacman -Syyu every hour an I’m fine.
But really, Arch has been extremely stable. Any issues I’ve had have all been solved in a few minutes after looking at the news on https://archlinux.org/
This has been my exact experience in the 8 years I’ve been using it as my desktop OS. Boot into windows to play some game I can’t get working, beat it a month later, come back and I need to get my boxing gloves out to use my computer again
SteamOS is based on Arch but doesn’t follow the same release cadence, as well as using an immutable base OS and an A/B partition layout (much like Android) allowing for rollbacks. So the problems that an Arch user may run into are less likely with SteamOS, because it has some extra protections and testing that is done before it arrives on the user’s device (particularly with the stable channel).
And gaming distributions often prefer a rolling release setup, because gaming benefits from very recent kernel and GPU related packages (that aren’t always fully compatible with older/stable distributions), particularly with AMD hardware.
Not true
