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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Gaming support is still very much a work in progress all up and down the software stack. Stable distros like Debian tend to ship older proven versions of packages so their packaged software can be up to 18mo behind current releases. The NTSync kernel code that should improve Windows game performance isn't even scheduled for mainline merge until the 6.10 kernel window in a few weeks - that's not likely to be in a stable Debian release for a 12-18mo.
TL;DR: Gaming work is very much ongoing and Arch moves faster than Debian does. Shipping 12-18mo old versions of core software on the Steam deck would degrade performance.
It's pretty common to use debian
unstableas a base.stableis not the only release that debian offers, and despite their names they tend to be more dependable than other distros idea of stable.Did you mean to say "branch" rather than "release"? Debian only releases stable. Everything else is part of the process of preparing and supporting stable.
Testing branch may work well or it may not. Its goal is to refine packages for the next stable release so it has an inherent strive towards quality, but it doesn't have a commitment to "quality now" like stable does, just to "quality eventually".
Testing's quality is highest towards the start of each release cycle when it picks up from the previous stable release and towards the end when it's getting ready to become the next stable. But the cycle is 2 years long.
Puts on reading glasses back in my day, we had a saying: “there’s nothing more stable than Debian unstable.”
No, I meant release: https://www.debian.org/releases/
Interesting, I didn't know they consider testing and unstable to be releases too.