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?
As for why they adopted KDE, they probably discovered how hard it is to work with Gnome developers.
I remember in an interview talking about the Steam Deck and its controls, GabeN said (paraphrased) “What we learned from the Steam Controller is there needs to be zero learning curve. Players want to pick it up and understand it immediately.”
Given that ethos, it’s not difficult to understand adopting KDE over Gnome. Most of Valve’s customers are coming from Windows, and KDE resembles Windows’ UI, where Gnome resembles iOS after a stroke.
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So, what you’re saying is you think Gnome resembles MacOS after a stroke? Fair enough.
Whichever who cares. I find Gnome so feature poor and so “why would you ever want to do that?” and so “You have to do it the way it occurred to us, not the way it occurred to you.” that I legitimately hate it.
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Don’t feed the troll…
Windows 11 is still easier to use…
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Yes, and I think it’s easier to use than gnome.
Why would you ever need such a feature? Closed.
I shared a green text recently that said just this lol
Since the start. Forget working with them, it’s a rough go to even try and communicate with them.
And that goes back to mailing list days, creating a personal grudge against Gnome so firm that I haven’t used it since the early 2000s.
Thankfully there’s KDE for my general use and a wide variety of lightweight options for other uses.
the deck isn’t some server that needs > 100% uptime for years. Debian is poopoo for bleeding edge game releases, especially any alpha/beta/early access stuff
People shitting on Gnome sound like kids bitching that the free pizza shop doesn’t offer your favorite hamburger.
Also, all this sudden Gnome hate all over Lemmy is trendy as fuck, being trendy used to mean you were a loser with no original style, I guess the capitalists turned it into “viral” and made it cool.
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This is a dumb take too, it’s important to criticize and scrutinize anything and everything down to the smallest detail to understand what works and what doesn’t, how and why that is the case in order to make better decisions for the future. You have to think critically, especially about software even when it’s a matter of preference.
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.
The popular opinion is that it was easier for them to get up-to-date packages that way.
My opinion: It’s just what the people working on the Deck were using at the time themselves.
Other reason might be that they had SteamOS 2 based on Debian and probably had some problems with it that they could solve on Arch more easily.
Arch packaging is also significantly easier to work with in my experience. I’ve packaged for both for some years and I’ll take the Arch build system over wrangling dpkg every chance I can.
I feel like this is the answer. if you’ve ever had to maintain a build pipeline or repository for .deb or .rpm, it’s not exactly pleasant (it is extremely robust, however). arch packaging is very simple by comparison, and I really doubt they’d need much more.
+1 to this. I built a few deb packages at a previous company. It was a solid packaging suite but good lord was it a pain to work through
It was based on debian, but moved to arch.
I think they did it because honestly, arch is better for desktop-usage due to its rolling-release model.
Bugs in debian stick around forever.
I don’t think that’s a good point, since they make their own immutable images, so they can use whatever versions of software they want, and you don’t normally get to update them with the rolling release
Yeah but what’s the point of using Debian when you’re going to have to manually package newer versions of a lot of software?
Yeah as an Arch user I disagree. Imo a handheld meant to be a plug and play system would hugely benefit from a stable OS with a laid back update schedule. You don’t see PlayStation pushing constant updates the second BSD packages get new versions.
As others have said, Valve has their own immutable release system, so it doesn’t really matter. In this case, the rolling release has even less to do with it. They likely chose Arch due to the up to date packages which benefit gaming.
Games need to live closer to the bleeding edge than a lot of other software.
Also, for wine/proton, and the other customisations built into the deck, it makes sense to pick a starting point that is more built for customisation. By that I mean there was probably less things they needed to add or remove at the start.
As mentioned, it’s also likely there was personal bias internally. But even that can be a valid reason as they need to be familiar/comfortable with the starting distro.
Not saying that Debian cannot do it, but doing it this way probably made valve’s employees lives easier.
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.$ awk -v k=$(uname -r) '/^NAME=/{gsub(/^NAME=|"/, "", $0);print $0,k}' /etc/os-release Debian GNU/Linux 6.7.12-amd64In my experience, Debian unstable has been less stable than “pure” rolling release distributions. Basing on unstable also means you have to put up with or work around Debian’s freeze periods.
Arch gets faster driver updates, KDE is faster at developing Wayland protocol implementations.
Edit: Valve gets their desired stability by turning Arch into a point release distro through image based releases. And, the system is practically unbrickable since it’s immutable. So, in summary it’s the best of both rolling release and point release models. By best, I mean for gaming.
Wayland
🤮
I understand your comment if you have an Nvidia GPU and/or if you don’t do any gaming, but if you have an Intel or AMD GPU and you play games, Wayland is just better. VRR, HDR, Fractional Scaling, Nvidia Reflex (for all GPU brands), in GameScope (wayland compositor made by Valve) you can have FSR, upscaling, on all games. It’s even better than on Windows. And if you use Bazzite, all is set up for you out of the box, you don’t need to be an experienced Linux user to use all of the above tech. Just like on the Steam Deck.
[…] anyone know why Volvo went in this direction?
So noone is talking about Volvo?
Other than that, SteamOS started with Debian and switched to Arch last minute before the steam deck released.
Volvo probably trying to cast off their reputation for being “safe ang boring” and take on a more edgy image.
Ditching Internal combustion in favour of steam power is also a major shift for them.
