I’ve been using a Steam Deck for almost a year damn near daily with maybe 1 OS crash that was largely due to a very unstable game. How is ArchLinux unstable, exactly?
Comment on Arch Linux and Valve Collaboration
pastermil@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Hopefully this would lead to a more (stable version of) ArchLinux.
bassomitron@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Darorad@lemmy.world 11 months ago
SteamOS is based on arch, but it has major differences. The steam deck’s update mechanism is completely different from normal arch Linux.
Arch normally immediately updates to the latest version of every program. This is usually fine, but when a big bug is missed by the developers, it can cause problems.
The steam deck updates a base image that includes all the programs installed by default, and by the time it releases a lot of them aren’t the absolute newest version. When valve updates SteamOS they definitely run a lot of tests on the base image to make sure it’s stable and won’t cause any issues.
SteamOS is also an immutible distro, meaning the important parts are read only. This also means updates are done to everything at once, and if something goes wrong, it can fall back to a known good version.
Not to say arch Linux is unstable (its been better for me than Ubuntu), but SteamOS is at a completely different level. It’s effectively a completely different distro if we’re talking about stability. I think what they’re hoping is this support would allow arch to build out testing infrastructure to catch more issues and prevent them from making it to users.
nous@programming.dev 11 months ago
Arch normally immediately updates to the latest version of every program
This is not true though. Arch packages new program versions as soon as they can - for popular stuff this happens quickly but not everything updates quickly. And when they do publish a new package it goes to the testing repo for a short time before being promoted to the stable repos. If there is a problem with the package that they notice it will be held back until it can be solved. There is not a huge amount of testing that is done here as that is very time consuming and Arch do not have enough man power for this. But they also do not release much broken things at all. I have seen other distros like ubuntu cause far more havoc with a broken update then Arch ever has.
RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
That’s… a weird take. There are variants of Arch that focus on stability, if that’s what you are after.
exu@feditown.com 11 months ago
Which ones? I’m not aware of any besides specialised distros like SteamOS
lemba@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
Try #EndeavourOS!
praise_idleness@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Which is just Arch witg GUI setup and DE pre-shipped
exu@feditown.com 11 months ago
It uses the Arch repos directly though
RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
itsfoss.com/arch-based-linux-distros/
Manjaro for example. I also thought Garuda would be focused on stability but according to this article potentially no. So maybe just Manjaro, I do remember reading about something else like it though…
exu@feditown.com 11 months ago
Manjaro does stability by delaying everything by two weeks. That doesn’t really help at all and might hurt you for security updates, because those will wait the same two weeks.
earth_walker@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Arch isn’t unstable. Users mess it up by installing a bunch of random crap from the AUR or fiddling with system files.
SteamOS addresses this by making the root level filesystem immutable and guiding the user to install containerized (flatpak) apps.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Exactly. I ran Arch for over 5 years, and the only “instability” I had was:
That’s really it. I’ve since moved to openSUSE Tumbleweed and an AMD GPU, largely because of built-in snapper support and their server-oriented distros (Leap and MicroOS), and it wasn’t because Arch was “unstable” or anything like that. In fact, I had far fewer issues with Arch than I did with the other distros I used before: Ubuntu and Fedora. It turns out, as you understand Linux better, you tend to mess things up less.