Valve’s Steam Deck updates to Plasma 6.2.5!
The games console has a slow update cycle to guarantee stability for users, but #Valve announced yesterday that both the #Arch base system and the #Plasma desktop environment are being updated to new preview releases.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1675200/view/529841158837240756
It has always confused me how they’re able to keep updates for too long on a rolling release distro. What kind of magic do they use to achieve that?
I wonder if it’s running some sort of “split release” cycle, where the KDE environment updates are delayed, but kernel and graphics drivers are rolling.
I’d love to know. I’d assume that “split release” would be happening on the steam client itself (when you get an update through the steam settings), because going into desktop mode, you only get flatpaks update (at least as far as I know). You can’t just run sudo pacman -Syu and get your update.
Steam OS is not a rolling release. It’s version numbers make it clear, it’s a point release. It’s versioned.
They take a specific version of arch, then add packages/changes selectively.
A little bird told me it’s quite a pain that arch updates so fast, because if they want to update package A they need to deal with a dependency hell due to everything having update on the meantime, and switching to Debian was even discussed still around the time OLED was released.
Rolling release is kind of a misnomer. It is technically rolling but the system is carefully put together and everything is updated at the same time.
I’d even argue that rolling release does not preclude grouping updates in bunches.
Rolling release distros still have testing cycles, usually. Gentoo will mask untested package versions, openSUSE tumbleweed just doesn’t ship them (at least not on a default zypper config - I haven’t looked into this much tbh). Of course, these package versions don’t get held back in large unrelated groups generally. They get released whenever tested. But you could just delay everything until most important packages are tested.
Actually, openSUSE SlowRoll does something like this. Instead of getting packages as soon as they’re tested like TumbleWeed, you get big updates once per month and important fixes as soon as released/tested.
I understand that, but if you run a rolling release, you know you’re getting updates constantly, and this is what I’m asking about. How is steam keeping up with these updates while “not updating”? Lol
It really isn’t a rolling release. They are cherry picking packages and package versions.
