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?
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.
Totally agree. Arch is actually a really good, simple system. That’s why so many people pick it as their main distro. Once you have installed it a few times, it’s just very simple how it works. There is no magic.
The difficulty with arch is not get it up and running. It’s about keeping it up to date. Do you have selinux enabled? I like selinux and among other things that’s what fedora bundles for me. I could do everything myself but not only do I have to know the state of the art today, I also will have to know what’s up tomorrow. I have to keep up with it. That is the difficulty with arch. Selinux is just one example but probably a prominent. I bet many people running arch have not installed it.
For KDE, Valve found it easier to work with KDE devs than GNOME devs.
Doesn’t kde work on debian? I haven’t used it on the desktop in ages, but that seems odd.
On second thought, they may not have the most up-to-date version. So maybe it’s that.
And if steam could make a Qt client while they’re at it…
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 unstable as a base. stable is 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-amd64
stableis not the only release that debian offers,
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.
No, I meant release: https://www.debian.org/releases/
Debian always has at least three releases in active maintenance: stable, testing and unstable.
As for why they adopted KDE, they probably discovered how hard it is to work with Gnome developers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
