I've run arch on probably a dozen or more physical machines (more if you count VMs) over the last 12 years. I can count the number of breaking updates on 1 hand. The talk about it being unstable may have been sort of true 10 years ago, but now it's just complete FUD.
Why SteamOS Switched from Debian to Arch Linux
41–50 of 68 posts
Re: Why SteamOS Switched from Debian to Arch Linux
#42I've run arch on probably a dozen or more physical machines (more if you count VMs) over the last 12 years. I can count the number of breaking updates on 1 hand. The talk about it being unstable may have been sort of true 10 years ago, but now it's just complete FUD.
I mean, everybody blaming Arch for being breaking and unstable...as if Debian or Ubuntu never were unstable. Quick to forget all the Mir, GNOME, wayland messups, huh?
The huge difference with Arch is that it's usually recoverable, no matter what's broken. And that's what I like the most about it.
Re: Why SteamOS Switched from Debian to Arch Linux
#43One unfortunate thing with rolling releases is that you shouldn’t fall too far behind. I had to move abroad for a bit and left my desktop behind. That’s fine. I’ve done this sort of thing before and I just boot it up, apt update, apt upgrade, and I’m good. With Pac-Man I hit a thing where it wouldn’t upgrade. It couldn’t get me up to date from a year ago. Had to give it up then because this sort of thing happens to m…
I know that the quick deprecation of keys inside the arch-keyring can lead to problems when you fall too far behind.
It would be awesome if pacman had an easy way to check what kind of keys are missing, and would automatically try to obtain them...because sometimes I had gpg/pgp problems, too, and these kind of problems are kinda unnecessary.
Re: Why SteamOS Switched from Debian to Arch Linux
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use to have arch break a lot because I only updated every couple of months, fixed it every time by looking at the forums. I don't seem to have those problems any more though.
The use case is very different here thought. For a handheld game console, it really has to work forever (or as long as the hardware lasts) without a single issue or ever requiring users to fix anything. The competitors here are nintendo consoles, and the playstation. It's not acceptable to say "oh its ok you can just open the terminal to fix and I haven't had an issue in 2 years". It has to be essentially perfect or…
>The competitors here are nintendo consoles, and the playstation.
Nope, the competition is GPD and other UMPCs. Valve is quite clear about the fact that this is a PC, not a game console. It's a portable gaming PC, but not a console. It's a general purpose computer. I expect a lot of people to install Windows on it, too.
Re: Why SteamOS Switched from Debian to Arch Linux
#45Re: Why SteamOS Switched from Debian to Arch Linux
#46Arch Linux is great! As a rolling release it needs "Patch Tuesday" type of updates. Falling behind just few weeks leads to a broken system. Over time too many .pacold, .pacsave and .pacnew files are polluting the filesystem, requiring manual intervention.
I've recently discovered pacdiff [0] to solve that problem, which helped me clean up about 30 leftover .pac[diff|new] files from my everyday desktop machine.
[0]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Pacnew_and_Pacsave#p...
Re: Why SteamOS Switched from Debian to Arch Linux
#47I've been running Arch on multiple machines for 10 years at this point. Been through the systemd transition. In my experience there is very little breakage, and it's easier to deal with than a huge upgrade every 6 months or more. I'm guessing Valve will not deploy Arch packages directly to the Deck, but instead do weekly/monthly releases that are properly QA'd. It should be very smooth while giving them flexibility t…
>and it's easier to deal with than a huge upgrade every 6 months or more.
I ran Arch but moved back to a LTS , it is not about stability but mostly I don't want surprises, my file manager works fine for me now , who knows the next version would remove or break something that will be maybe fixed in a different version but would also introduce a new bug.
For my IDE I keep 3 versions just in case some bug or stupid UI change is introduced, for people like my I think as stable base where you can update only the programs that you want/need is a better solution. I also have the option and used it to get backported kernels and nvidia drivers to get better vulkan support - I am at that point in live where I would dread to see that there is an update pending and there is a new kernel or video driver version available.
Re: Why SteamOS Switched from Debian to Arch Linux
#48One unfortunate thing with rolling releases is that you shouldn’t fall too far behind. I had to move abroad for a bit and left my desktop behind. That’s fine. I’ve done this sort of thing before and I just boot it up, apt update, apt upgrade, and I’m good. With Pac-Man I hit a thing where it wouldn’t upgrade. It couldn’t get me up to date from a year ago. Had to give it up then because this sort of thing happens to m…
Same, on one of my old servers. It was the change to zst as I remember it that did me in.
I still use arch, but it's not without warts.
Re: Why SteamOS Switched from Debian to Arch Linux
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Arch is great and probably very rarely breaks but if it does, there is very few ways to recover the situation other than instructing users to reinstall the OS. Is there any citation to support this? I’ve run arch for 11 years, never once on that same computer did I have to reinstall the OS. On the rest that have been running it for 2y and 5y they’ve never had that issue, nor instruction.
Yes, me! Just a few weeks ago my Thinkpad ran out of battery mid upgrade (`pacman -Syu`) and got corrupted so bad it caused a kernel panic right after the LUKS prompt. Only took an hour to boot into the live USB, chroot into the disk installation (`arch-chroot`, but don't forget to mount `/boot` afterwards!!!), and reinstall the entire OS with `pacman -Qqn | pacman --overwrite "*" -S -` followed by `pacman -Syyu` (to…
You corrupted your kernel. Arch had nothing to do with that, and regardless of the os if you corrupt the kernel you need to reinstall.
Re: Why SteamOS Switched from Debian to Arch Linux
#50Arch Linux is great! As a rolling release it needs "Patch Tuesday" type of updates. Falling behind just few weeks leads to a broken system. Over time too many .pacold, .pacsave and .pacnew files are polluting the filesystem, requiring manual intervention.
> Falling behind just few weeks leads to a broken system.
Not really. Arch is rock stable, Even if you update only one every two months.