I forked SteamOS for my living room PC • Hacker News Board

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#141

Post by 0x457 » Sun, Dec 31, 2023, 7:25 PM UTC

glitchcrab wrote: post #97

smoldesu wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> built on Arch, a bad call IMHO. I'd be curious to hear why. Arch deserves it's reputation for poor stability, but for Valve's application with OSTree and immutable root should work fine. For users who don't want to tinker, they can receive a quality first-party experience with smooth upgrades. Users that do want to tinker are largely funneled into using Flatpak or AppImage, which are much more stable than AUR packa…

Can we please stop with the FUD around Arch and poor stability? It's an old meme which will never die, but it has no basis in reality. I've been using Arch on my personal and work laptops for probably 7 years now and the only time it had been a problem has been due to layer 8 issues and doing something stupid. I certainly wouldn't be using it for work if it was unstable.

It's because plenty of arch users just copy and paste things from arch wiki and stackoverflow without thinking.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#142

Post by bsimpson » Sun, Dec 31, 2023, 7:25 PM UTC

jokethrowaway wrote: post #118

Interesting read! The A/B upgrade sounds a bit overkill, you can always just pop up a live distro or install a recovery system (on an old version) in a partition in case something goes wrong. I recently moved to Arch after a few years of NixOS (preceded by years of Arch) and I think the fears of the author are misplaced. Arch is definitely a very serious and mature distro and I'd trust them more than Valve. The quali…

The Steam Deck is essentially a Chromebook for video games, so ChromeOS's unbreakable partition scheme seems like a reasonable idea.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#143

Post by Adverblessly » Sun, Dec 31, 2023, 7:27 PM UTC

delfinom wrote: post #110

pjmlp wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pity that it solidifies Windows as the top PC gaming OS, that all studios should care about. Let Valve do the needful for running them under GNU/Linux, if at all.

Valve inventing a portable game runtime that just works on all Linux distros without game studios needing an entire department to handle the dependency hell of Linux NIHisn would solve that issue.

You mean the Steam Linux Runtime?

From a quick search this is the best description of it I found: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#144

Post by bsimpson » Sun, Dec 31, 2023, 7:30 PM UTC

toxicunderGroov wrote: post #73

bazzite.gg alsof does this very well. On AMD hardware it did 120hz VRR out of the box and u can alpha test HDR support.

Bazzite (and Immutable Linux as a whole) is fascinating.

I'm not deep enough in their weeds to perfectly explain it in a concise HN comment, but it's all about having a read-only known-good Linux distro at the root and then layering packages on top, taking much inspiration from server-side containers. It's supposed to be both more secure and more reliable/reproducible/customizable than traditional Linux. You just write in a container manifest which packages you want. When an upgrade comes out, it runs the upgrade, then reinstalls your packages on top.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#145

Post by techknowlogick » Sun, Dec 31, 2023, 7:38 PM UTC

I love this kind of deep dive into customizing the software/OS on a device you own. Glad that "Tivoization" isn't a concern for the steamdeck.

The most interesting part of the article was the mention of a /nix partition, as I didn't realize the steamdeck supports nixpkgs, after researching it more, they do indeed (not installed by default, but at least it is possible without having to fork an entire os to get it on the device).

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#146

Post by ParetoOptimal » Sun, Dec 31, 2023, 7:40 PM UTC

jokethrowaway wrote: post #118

Interesting read! The A/B upgrade sounds a bit overkill, you can always just pop up a live distro or install a recovery system (on an old version) in a partition in case something goes wrong. I recently moved to Arch after a few years of NixOS (preceded by years of Arch) and I think the fears of the author are misplaced. Arch is definitely a very serious and mature distro and I'd trust them more than Valve. The quali…

> The quality of the packages available for Arch is what made me move from NixOS.

Can you give some examples of this please?

I generally find the NixOS packages high quality.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#147

Post by ParetoOptimal » Sun, Dec 31, 2023, 7:42 PM UTC

bsimpson wrote: post #112

I recently got my hands on a gaming handheld (the Legion Go) and have used it to get more exposure to Linux. I'd historically avoided it, because it seemed like a perpetual tinker timesink with limited compatibility with things I'd actually want to use. Reading about immutable filesystems and how traditional Linux gives root willy-nilly to all sorts of random software piqued my curiosity. I'm using NixOS, which can i…

I'm also successfully using Jovian-NixOS on my Steam Deck without issue, highly recommended.

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#148

Post by sdl » Sun, Dec 31, 2023, 7:42 PM UTC

quaffapint wrote: post #34

I actually just ordered a GPU for my unRaid NAS server just to be able to do Steam Headless via a nice docker image(1) and then use Moonlight (for example) as a client on my Windows laptop. If it works, it's much better than buying yet another piece of desktop hardware just to play games when my NAS is just sitting there idle most of the time. Just need to make sure I keep the power level setting on the Nvidia card t…

I spent some (too much) time trying to get pretty much the same thing running using GOW [1]. Was quite a bit harder than I thought, requiring a hdmi dummy plug to get the xserver config right etc.

1: https://github.com/games-on-whales/gow

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#149

Post by bormaj » Sun, Dec 31, 2023, 7:45 PM UTC

quaffapint wrote: post #34

I actually just ordered a GPU for my unRaid NAS server just to be able to do Steam Headless via a nice docker image(1) and then use Moonlight (for example) as a client on my Windows laptop. If it works, it's much better than buying yet another piece of desktop hardware just to play games when my NAS is just sitting there idle most of the time. Just need to make sure I keep the power level setting on the Nvidia card t…

This is really interesting! Do you notice any limitations on input lag or video quality when streaming over a local network this way?

Re: I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

#150

Post by freedomben » Sun, Dec 31, 2023, 7:48 PM UTC

Adverblessly wrote: post #140

freedomben wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is surely part of the consideration, but certainly not all. Some engineers at Valve (especially the head honcho Gabe Newell) are legit Linux people (Debian IIRC). They believe in it, and I love them for it

I don't dispute your claims, but I remember very clearly that back then it seemed obvious that SteamOS was a response to the Microsoft Store and a fear that Microsoft would mandate that all software on Windows come from the Microsoft Store. While that was obviously speculation, at least the dates match up (October 26, 2012 for Microsft Store launch and December 13, 2013 from SteamOS launch according to Wikipedia)

Agree based on my memory. I think the Microsoft store threat is what finally tipped the scale. It took it from "we kind of support linux because we like it" to "we support linux because it's important business insurance for us in case Microsoft goes Apple (or Xbox or whatever example you want) and monopolizes app distribution on Windows.