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Why SteamOS Switched from Debian to Arch Linux

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Re: Why SteamOS Switched from Debian to Arch Linux

#51

Post by ekianjo »

SilverRed wrote: post #20

I think that Fedora SilverBlue would have been the perfect OS for these kinds of consumer products. 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. With something like fedora silverblue, if an update fails, The system can reboot in to the previous OS image without issue. It also ensures that there is a know…

> 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.

What are you talking about? Whenever things break in Arch, I fix them in my own install, either by downgrading a package that may be causing problems, or worst case with a USB stick which can enable me to chroot in the system again. Never had to reinstall anything from scratch.

On top of that, Valve will use its own repositories and you can be sure that for a SINGLE device, they will test things and make sure they don't break when they roll things out. That's a non-issue from the get go.

Re: Why SteamOS Switched from Debian to Arch Linux

#52

Post by baq »

kyruzic wrote: post #49
akiselev wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow. How’s that a reasonable answer? The OS did a very bad job at upgrading something that should be upgraded in an atomic fashion and blew up on both that and a failsafe boot to previous kernel. Neither should happen.

Re: Why SteamOS Switched from Debian to Arch Linux

#53

Post by walteweiss »

kyruzic wrote: post #49
akiselev wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you corrupt your kernel? What leads to that?

Re: Why SteamOS Switched from Debian to Arch Linux

#54

Post by renewiltord »

secondaryacct wrote: post #14
renewiltord wrote: post #11

One 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…

Yeah having been on many distro for 20 years I just gave up on Windows-like (or MacOS) upgrade experience and just split everything that is important in a NAS, everything transient personnal in a home partition totally isolated from the distro, and the rest in a distro partition that can break any day with no consequence. I even do that too with the NAS since ive been fucked before by an upgrade tainting the same par…

Oh recovery was easy because I follow the same separation of / and /home (and some other stuff, like I have /var/lib/pgsql/data on this other SSD).

But ultimately I like booting up and getting to work. Maybe I’ll fuck with DKMS and Nvidia a little but that’s it.

Oh man, rough luck with the btrfs there. I got bitten by the XFS zeroing out bug back in the day so I empathize.

Re: Why SteamOS Switched from Debian to Arch Linux

#55

Post by SilverRed »

ekianjo wrote: post #51
SilverRed wrote: post #20

I think that Fedora SilverBlue would have been the perfect OS for these kinds of consumer products. 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. With something like fedora silverblue, if an update fails, The system can reboot in to the previous OS image without issue. It also ensures that there is a know…

> 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. What are you talking about? Whenever things break in Arch, I fix them in my own install, either by downgrading a package that may be causing problems, or worst case with a USB stick which can enable me to chroot in the system again. Never had to reinstall an…

The problem is you can not tell users to just go fix it themselves. This is a device that should not _ever_ require fixing. It is not ok to ever tell a casual user to open up a terminal and correct the system state.

An immutable OS gives a huge safety layer by allowing all mistakes to be rolled back automatically.

Re: Why SteamOS Switched from Debian to Arch Linux

#57

Post by SilverRed »

kyruzic wrote: post #49
akiselev wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fedora silverblue can recover from this state. The kernel is just a file inside the OS image. If the latest OS image is corrupted due to a power failure, it will just boot the previous image which is still working.

Re: Why SteamOS Switched from Debian to Arch Linux

#58

Post by diffeomorphism »

edgyquant wrote: post #3

Would not ubuntu or fedora be better if you wanted faster release? In my experience when I used to run arch (~4 years ago) I had breaking changes every couple of months where with Fedora I never had one except when I was the culprit by adding a graphics card with proprietary drivers.

Ubuntu has Canonical to deal with. If that were not an issue why base steamOS on debian ( but runtime on ubuntu)? Same for fedora and red hat.

Re: Why SteamOS Switched from Debian to Arch Linux

#60

Post by neilv »

The parting words of the article, on what seems to be a site for PC gamers, looks significant to me:

> but I need a reason to get into Linux and stick with it. Valve’s work might get me there.

How many PC gamers an article with this title will reach, I don't know, but getting more people thinking about "Linux" seems good (even if the open systems guts are in a somewhat closed appliance). Especially when gaming has been keeping a lot of expensive home PCs on Windows -- thereby keeping a lot of other things people do on Windows.

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