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?

  • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    122
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    8 months ago

    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.

    • seaQueue@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      79
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      8 months ago

      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.

      • 1984@lemmy.today
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        32
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        8 months ago

        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.

        • swooosh@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          edit-2
          8 months ago

          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.

          • LeFantome@programming.dev
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            8
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            8 months ago

            How is keeping Arch up-to-date hard? Because there are a lot of updates?

            I found Arch to be easier to maintain than any other distro I use. Everything is managed by the package manager ( no snaps, no flatpaks, no PPAs ). Updates are frequent but small and manageable. There are really no update “events” to navigate. And everything is current enough that I never find myself working around missing features or incompatibilities. I found it to “just work”.

            I am not sure how your first point relates to SElinux. SELinux is part of the Red Hat ecosystem which is why Fedora uses it. It is not new ( SElinux may pre-date Arch Linux ). Whether you have it installed or not has nothing to do with how hard the system is to maintain. Default Debian installs do not use it either. Most Linux distros don’t. Ubuntu and SUSE use AppArmor instead.

            I do not use SElinux on desktop but it makes sense for a server. The Arch kernel includes SElinux support so all you have to do is install the package if you want it. Generally, Arch gives you a newer version than Fedora does.

            • swooosh@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              8 months ago

              Flatpak is another good example besides selinux. You as a user have to be up to date how to install packages. You have to install flatpak yourself. I trust that you are up to date enough, but many people lack time and especially interest in how the system works. Many people don’t care as long as it works. On arch you have the freedom to do everything but you have to take care of a lot of thing on your own. E.g. fedora makes a lot of decisions for you. You do not have to read about firewalls, you can, but you don’t have to. On arch I highly advise evryone to read what a firewall is and then decide which firewall to use and set the right settings. Arch is not bad but it’s not for the average person who doesn’t read readmes and guides and that’s ok

              • pathief@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                2
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                edit-2
                8 months ago

                You can also install “app stores” on arch, if you so desire. I believe the most famous one is pamac.

                You can configure the firewall with the KDE GUI, you don’t need additional knowledge than the one you’d already need for any other system.

                I wouldn’t recommend Arch for newbies with no technical background but I feel like EndeavourOS is very simple to install and use.

          • 1984@lemmy.today
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            8 months ago

            True, I have not installed it. I ran Fedora for a while long time ago and selinux was causing tons of headaches. So I never wanted to have it on my system after that.

      • toasteecup@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        13
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        8 months ago

        +1 to this. I built a few deb packages at a previous company. It was a solid packaging suite but good lord was it a pain to work through

      • patchexempt@lemmy.zip
        cake
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        8
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        8 months ago

        I feel like this is the answer. if you’ve ever had to maintain a build pipeline or repository for .deb or .rpm, it’s not exactly pleasant (it is extremely robust, however). arch packaging is very simple by comparison, and I really doubt they’d need much more.

      • Dandroid@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        8 months ago

        I have only ever packaged for RPM (the company I work for has our own RPM-based distro). How does it compare? I find RPM to be pretty easy, but I have nothing to compare against.

  • iknt@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    122
    arrow-down
    8
    ·
    8 months ago

    For KDE, Valve found it easier to work with KDE devs than GNOME devs.

    • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      8 months ago

      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…

      • HopFlop@discuss.tchncs.de
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        19
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        8 months ago

        Of course it does. OP asked multiple questions, this was sipposes to answer why they used KDE instead of Gnome. I personally think Arch would have the advantage of having the newewst drivers, Proton version etc. available.

  • seaQueue@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    106
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    8 months ago

    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.

    • TunaCowboy@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      20
      arrow-down
      4
      ·
      8 months ago

      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
      
      • dsemy@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        21
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        8 months ago

        In my experience, Debian unstable has been less stable than “pure” rolling release distributions. Basing on unstable also means you have to put up with or work around Debian’s freeze periods.

      • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        4
        ·
        edit-2
        8 months ago

        stable is 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.

  • deathmetal27@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    81
    arrow-down
    5
    ·
    8 months ago

    As for why they adopted KDE, they probably discovered how hard it is to work with Gnome developers.

        • realbadat@programming.dev
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          14
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          8 months ago

          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.

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      15
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      8 months ago

      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.

      • TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        8
        ·
        8 months ago

        Average GNOME hater is so blind they cannot distinguish between MacOS and iOS. No surprise, considering they never grew out of Windows UI paradigms.

        • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          6
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          8 months ago

          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.

          • TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            arrow-down
            8
            ·
            8 months ago

            No, GNOME is far superior to MacOS, so superior that Windows 11 copied it, and KDE copies Windows. That makes GNOME the godfather compared to hacky KDE.

              • TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                2
                arrow-down
                2
                ·
                8 months ago

                You think so? That shit has 2 right click menus and settings hard to navigate, not to mention the unbearable ad ridden Start menu, shitty Control Panel and AI garbage you cannot escape. You need something like AME project to make it barely usable. Oh and forced updates taking hours of time. All this is not a problem on Linux.

                • lud@lemm.ee
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  5
                  arrow-down
                  2
                  ·
                  8 months ago

                  Yes, and I think it’s easier to use than gnome.

  • SGG@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    66
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    8 months ago

    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.

  • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    30
    ·
    8 months ago

    All of the things others have said are excellent points, I would also like to point out that if you go to the steam hardware survey and select Linux only you’ll see that Arch is the most used distro (after SteamOS), and that was also the case when the Steam Deck was announced in July 2021 https://web.archive.org/web/20220806051441/https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

    And from my personal experience there’s a reason for that, other than the I use Arch btw meme, despite most ports having Ubuntu in mind, and despite Ubuntu being the more user friendly distro, games just work on Arch. It’s a weird thing where gaming on all of my arch machines is very painless, but gaming on the Ubuntu ones is frustrating, there’s always something not right, it feels like the machine is chugging, or the driver decides not to work, or the game shows a black screen, or prime decides not today, etc, etc. I admit this is personal experience, and others might have the exact opposite, and that this is kind of biased because as a general rule people who use Arch tend to be more knowledgeable about Linux than people who use Ubuntu, but from replying on several Linux forums it’s generally people with Ubuntu that have problems with games and people with Arch usually report that “it just works” for them.

    • sazey@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      8 months ago

      Reminds me of the time I had a nvidia GPU laptop and was distro hopping like a rabbit on crack trying to find something stable. Surprisingly enough it was Arch that proved to be the most stable and what I ended up sticking to.

      • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        8 months ago

        Yup, been using Arch for around 16 years, never had a problem with an Nvidia card and the vast majority of my GPUs were Nvidia. Every time I hear the horror stories of prime and bumblebee I really couldn’t relate because everything just works for me… A couple of years back however my company gave me a laptop with a company approved OS (Ubuntu), and while I don’t know who’s exactly to blame here (but I have my suspicions), I’ve had to use prime-select to set the OS to work always with the Nvidia GPU, otherwise external monitors work like shit.

        It could be that ThinkPads are shit compared to Acer (and every other brand I’ve had in the past) laptops, it could be that the i7 on that laptop has a shitty GPU and can’t handle the external monitors. But I’m 90% sure that if I put Arch there it would just work, and I wouldn’t almost burn myself with a 99°C laptop that’s constantly running a GPU that’s not meant to.

  • john89@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    36
    arrow-down
    6
    ·
    8 months ago

    It was based on debian, but moved to arch.

    I think they did it because honestly, arch is better for desktop-usage due to its rolling-release model.

    Bugs in debian stick around forever.

    • KubeRoot@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      18
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      8 months ago

      I don’t think that’s a good point, since they make their own immutable images, so they can use whatever versions of software they want, and you don’t normally get to update them with the rolling release

      • pathief@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        16
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        8 months ago

        Yeah but what’s the point of using Debian when you’re going to have to manually package newer versions of a lot of software?

        • c10l@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          8 months ago

          Why would they manually package them? Just grab the packages you need from testing or sid. This way you keep the solid Debian stable base OS and still bring in the latest and greatest of the things that matter for gaming.

          • pathief@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            8 months ago

            But why go through those hoops? What is the advantage Debian brings when you have to cherry pick packages and their dependencies from Sid? Stability is no longer an advantage when you are cherry picking from Sid lol.

            • c10l@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              2
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              8 months ago

              Stability is no longer an advantage when you are cherry picking from Sid lol.

              This makes no sense. When 95% of the system is based on Debian stable, you get pretty much full stability of the base OS. All you need to pull in from the other releases is Mesa and related packages.

              Perhaps the kernel as well, but I suspect they’re compiling their own with relevant parameters and features for the SD anyway, so not even that.

    • bigmclargehuge@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      9
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      8 months ago

      Yeah as an Arch user I disagree. Imo a handheld meant to be a plug and play system would hugely benefit from a stable OS with a laid back update schedule. You don’t see PlayStation pushing constant updates the second BSD packages get new versions.

      As others have said, Valve has their own immutable release system, so it doesn’t really matter. In this case, the rolling release has even less to do with it. They likely chose Arch due to the up to date packages which benefit gaming.

  • Mactan@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    28
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    8 months ago

    the deck isn’t some server that needs > 100% uptime for years. Debian is poopoo for bleeding edge game releases, especially any alpha/beta/early access stuff

  • LoudWaterHombre@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    21
    ·
    8 months ago

    […] anyone know why Volvo went in this direction?

    So noone is talking about Volvo?

    Other than that, SteamOS started with Debian and switched to Arch last minute before the steam deck released.

    • oo1@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      19
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      8 months ago

      Volvo probably trying to cast off their reputation for being “safe ang boring” and take on a more edgy image.
      Ditching Internal combustion in favour of steam power is also a major shift for them.

      • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        6
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        8 months ago

        Wasn’t Volvo the company where some exec got run over when they wanted to demonstrate the automatic emergency stop feature? And all this after they gifted seatbelts to the world.

        • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          8 months ago

          That actually ended up being untrue. There were claims that it was the CEO, then it switched to “some random executive”.

          Turns out it was neither, and the identity of the people (there were two) struck is unknown. Not only that, the car in question didn’t even have a pedestrian detection system, because that’s an optional extra that the XC60 in question didn’t have installed.

          The rumour also said that the “CEO” was paralysed, which is also untrue. The injuries sustained were so minor that nobody went to hospital.

  • therealjcdenton@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    19
    ·
    8 months ago

    Rolling release, quicker updates for gaming, and pacman is an extremely fast package manager, which is why OpenSUSE Tumbleweed wasn’t chosen. KDE probably because touch screen works better on it and maybe they found switching between desktop and big picture mode to be a better transition

      • therealjcdenton@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        8 months ago

        Maybe? As much as I hate that statement it’s probably true, cause windows does look like kde since they copied a bunch of stuff from plasma

    • Sentau@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      8 months ago

      TW also has the issue of having ‘controversial’ software like the media codecs, etc not being included OOTB due to licensing concerns.

  • azvasKvklenko@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    17
    ·
    8 months ago

    In early Steam Deck showcase videos there were talks with Valve guys like Lawrence Yang, and IIRC they simply said that it is easier for them to build the system that way, not that they couldn’t continue using Debian.

    I think the reason for that might be that Debian has pretty strict package and dependency policies and sometimes it’s not easy to put cutting edge solutions on top of the „stable” base, so they would end-up using unstable/sid anyway, which still isn’t ideal as there is some freezing happening every now and then. Also Debian packaging system feels quite dated and strict comparing to PKGBUILD format, and it’s simply easier to build custom packages, having single build instruction file is super convenient and unlike with Debian at times, replacing whatever core system packages without breaking half of the dependency tree is usually easily doable on Arch.

    • wax@feddit.nu
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      8 months ago

      I’ve packaged on both distros, and PKGBUILDs are truly amazing

  • uzay@infosec.pub
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    17
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    8 months ago

    Another point for KDE might be that it works much better on a small screen that may be partially obscured by an overlaid keyboard. I used Bazzite Gnome for a while on the Steam Deck and I much preferred Plasma on there after switching back, despite using Gnome on my main system.

  • D_Air1@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    9
    ·
    8 months ago

    For the KDE part, something I haven’t heard most people mention is the wayland support and how fast they are to pioneer and implement new protocols. DRM leasing is the reason why Gnome can’t do VR games and I forget why they wouldn’t implement it, but the why doesn’t really matter for a company focused on gaming. There are quite a number of protocols that have followed this same story with Gnome.

      • D_Air1@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        8 months ago

        Yes, but that isn’t really relevant to the current state of things. I still think Gnome’s wayland implementation is ahead in some ways, but why would that matter when various game related stuff doesn’t work on Gnome. We are talking about a gaming company here.

  • warmaster@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    edit-2
    8 months ago

    Arch gets faster driver updates, KDE is faster at developing Wayland protocol implementations.

    Edit: Valve gets their desired stability by turning Arch into a point release distro through image based releases. And, the system is practically unbrickable since it’s immutable. So, in summary it’s the best of both rolling release and point release models. By best, I mean for gaming.

      • warmaster@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        8 months ago

        I understand your comment if you have an Nvidia GPU and/or if you don’t do any gaming, but if you have an Intel or AMD GPU and you play games, Wayland is just better. VRR, HDR, Fractional Scaling, Nvidia Reflex (for all GPU brands), in GameScope (wayland compositor made by Valve) you can have FSR, upscaling, on all games. It’s even better than on Windows. And if you use Bazzite, all is set up for you out of the box, you don’t need to be an experienced Linux user to use all of the above tech. Just like on the Steam Deck.