More info on the Valve (Steam) collab with Arch Linux and potential future hardware support https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/10/more-info-on-the-valve-steam-collab-with-arch-linux-and-potential-future-hardware-support/
@gamingonlinux I really don't understand why they went this way instead of FreeBSD route like eveeryone else
@sos @gamingonlinux Why would they? That would only make the whole project significantly more complex and expensive without providing tangible benefits.
What's harder to understand, especially with this news above, is why they went with Arch specifically - although ultimately the choice of base distro isn't that important with their atomupd design.
@dos @sos @gamingonlinux distros like arch/gentoo are by far the easiest to build a custom setup on top of since the "distro" itself is really just 'build your own" distro tools on a disk, so it makes sense to base off a distro that's literally designed to base off of.
@raptor85 @sos @gamingonlinux That description applies to Gentoo, but doesn't to Arch. Even Debian would be better than Arch in this regard - just look at SteamOS's post-install rootfs cleanup that's done behind pacman's back. They didn't "build their own distro" at all, they just roll with repo snapshots and overlays (which is perfectly fine, as that's exactly what they needed there).
@raptor85 @sos @gamingonlinux Ever since Deck was released I suspected that Valve will eventually want to migrate away from Arch as a base for SteamOS because of some of its properties simply making it a less-than-ideal choice for such project long term. However, it looks like they decided to throw money at Arch to have them provide the things they're going to need instead. I haven't thought about that possibility, but in hindsight it is a totally Valve move 😂