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 @dos @gamingonlinux FreeBSD is up there with "choose your own adventure" OSes too.
> Why would they?
Short answer - closed source.
@sos @raptor85 @gamingonlinux And that would help them how? :p
@dos @raptor85 @gamingonlinux There is a reason most of video games are not open source. Why use an open-source system, then?
@sos @raptor85 @gamingonlinux Yeah, as we all know, withholding the source magically provides your project with more devs and gives them wings to do more in less time ;P
The opposite is true in fact. It wouldn't be possible to create a product like Deck with such a small dev team without relying on synergies with already well-established projects and communities. Their choices are pretty smart in this regard.
And that's just pure pragmatism. They have strategic reasons to do it this way too.
@sos @raptor85 @gamingonlinux Mind you, I don't think Valve cares about FLOSS at all. It just happens to be the best available path for them, especially since they don't seem to care about locking things down either. In the end, everything they do is there to support Steam, one way or another.