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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
+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
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.
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.
For KDE, Valve found it easier to work with KDE devs than GNOME devs.
Big surprise.
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…
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.
My hair is a bird.
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But Gnome devs are notoriously hard to work with.
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.
It’s pretty common to use debian
unstableas a base.stableis 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-amd64In 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.
stableis 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.
Puts on reading glasses back in my day, we had a saying: “there’s nothing more stable than Debian unstable.”
No, I meant release: https://www.debian.org/releases/
Debian always has at least three releases in active maintenance: stable, testing and unstable.
Interesting, I didn’t know they consider testing and unstable to be releases too.
As for why they adopted KDE, they probably discovered how hard it is to work with Gnome developers.
Why would you ever need such a feature? Closed.
I shared a green text recently that said just this lol
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.
Just saw it too :D
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.
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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.
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Don’t feed the troll…
Windows 11 is still easier to use…
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Yes, and I think it’s easier to use than gnome.
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.
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.
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
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?
Why would they manually package them? Just grab the packages you need from
testingorsid. This way you keep the solid Debianstablebase OS and still bring in the latest and greatest of the things that matter for gaming.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
People shitting on Gnome sound like kids bitching that the free pizza shop doesn’t offer your favorite hamburger.
Also, all this sudden Gnome hate all over Lemmy is trendy as fuck, being trendy used to mean you were a loser with no original style, I guess the capitalists turned it into “viral” and made it cool.
Gnome is shit, I use KDE btw is definitely the new Reddit/Lemmy Linux community circlejerk.
And it’s not even like console fanboy arguments, because in this case it’s pretty one-sided. I don’t see Gnome fans brigading KDE threads and circlejerking about KDE being awful and the devs being cunts.
Idk why people can’t just accept that they’re both amazing DEs but very different in use, with very different project philosophies.
It seems to me that people keep saying “Linux is about choice”, but the second someone chooses something different to what the hivemind likes, the pitchforks are out.
It’s not new, it started when they released GNOME 3.
Oh yeah, definitely. There were even death threats to the devs for a while after Gnome 3 came out, because anonymity seems to turn some people into monsters.
It just seemed to me that it settled down for a while and now in the past couple of years it’s ramped back up again for some reason.
I was very upset when they released gnome 3. Suddenly things were different, and there were rough edges. I used XFCE for many years after that. But… I have come to appreciate it now. I like that the devs had their vision and didn’t give in to all the demands to make it work differently. It’s their project, and I can use it if I want, or not. I respect it the same way I respect OpenBSD doing their thing. Can you imagine demanding that the OpenBSD devs changed their vision due to popular opinions? “We want closed source nvidia drivers and bluetooth support!” They just tell people to use another OS then. But from that stubbornness something beautiful is created.
I don’t see Gnome fans brigading KDE threads and circlejerking about KDE being awful and the devs being cunts.
I’m a Gnome user for like 20 years, I don’t prefer KDE but glad it’s there. I never have but would be happy to support KDE and understand any devs being cunts on occasion, I’m sure it’s stressful. I’m glad they are there so I don’t have to use proprietary software.
I’ve used Gnome for a very long time but tried out Plasma 6.0 soon after it came out, and I’m very impressed.
I might switch back to Gnome some day, but KDE just keeps growing on me.
The seamless clipboard sharing feature between mobile and laptop is really cool, and that was just an unexpected bonus attached to a whole set of cool features. And everything feels cohesive in a way that I’m not used to.See, this is a good comment. You like KDE more, awesome! Enjoy! Your attitude makes me want to try it again.
I know you can get most of the KDE Connect features with GSConnect. I assume clipboard sharing works too?
That’s possible. I went very many years without even hearing about that, and I found KDE Connect and had it up and fully operational on day one.
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This is a dumb take too, it’s important to criticize and scrutinize anything and everything down to the smallest detail to understand what works and what doesn’t, how and why that is the case in order to make better decisions for the future. You have to think critically, especially about software even when it’s a matter of preference.
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What? No I was saying that NOT criticizing GNOME just because of the old thought-terminating cliché of “don’t use it then” is silly because it’s important to critique everything and no one is just saying it’s “garbage” apart from people in your head
I never see KDE get near the hate from gnome users because it just doesn’t affect them.
It’s because everyone that uses Linux will stumble across gnome at least once because it’s in Ubuntu which is the first and only distro a lot of people use, so you have to go out of your way to use something else like KDE.
i don’t understand why you’d waste time complaining about any you don’t use.
Why do people complain about anything?
Because why not? I don’t like Gnome but I complain about it because I can and I don’t like it.
I also complain about IOS, macOS, And a lot of other shit that doesn’t matter. I just like to voice my opinion like everyone else. There is no need to listen.
Ubuntu’s version of Gnome is heavily modified to look and feel like their old Unity DE though. Vanilla Gnome like in Fedora or Arch is a vastly different experience.
Arch?
Last time I installed arch it didn’t have any DE (or anything really) by default.
Correct. But if you install gnome, it comes with default configs
That’s true with KDE as well.
Who said it wasn’t
I remember a lot of KDE hate up until Gnome 3, which was controversial, to say the least. It mirrored old-school Mac hate, with a lot of invalid arguments parroted by people who never took time to learn it (or more to the point, to unlearn what they came from).
I’ve swapped between Gnome and KDE a bunch of times, and it hasn’t really made a difference to me in many years. There was a time when running apps built for one on the other was a painful experience either way. Nowadays my DE choice doesn’t really influence my application choices.
Lol, typical Lemmy to blame everything on capitalism.
Gnome is just incredibly annoying to use. It’s not a trendy thing to say, it’s just my opinion.
I really enjoy gnome, I much prefer it.
That’s fair enough. I don’t understand why personally but you do you.
I find some software annoying too but I’m not 12 so I don’t feel the need to shit on people volunteering their time to make software for people.
I see you’re upset people don’t like gnome.
I don’t care what people like, I don’t like people shitting on open source projects and dividing the community.
Right.
You don’t like that people don’t like gnome. You care about what they like.
I, personally, think when we love something we want it to be the best it can be. Gnome devs seem to just be red hat employees who don’t actually care about making a good DE, just doing the easiest work while [WONTFIX]ing anything that takes actual effort.
You don’t even talk with gnome devs. You talk with red hat. They’re employees first for a company owned by IBM.
Gnome devs seem to just be red hat employees who don’t actually care about making a good DE
But Gnome is a great DE, I’ve used it as a daily driver for personal and at work for many years. I can’t say I have any major complaints. What’s so terrible about Gnome?
Do you use gnome tweak tools?
Because if I do, then that proves Gnome is terrible and all the devs should drive off a cliff?
If we divided Gnome right out of the open source community, we wouldn’t have lost much.
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A coherent ecosystem…of blank windows with not enough functionality crammed into a hamburger menu made the way it is mostly for aesthetics. A workflow that doesn’t make sense to most people who are trained on PCs. A dev team who hate their users.
No thanks.
A workflow that doesn’t make sense to most people who are trained on PCs
If you want this use KDE. I for one am very happy to use a desktop that doesn’t follow 30 year old design.
Do you type on a QWERTY keyboard?
If we lost the open source community will have gained.
It’d be a massive loss. The best DE would be gone.
Naw, Cinnamon will still be here.
Lmao
Splitting the community? Who cares, it doesn’t matter anyways.
I care, and so do many others, it happens to some with empathy when they grow out of their preteen years.
Shitting on Gnome if you use a tiled desktop manager is fair game.
Shitting on Gnome if you use KDE is just dumb
I used to use Gnome with a tiled window manager. It was a good combo. Don’t see why they have to be exclusive. No hate from my side, KDE and Gnome are both incredible. I can spare some hate for the Gnome-haters though.
Love the love, hate the hate. It’s a good default.
[…] 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.
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.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.
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.
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
KDE because it looks like Windows? So gamers will have a familiar interface instead of Gnome
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
And Plasma copied a bunch of stuff from Windows.
TW also has the issue of having ‘controversial’ software like the media codecs, etc not being included OOTB due to licensing concerns.
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.
I’ve packaged on both distros, and PKGBUILDs are truly amazing
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.
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.
Didn’t GNOME support Wayland way earlier than KDE ?
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.
Switched to it by default in 2016.
SteamOS, which is what is on the Deck, used to be Debian-based. The creation of the Deck led to an environment where a rolling distro was a better choice.
I don’t think it has anything to do with Arch being a rolling distro.
SteamOS isn’t a rolling distro, it’s by releases controlled by Valve.
Even on a Debian base they could have done the same, like Ubuntu releasing versions independently from Debian.
Because SteamOS is immutable, the simplest today would be to use a Fedora Atomic base.
