Steam Deck: good news for Linux gaming, bad news for Debian :(
Hello d-devel,
As some of you already seem, we have very good news for the Linux
gaming community, although somewhat bad for Debian:
https://www.steamdeck.com
The Steam Deck is a portable gaming device, running SteamOS, to be
released later this year.
Review video from 2kliksphilip:
Valve Steam Deck - The Budget Gaming PC We Need
https://youtu.be/zBEpymHvrpo
The bad news for Debian comes from this page:
https://www.steamdeck.com/en/tech
Operating System: SteamOS 3.0 (Arch-based)
SteamOS used to be based on Debian, and Valve seems to have decided to
go with Arch instead (great news for Arch, don't get me wrong).
The reasons for the switch have not been publicized, but I think we're
safe to assume it's because Debian is not fit for the majority of the
desktop/gaming users, at least not officially (since testing is not a
supported release). I remember having some issues due to SteamOS being
based on stable. These are the people who need to be able to run the
most up-to-date packages, especially drivers and kernel (backports is
not always there).
Now, this is ok for regular users, as they can take the risk[0] of
running testing to get all the benefits from it, and that's what I
recommend to pretty much anyone running Debian on a desktop, though I
recognize some people prefer to run stable.
Debian Testing is very close to Arch wrt up-to-date packages (when not
frozen) but most people don't know this and we end up being known for
not supporting newer hardware/software[1].
This is a niche that is currently fulfilled by Fedora, Ubuntu non-LTS,
Arch... and Debian Testing (only one which is not an official
release).
I know the situation is not as simple as calling Debian Testing
something else and making it an official release, my intentions here
are to expose the current issue we have: that we don't fulfill the
needs of a lot of desktop users and SteamOS is now Arch-based, most
likely because of this.
So here's my wish that someday we can have a Debian semi-rolling
release (if we want to have it based on Testing), with security
support and a different name other than "Testing".
[0] No security team support.
[1] And software matters here because the gaming side of Linux still
receives major improvements with new releases of things like Proton.
Have a nice weekend!
--
Samuel Henrique <samueloph>
Reply to: