On Sat, 2021-07-17 at 13:48 +0100, Samuel Henrique wrote: > 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! I think it would be quite nice to hear from Valve or some of the Debian folks who work(ed) with them, about the reasons for the rebase. With no ill will, just to understand what the problems were and if we can learn something from them. -- Kind regards, Luca Boccassi
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