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?
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.
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
In 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.
As for why they adopted KDE, they probably discovered how hard it is to work with Gnome developers.
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.
Average GNOME hater is so blind they cannot distinguish between MacOS and iOS. No surprise, considering they never grew out of Windows UI paradigms.
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.
No, GNOME is far superior to MacOS, so superior that Windows 11 copied it, and KDE copies Windows. That makes GNOME the godfather compared to hacky KDE.
Don’t feed the troll…
Windows 11 is still easier to use…
You think so? That shit has 2 right click menus and settings hard to navigate, not to mention the unbearable ad ridden Start menu, shitty Control Panel and AI garbage you cannot escape. You need something like AME project to make it barely usable. Oh and forced updates taking hours of time. All this is not a problem on Linux.
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
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.
[…] 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.
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.
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.
Arch rolling gives up to date packages quickly. The most important part for Linux gaming is quickest pushing of GPU and performance related kernel code, so that the most optimal balance between battery life and performance is continuously achieved, because Linux gaming is still in its infancy. Every new update or package possibly giving this benefit matters to Valve, and they need maximum amount of time to optimise and push updates.
There is no GNOME hate angle, unlike what a lot of idiots here want to claim and spread the toxicity for it. KDE people, Snap haters, systemd haters are extremely vile people. Valve does not care about working with UI, since they can design a launcher for any Linux distro themselves, hiding the ugly terminal and filesystem well enough for casual gamers.
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.
I suspect KDE because most PC gamers are Windows users and KDE is closer to that while Gnome is closer to macOS (both in design and being restrictive).
I believe SteamOS is also immutable and uses a rolling release model. It’s probably logical to make a custom version of Arch. They can make it immutable and still get the latest packages. Fedora Silverblue (or another immutable Linux distro) wouldn’t be as quick to release packages and was probably in alpha when the decision was made.
I had no idea it was based on Arch… I thought I read somewhere that Steam was only officially packaged for Debian or Ubuntu.
SteamOS was based on Debian but they changed when they released Steam deck with Arch base
