I just want the very latest of a short(ish) list of things, lets say arbitrarily within about 2 weeks of release, which is what Manjaro basically gives me.
pamac upgrade -a
pacman -Syu
Anyway for Steam deck my first reaction is that they will need to:
1. Do like Manjaro and hold updates for a period of time before distributing them.
2. Provide some sort of one-click revert for when an update randomly prevents your device from booting. These are basically the only big problems that I encounter anymore - it usually takes 20 minutes to an hour to figure out which package is the problem and fix it, but you don't want to be doing that on your $600 steam deck.
Edit: As far as updates that brick your system go, my first experience with Arch was that if you don't keep up with the rolling releases, you will brick your system guaranteed when you update. So we'll see how that goes. That was 10+ years ago, and maybe it's not as bad now.
1. AUR - almost anything you could need.
2. rolling releases - I admit I haven't used Ubuntu in a long time, but I use Debian for a variety of things, and it can be painful to need a release upgrade in order to get the next version of some piece of software. With Arch and derivatives, as long as you do updates regularly, everything stays new.
More than 0, but not a lot.
Note I don't stick to LTS releases. If I only upgraded to the X.1 LTS releases I expect it would have been smoother.
I spend more time just trying to have up-to-date software on that Ubuntu installation than I spend time configuring anything about the arch installation. Granted, sometimes you need to edit some files after an update (oh device names changed again in pulseaudio so your volume hotkeys need to be fixed!), but that's usually a matter of seconds because I already know how everything fits together. When a package is totally broken for some reason, I just downgrade it.
Meanwhile on Ubuntu your only option for getting up to date versions of Jameica/Hibiscus, pretty much any mapping software that OSM contributors/users would want to use, and a bucket list of other productivity software that tends to be useless if outdated, is to compile from source (don't forget to fix incompatibilities with Ubuntu's libraries!) or manual downloads. Oh I forgot to mention Subsurface and TurtleSport. Don't get me started about those. Bonus points for Ubuntu not having disabled the built-in version checks in a lot of software (it's usually just a compile time options or command line argument!), so it nags users that they're running outdated software when there's no way to upgrade!
At this point I'm convinced the only noteworthy software that Ubuntu manages to have acceptably recent versions of is Firefox. If all you want to do is browse web, Ubuntu might be less work.
I'm not surprised Ubuntu is trying to move to snap packages. That's their last ditch attempt at getting their house in order.
Arch will always at least have an automatically installing AUR package for you with a version that isn't from 2018.
The last time I seriously tried to use Ubuntu was probably 8-10 years ago and I ran into a lot of trouble trying to get up to date graphics drivers via PPAs. I also remember being tired of having to go find a random PPA for every piece of software I wanted. Most of the time I would just find some random blog that provided a "PPA for up-to-date package X" and ultimately felt like what I was doing wasn't really any better than downloading random MSIs like you would on Windows.
With Arch though you get the AUR which quite literally has every piece of software you could ever want and is at least managed and maintained in a central place so you're not just adding random PPAs for everything.
I don't think the AUR is necessarily more secure but in general the nature of how the AUR works does perhaps give some slight advantage. The suggested approach to the AUR is to download and inspect the PKGBUILD so you know how/what the package is doing opposed to a PPA typically being a precompiled binary. AUR helpers will also typically show recent comments, etc. so if a package was compromised or had issues you'd probably know as you're pulling it down.
Really though the AUR just tends to be more convenient and complete than finding random PPAs in my experience.
You're supposed to separately manage the software you care about. e.g. there's a nodejs for people who don't exploit it in their daily use except as dependencies to other software, but if you use it regularly you should manage your own nodejs binaries.
Then I adopted Fedora and never looked back for several years. Even more recently I have been using WSL inside of Windows... and it actually covers most of my use cases well enough.
I dont have the time or patience anymore to keep up with distro's like Arch, but I also get that some people love tinkering and figuring out how to make their system work like its some kind of puzzle.
Edit: One thing about Arch, its possible to dig yourself a real bad hole if you don't keep updating regularly and I get that's sort of the point, but it can cause a lot of issues if for example, you go on vacation for a few weeks.
Any changes that could be problematic are announced on the site and the arch-announce mailing list. It's really not a matter of weeks. I've gone many months without updating, without any problems.
In return you'll never need to update a Debian release name in sources.list, click away a nagging update prompt, wait for a double-reboot cycle for some registry changes, or anything of the sort.
Yes, you will need to understand what's on your system to know what news is relevant for you. You automatically will because you set it up yourself.
Perhaps there exists some subculture of folks that delight in having to read a set of articles published in the time between the last update and today before they do so again, but I have never encountered it.
It's honestly incredibly low-maintenance. You just have to spend a relatively long time setting things up first.
Yeah.. once I did a normal upgrade and it fucked my whole system. I asked for help and I was told that exact sentence "read the mailing list, it was announced". Thanks, but no thanks.
Meanwhile Debian and Ubuntu both are a hodgepot of random patches thrown together by more or less (but rather less) knowledgeable maintainers for reasons which are clear only to themselves and involve goals I don't share such as allowing things to run over weird kernels and maintaining some imaginary philosophical open source purity. I wouldn't touch that with a ten feet pole.
I still personnaly believe that the Linux distribution system is the main reason Linux wasn't more successful. I like Arch because amongst all the successful distribution they seem to be the one doing the less.
I think in general finding the right tool is more about finding the thing whose inadequacies are least inconvenient to you personally rather than looking for some mythical tool that works well for everyone, in every case.
FWIW, a lot of "work" areas are still deep into Microsoft Word, which works a lot better on Windows.
But when I write or compose documents, I don't need MS Office interop, and it'd probably be my 3rd or 4th choice of "suite" for that kind of thing, behind the Apple's versions (mostly because they have great default templates, are very stable, are fairly easy to use, and are very light on system resources), Abiword/Gnumeric and other pieced-together open source options, and maybe LibreOffice in 3rd place. But, if I had to pass around Office documents, that'd be another story.
Probably my main pain-point on Mac, as far as work-stuff goes, are under-developed virtualization tools. They have a hypervisor, but it's a pain to use and there's almost no community around it. No simple way to pick an earlier version of macOS and virtualize it, even. VirtualBox is... OK. Barely. 3rd party commercial options improve the situation a ton, but you get much better tools out-of-the-box on basically every other at-least-semi-viable workstation OS.
I like the idea of pop!_os but part of the flagship experience is a big ol' Javascript extension on top of Gnome. I can't imagine I'd find that enjoyable.
Last time I had a Linux working and I didn't hate the experience was a "so small I could drown it in a tub" install/config of Void with mostly Suckless tools/programs. I find Linux to be most tolerable in those kinds of configs, these days. Doesn't do much, but what it does do actually works and behaves fairly consistently. Start trying to get fancy, and the machine begins to feel haunted in a hurry.
It's stable enough for me, and I see that as the price to pay for more freedom and flexibility, but I can understand one wanting to get down to close to zero fiddling and pay premium for OSX to be done with it.
However, the Steam Deck only has three main hardware configurations and Valve presumably has a team dedicated to making sure it runs correctly. So Arch may be a really good value proposition for them.
Looks like they want to have the ability to be fairly agile and not getting locked into a platform for 2+ years
Meanwhile, $work server images have been Ubuntu LTS, CentOS, and AL2 with updates introducing breakage several times a year.
As far as I can tell, they have resolved these issues now, but it was a pain point.
I understand they're different distros with different philosophies, but in the end I do need my screen sharing to work no questions asked.
Fedora do work on six-month releases so there will be some version jumps between versions of Fedora but IIRC they will update little and often just like Arch whilst on a given release.
https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=24...
And Fedora shipped some configuration that worked for the standard environment you'd have when you just installed Fedora and didn't change things around too much. Since Arch encourages you to build your own setup and roll your own configs to a much larger degree, the defaults probably weren't quite right or quite enough for their specific setups.
I don't mean this in an "Arch bad, other distro good" sense, I just wanted to say I've seen the same thing where some detail in an Arch setup was broken. It's simply different strokes for different folks.
The endless criticism of everything needs to stop.
With flatpaks/snaps being so ubiquitous it doesn't really matter much at this point anyway.
All that said, I can thoroughly recommend NixOS (my setup[1]) as an alternative, and I personally predict SteamOS will show up there eventually. Initial setup is a fair bit easier, and being able to seamlessly boot into any of the previous configurations is a big deal. The main issues so far have been with dev env setups (Nix isn't terrible, but it's another language to add on top of my existing setups) and running out of disk space because each upgrade takes multiple GB. Don't install unless you have ~100GB to spare for the root partition and a decently fast Internet connection.
When you sign up to Arch, yeah I think you sign up for a lot of tweaking that would be done for you already. Luckily there is the excellent Arch Wiki to hold your hand through much of it.
It also provides continuous snapshots: https://snapshot.debian.org/
Things break often and I am not interested in fixing them. And that's not taking into account wife and kids builds. It took me a while to realize the Arch crowd largely doesn't get that not everyone is exciting to thinker with their OS all the time. I get it. I really do. But I am old
As you say, hopefully Valve's efforts are going to help with that. In fact, there's hardly a chance they won't because they business depends on it, at least long term.
I switched to macOS several years ago for my personal desktop. I use Ubuntu (or any Linux) only at work where someone else (IT) manages the machine and ensures things work.
Being a rolling release goes directly against that. It might be the most stable rolling release together with openSUSE Tumbleweed. When you combine it with a modern filesystem and features like snapshots it really feels solid.
In the context of the Steam Deck they can just test and hold/fix bugs so that's a very different scenario.
There are just too many changes everywhere and different hardware, software combinations, to expect a bug free experience. Not even Apple with a different release model can manage that and they control everything and have most of the hardware combinations to test. Many DEs and bigger applications need a few point releases to be better but maybe you're talking only about the base distro if it's even possible to make that distinction.
Yes I occasionally don't know what's causing a problem and I have to reinstall some packages. It's definitely not stable.
But if I needed stability I would have gone for Cent OS or what ever stands for stability nowadays. And that's the beauty of Linux, There's something for everyone.
I get new hardware support and access to the many only-arch-pre-packaged software, in a more stable base.
I use Manjaro and it's been nothing but smooth sailing for a few years now. I have it on 4 machines - a home desktop, a work desktop, a laptop and an old Mac Pro from 2012.
If so, why is this the distribution's fault? The installation is a bit cumbersome but other than that you do not need to do much.
I personally keep my configuration small and tidy, following a "bang for the buck" approach and have not faced any issues. Perhaps my usage patterns are just simpler, but even Steam works fine.
To me arch tries to be fast moving without checking if anything breaks
I suspect they will do like those Arch derivatives do: holding back updates for testing, which is easy when you target known hardware.
But then this little thing doesnt work yet because, they say, they haven't configure it correctly. And this little one, it's nothing mind you, it never worked. And this one, just a small detail, but it broke yesterday. We have a different definition of the box.
And so I go back to my Ubuntu LTS. I really want to try arch but I'm not 20 anymore, fiddling with my workstation is not as fun as it used to be. I just want to use it.
Maybe with the steam deck it will become so battle tested it will turn into the most stable distro ever.
I think their decision makes sense though, they don't want to have to craft every update and spend too much time on it. It's a good strat for them.