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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • SteamOS is based on arch, but it has major differences. The steam deck’s update mechanism is completely different from normal arch Linux.

    Arch normally immediately updates to the latest version of every program. This is usually fine, but when a big bug is missed by the developers, it can cause problems.

    The steam deck updates a base image that includes all the programs installed by default, and by the time it releases a lot of them aren’t the absolute newest version. When valve updates SteamOS they definitely run a lot of tests on the base image to make sure it’s stable and won’t cause any issues.

    SteamOS is also an immutible distro, meaning the important parts are read only. This also means updates are done to everything at once, and if something goes wrong, it can fall back to a known good version.

    Not to say arch Linux is unstable (its been better for me than Ubuntu), but SteamOS is at a completely different level. It’s effectively a completely different distro if we’re talking about stability. I think what they’re hoping is this support would allow arch to build out testing infrastructure to catch more issues and prevent them from making it to users.


  • The easiest way to think of it is flatpaks are AppImages with a repository and snaps are flatpaks but bad.

    That has benefits and detriments. Appimages contain everything they need to run, flatpak’s mostly do, but can also use runtimes that are shared between flatpaks.

    All flatpaks are sandboxed, which tends to make them more secure. AppImages can be sandboxed, but many aren’t.

    Flatpaks tend to integrate with the host system better, you can (kinda) theme them, their updates are handled via the flatpak repo, and they register apps with the system.

    AppImages are infinitely more portable. Everything’s in one file, so you can pretty much just copy that to any system and you have the app.


  • Maybe it’s just ubuntu being bad, but I’ve had way fewer issues on arch after switching to it. I had like 4 issues where my pc just wouldn’t boot in the 3 years I was running Ubuntu, and I’ve had I think 1 in 4 years on arch.

    Granted I’ve gotten more comfortable with linux in that time and have gotten better at fixing problems.