this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
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396
Arch Linux and Valve Collaboration (lists.archlinux.org)
submitted 1 week ago by Aatube@kbin.melroy.org to c/technology@lemmy.world
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We are excited to announce that Arch Linux is entering into a direct collaboration with Valve. Valve is generously providing backing for two critical projects that will have a huge impact on our distribution: a build service infrastructure and a secure signing enclave. By supporting work on a freelance basis for these topics, Valve enables us to work on them without being limited solely by the free time of our volunteers.

This opportunity allows us to address some of the biggest outstanding challenges we have been facing for a while. The collaboration will speed-up the progress that would otherwise take much longer for us to achieve, and will ultimately unblock us from finally pursuing some of our planned endeavors. We are incredibly grateful for Valve to make this possible and for their explicit commitment to help and support Arch Linux.

These projects will follow our usual development and consensus-building workflows. [RFCs] will be created for any wide-ranging changes. Discussions on this mailing list as well as issue, milestone and epic planning in our GitLab will provide transparency and insight into the work. We believe this collaboration will greatly benefit Arch Linux, and are looking forward to share further development on this mailing list as work progresses.

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[–] pastermil@sh.itjust.works -5 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Hopefully this would lead to a more (stable version of) ArchLinux.

[–] earth_walker@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Arch isn't unstable. Users mess it up by installing a bunch of random crap from the AUR or fiddling with system files.

SteamOS addresses this by making the root level filesystem immutable and guiding the user to install containerized (flatpak) apps.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 week ago

Exactly. I ran Arch for over 5 years, and the only "instability" I had was:

  • Nvidia drivers not matching kernel drivers - also happened on openSUSE Tumbleweed, and has more to do with Nvidia's driver being closed-source than anything Arch is doing
  • systemd and usr merge - this was many years ago, and the only reason I messed it up was because I didn't actually follow the instructions; and this was an absolutely massive change
  • I did something stupid - sometimes this is uninstalling the display manager or some other critical component

That's really it. I've since moved to openSUSE Tumbleweed and an AMD GPU, largely because of built-in snapper support and their server-oriented distros (Leap and MicroOS), and it wasn't because Arch was "unstable" or anything like that. In fact, I had far fewer issues with Arch than I did with the other distros I used before: Ubuntu and Fedora. It turns out, as you understand Linux better, you tend to mess things up less.

[–] bassomitron@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I've been using a Steam Deck for almost a year damn near daily with maybe 1 OS crash that was largely due to a very unstable game. How is ArchLinux unstable, exactly?

[–] Darorad@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] nous@programming.dev 1 points 1 week ago

Arch normally immediately updates to the latest version of every program

This is not true though. Arch packages new program versions as soon as they can - for popular stuff this happens quickly but not everything updates quickly. And when they do publish a new package it goes to the testing repo for a short time before being promoted to the stable repos. If there is a problem with the package that they notice it will be held back until it can be solved. There is not a huge amount of testing that is done here as that is very time consuming and Arch do not have enough man power for this. But they also do not release much broken things at all. I have seen other distros like ubuntu cause far more havoc with a broken update then Arch ever has.

[–] RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That's... a weird take. There are variants of Arch that focus on stability, if that's what you are after.

[–] exu@feditown.com 0 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Which ones? I'm not aware of any besides specialised distros like SteamOS

[–] lemba@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Try #EndeavourOS!

[–] exu@feditown.com 1 points 1 week ago

It uses the Arch repos directly though

[–] praise_idleness@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Which is just Arch witg GUI setup and DE pre-shipped

[–] Metz@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

they added some nice tools though. e.g. their pacdiff & meld tool eos-pacdiff is pretty nice. then there is a kernel manager and a pretty clever update-script / wrapper around pacman and yay (eos-update). saying it is just Arch + GUI is selling it a bit short imho.

[–] RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de -3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

https://itsfoss.com/arch-based-linux-distros/

Manjaro for example. I also thought Garuda would be focused on stability but according to this article potentially no. So maybe just Manjaro, I do remember reading about something else like it though...

[–] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Manjaro has a stability track record miles worth than Arch, to the point where someone made a GitHub wiki called “Manjarno”.

[–] pirat@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago

Manjarno, manjarno

— as they say in Spain ...

[–] exu@feditown.com 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Manjaro does "stability" by delaying everything by two weeks. That doesn't really help at all and might hurt you for security updates, because those will wait the same two weeks.

[–] ccdfa@lemm.ee 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

They also don't hold back the aur which causes problems if an aur package is expecting a system package of a particular version, if I understand correctly