The Arch Linux team is now working directly with Valve

> While Valve's specific reasons for picking Arch Linux for Steam Deck remain unknown, it's pretty easy to guess why it was picked. Mainly, it's a particularly lightweight distribution maintained since March 2002, which lends itself well to gaming with minimal performance overhead. A more intensive Linux distribution may not have been the ideal base for SteamOS 3, which is targeted at handhelds like Steam Deck first.

I am not sure Arch is going to be faster for gaming than any other distro, but I can see why Valve picked it for a minimalist base. Another reason I am sure they picked it is that it is smaller and less commercial than others (such as Debain or Ubuntu) and they would have more ability to influence the project.

> In the long-term, the funding touted should, at minimum, allow Arch Linux to improve the security of its distribution and provide more structured releases compared to its current near-continuous update cycle.

This was literally the stated reason they moved from Debian in 2021, because they preferred rolling releases. [1]

[1] https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/heres-why-steamos-switched-...

Seen from a certain angle, the real question is: why don’t more companies do this? This isn’t charity, this is enlightened self interest paired with understanding that pissing off your free supplier is a bad idea.

No other OS is as configurable, adaptable and versatile as Linux. It runs on the biggest super-computers, on the helicopter that flew on Mars, on the server that is hosting this service and on the device I'm typing just now.

Now, just imagine... just imagine how much performance could be gained if game vendors didn't ignore it.

"In the long-term, the funding touted should, at minimum, allow Arch Linux to improve the security of its distribution and provide more structured releases compared to its current near-continuous update cycle."

Isn't rolling release one of the core ideas behind arch? Sounds like the usual gaming journalism...

I'm still hoping to see an official immutable version of Arch Linux.

SteamOS is immutable, and I'm "stuck" using Fedora Silverblue [1] because immutable is the future and I won't go back to installing stuff manually while cruft accumulates in system directories. I don't interact often with rpm, but I hate them with a passion, while I used to maintain multiple Archlinux packages as it was so easy to do.

1: Silverblue host, but working within an Arch Linux container with Emacs, of course. Imagine having to maintain all the five dozen LSP servers and dev tools without access to the AUR.

> Valve is now providing a build service infrastructure

Fingers crossed this means Arch will support the ARM architecture* in the official repositories. There's a related RFC which has been accepted but but I'm not sure where things stand right now.

https://rfc.archlinux.page/0032-arch-linux-ports/

* I'm well aware of Arch Linux ARM but that's a separate project with even less resources (missing packages, some broken). Asahi used to use it before moving to Fedora due to similar problems.

> In the long-term, the funding touted should, at minimum, allow Arch Linux to improve the security of its distribution and provide more structured releases compared to its current near-continuous update cycle.

This is a weird point, and concerning if it is true, because it seems to assume Arch's rolling release model is a bad model that the Arch team are forced into due to lack of funds, whereas for most of us it is in fact one of the main reasons to use Arch. As another commenter mentioned, the rolling release model is one of the reasons why Valve chose Arch, so hopefully this comment in the article is just misinformed. But there is a concern IMO that once Arch starts to look how Valve want it to look, they will try and influence the project to move to a more Debian-like release model (so that they have to worry less about breaking changes). Of course whether they can successfully influence the project in that way is another thing.

I'm still curious about why they picked Arch over Debian or a BSD.

The article claims it's because Arch is "lightweight," but then why not pick a smaller distro?

My best guess would be familiarity (Valve can afford to buy the best developers, and lots of great folks enjoy the fiddlyness of Arch), hackability, and insanely fantastic documentation of Arch

Well... Arch community is very kind and very active, but Arch is a rolling distro, a paradigm essentially incompatible with stable production systems.

I wonder why not choosing NixOS or a custom Guix System (due to the non-free stuff) instead since their model offer effortless rollbacks and safe updates.

If I'm not mistaken, Arch Linux only supports x64 (excluding the unofficial ARM port), so I wonder why they've chosen to go with it rather than Fedora or Debian.

Did gentoo have any similar collaborations with Google?

(Chromeos is based on gentoo)

I'm glad I started looking at other distributions like Alpine recently. This could just as well have negative effects as positive ones. Time for me to diversify.