Valve’s upcoming Steam Deck will be based on Arch Linux:
As Ars Technica confirmed in May, two months ahead of its official reveal, Valve is about to re-enter the hardware space with its first portable PC, the Steam Deck. This custom x86 PC resembles an XL version of the Nintendo Switch and will begin shipping to buyers by the end of 2021, starting at $399.
[...] Shipping on Linux cuts manufacturing costs for Steam, insulates the company from competition with the Microsoft Store on Windows, and avoids exposing Steam Deck players to the world's premiere malware ecosystem—which also runs on Windows.
[...] "The main reason [to switch to Arch] is the rolling updates [that support] more rapid development for SteamOS 3.0," Valve designer Lawrence Yang told PC Gamer. Yang says that Arch is a better choice given the massive number of updates, changes, and customizations Valve needs to make in order to provide the best gaming experience on the Steam Deck.
Valve promises that the Steam Deck will run "the entire Steam library" at 30+ fps, so that means a lot of customizations indeed.
Previously:
AMD + Valve Working on New Linux CPU Performance Scaling Design
Steam Deck is Valve's Switch-Like Portable PC: Starting at $399 this December
Related Stories
Steam Deck is Valve's Switch-like portable PC: Starting at $399 this December
Steam Deck is Valve's Switch-like portable PC, starting at $399 this December
On Thursday, Valve took the wraps off its new Switch-like portable PC, now dubbed the Steam Deck, confirming that it is indeed the hardware Ars Technica wrote about earlier this year. The device will begin shipping later this year at a starting price of $399.
The hefty-looking console, which is 11.7 inches long, will launch at three price points, differentiated by built-in storage capacity, SSD speed ratings, and differently tempered glass on its screen. Those particular upgrades will cost $529 (256GB) and $649 (512GB, "anti-glare etched glass"). Both pricier bundles include a carrying case.
Valve Announces the "Steam Deck", a Handheld Gaming PC
Valve has announced a handheld gaming PC, the Steam Deck:
AMD + Valve Working On New Linux CPU Performance Scaling Design
Along with other optimizations to benefit the Steam Deck, AMD and Valve have been jointly working on CPU frequency/power scaling improvements to enhance the Steam Play gaming experience on modern AMD platforms running Linux.
It's no secret that the ACPI CPUFreq driver code has at times been less than ideal on recent AMD processors with delivering less than expected performance/behavior with being slow to ramp up to a higher performance state or otherwise coming up short of disabling the power management functionality outright. AMD hasn't traditionally worked on the Linux CPU frequency scaling code as much as Intel does to their P-State scaling driver and other areas of power management at large.
AMD is ramping up efforts in these areas including around the Linux scheduler given their recent hiring spree while it now looks like thanks to the Steam Deck there is renewed interest in better optimizing the CPU frequency scaling under Linux.
[...] AMD will be presenting more about this effort next month at [the X.Org Developers Conference (XDC)].
X.Org Developer's Conference: XDC2021, Virtual (formerly Gdańsk, Poland), September 15th through September 17th, 2021.
Previously: Steam Deck is Valve's Switch-Like Portable PC: Starting at $399 this December
Valve Shares New Steam Deck Details, Proton Update Available For Testing
The recording from the livestream is embedded below for those interested, but some of the key takeaways from today's developer-focused Steam Deck event included:
- Steam Deck will use an immutable root file-system, albeit can be changed for developers/enthusiasts wanting more control over the system state. The immutable root file-system approach is similar to the likes of Fedora Silverblue.
- SteamOS 3.0 will be generally available in due course for those wanting to run the Arch-based Linux distribution on other hardware.
- SteamOS 3.0 is making use of PipeWire.
- Flatpak'ed apps will be supported.
- At least initially the Steam Deck is now making use of a global frame limiter but initially is being left up to the individual games to handle. We'll see how quickly such functionality or so is built into Gamescope.
- The AMD SoC powering the Steam Deck is codenamed "Aerith" and as previously reported is a quad-core Zen 2 design with RDNA2 graphics. The TDP range for Aerith is 4 to 15 Watts. The Steam Deck should support up to two 4K screens at 60Hz via the USB3/DP 1.4 DSC interface.
For Linux Enthusiasts Especially, The Steam Deck Is An Incredible & Fun Device
The most fun and promising Linux-powered gaming device for the masses though is launching today: Valve's Steam Deck. I've been fortunate to be testing out this Arch Linux derived handheld game console the past month and it has been working out very well -- both as a portable Steam gaming device but making it even more compelling from the Linux enthusiast angle is its "developer mode" that effectively turns it into a general Linux handheld and also being free to load your own Linux distribution of choice.
[...] [The] much anticipated Valve handheld gaming computer that features a 7-inch 1280 x 800 display, gaming-optimized controls, 16GB of LPDDR5 memory, 64GB to 512GB of storage depending on model, and is powered by a custom AMD APU. The AMD APU is made up of four Zen 2 cores (8 threads) and an AMD RDNA2 GPU with 8 compute units.
[...] On the software side, the Steam Deck is using SteamOS 3.0 that in turn is based on Arch Linux. SteamOS 3.0 is a complete overhaul compared to Valve's prior SteamOS work that is based on Debian GNU/Linux. SteamOS 3.0 with Arch Linux is much more fast-moving and has been seeing near-daily updates in preparation for launch.
See also:
Valve releases Steam Deck handheld PC to select few
Steam Deck review: it's not ready
The Steam Deck is already the emulation system of my dreams
Steam Deck: The comprehensive Ars Technica review
Steam Deck Review: Valve's Handheld Has Big PC Energy
Gabe Newell talks Steam Deck, crypto risks and why the PC industry "won't tolerate" closed platforms
Developers praise the Steam Deck: 'It just works, for real'
Valve Steam Deck Hardware Review & Analysis: Thermals, Noise, Power, & Gaming Benchmarks (Gamers Nexus, 35m30s video)
Steam Deck Tear-Down: Build Quality, Disassembly, & VRM Analysis (Gamers Nexus, 34m24s video)
Steam Deck 1-Month Review: SteamOS Difficulties, Software, & User Experience (Gamers Nexus, 34m28s video)
Several sites, including OS Technix, are reporting that Arch will be collaborating with Valve. A heavily modified in-house Arch distro is used by Valve for SteamOS.
In an exciting development for the Linux community, Arch Linux has announced a new partnership with Valve, the company behind the Steam gaming platform and Steam Deck. This collaboration will see Valve financially support two major projects for Arch Linux: an improved build service infrastructure and a secure signing enclave.
[...] By providing freelance backing, Valve's support allows Arch Linux to work on these critical projects without being hindered by limitations in volunteer time. This will significantly accelerate progress and enable the Arch Linux team to tackle ambitious endeavours that would have otherwise taken much longer.
The collaboration will lead to the development of a robust build service infrastructure. This infrastructure will involve servers for building software, potentially similar to continuous integration systems. The system will likely manage compiling and distributing software, simplifying the process and reducing the need for custom setups for different devices.
The introduction of a secure signing enclave marks a significant advancement in security for Arch Linux. This enclave will leverage code signing to provide a higher level of assurance that packages downloaded from the official repositories haven't been tampered with. Users will be able to cryptographically verify the origin and integrity of software packages, making it much harder for malicious actors to distribute compromised software.
There is speculation that Valve might publicly release SteamOS in the future or that native support for games on GNU/Linux will improve greatly.
Previously:
(2021) Valve's Upcoming Steam Deck Will be Based on Arch Linux--Not Debian
(2015) Steam Now Has 1500 Linux-Compatible Game Titles
(2015) Valve's SteamOS Dreams Beginning to Look Like Reality
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 13 2021, @07:08AM (8 children)
Rolling releases are good, until they're not. To get an idea of when rolling releases aren't so good, think back to the time a Windows update destroyed your installation. Though less common, such things have happened on Linux as well. That doesn't happen to stable release distros.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 13 2021, @07:21AM (1 child)
If the user is using the Steam Deck primarily to play games, they might not lose much since it will all be backed up onto their Steam account.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Friday August 13 2021, @07:25AM
They'll have some way of avoiding raw Arch and will have polished it enough as to be able to avoid needing the occasional rollbacks that using a rolling release distro entails. I expect that they'll just push out some pre-built, refined image that they themselves have built using Arch and that all the lumps will have been smoothed out in their lab first.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Friday August 13 2021, @08:54AM (1 child)
Yeah, it does, though not as often. I remember over a decade ago when a Fedora 9 update trashed my install.
Debian also has more OS-destroying updates than Red Hat based stuff, for some reason. It's only happened once on Fedora, and several times on Debian.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 14 2021, @12:13AM
Are you running testing or unstable / mixing without pinning?
I've never used fedora, but I have had to support redhat boxes (which comes out of the same corporate parent as fedora) and while, in general, I haven't been impressed with redhat, both redhat and debian seem to vet their patches well, in my experience.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 13 2021, @01:09PM
Hah! Apt-based distros have been automagic garbage for a /long time/. Do you think dependency hell was something new? I've had more breaks on "stable" releases than rolling ones, and the rolling release has the tools to quickly solve problems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 13 2021, @02:10PM (2 children)
i've been using arch for 15 years, and that has happened a total of *ZERO* times. thanks for playing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 13 2021, @05:59PM
yeah, arch is extremely stable if you know what you are doing. The only thing i've run into that wasn't my initial learning mistakes is arch packages moving too fast for something i'm maintaining. not exactly arch's fault...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 13 2021, @09:46PM
Then you don't roll your release or haven't really been using it 15 years. Arch has had some rather infamous bugs like that, including a couple that required using another repair system due to shared library breakage.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by canopic jug on Friday August 13 2021, @07:22AM (12 children)
Arch is also afflicted with systemd, same a Debian, but the project seems to have escaped much of the fighting that it causes. Debian fared very poorly [debian.net] in the months leading up to it pounding systemd into the project and worse in the months following it. Debian had been a very sensible default choice until all that fallout. Viewing both from the outside nowadays, it looks like Arch is much better run project and that Arch has become the safe default that Debian once was. A safe default can lead to less effort having to be spent on porting applications and other system maintenance. Yet the article mentions that a conservative decision is not necessarily what they aimed to make.
Not enough is written there about why Valve was considering only either Debian or Arch for Steam Deck. I understand the relative advantages and disadvantages of stable versus rolling releases. However, why is the choice between Debian and Arch at all, and not Alpine or similar? Alpine probably could have met their needs for their product yet avoided the weight, complexity, and politics of systemd.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 13 2021, @07:53AM (7 children)
Big companies do not care about the "politics of systemd". Probably not the alleged weight or complexity either.
(Score: 4, Disagree) by DannyB on Friday August 13 2021, @03:14PM (4 children)
systemd gives Linux a better integrated and stronger "services" concept. It brings other things like parallel startup. It is uniform across distributions. It is adopted by all major distributions. (So it must be doing something right?)
I understand all of the arguments raised against systemd. But I have to observe that it does seem to work well.
It isn't perfect. I've had plenty of fun joining in the anti-systemd pile ons. But, it just seems to work.
The major argument seems to be that it doesn't work the way things once worked in the past.
Don't put a mindless tool of corporations in the white house; vote ChatGPT for 2024!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 14 2021, @12:56AM
It is impossible to learn the design of systemd because there is none. Systemd has zero (public) design documents, it is whatever LP can think up this year. And no, I'm not talking about man pages.
With that as the backdrop, That's Not How We Did Things Before™ is irrelevant. The principle of discoverability has been thrown away, and learning is empirical instead of systematic - like the ten thousand tricks of differential equations, as opposed to the one princicple of calculus. It's not impossible, but it is work.
The benefit to Red Hat is that it's harder for a single sysadmin to stay on top of how to use it and how it works behind the scenes, thus necessitating the sweet, sweet cash flow of support contracts. The benefit to me is... zero. The problem it claimed to be a solution for does not exist.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 14 2021, @03:00AM
systemd is a embrace, extend, extinguish from inside. The purpose is to kill the flexibility of previous Linux ecosystems and make everything be what IBM (RH in origin) wants, without alternatives. You can go in, but not out. Even the name from the start was a clue, not "nu-init", "awesome-init" or whatever, but "systemd". A full layer that ends dictating everything. Non IBM endorsed libc (Alpine)? Or kernel (Debian as universal OS)? "Fuck you, we are consultants and have a business to run" (How far Debian has fallen, the history says caring of users', not companies' interests, was the reason to create it)
Plus what the other AC said, a nice stream of money, and job security for some people. We are going back to the 90s, minus the multiple Unix. So worse, because it becomes a monoculture, IBM/systemd.
BTW, other init systems had and have parallelism. Or configurations that are 100%, or pretty much declarative but all in one place in case you need a script (set some vars, include main file that takes charge of all the shell invocations, compared to writing a new file if you need the scripted behaviour... or are they three, the original, the override, and the script?).
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday August 16 2021, @01:05AM (1 child)
Like you, I've read a lot about systemd. I'm not running any systemd-based distros, but I've certainly booted some from optical / USB media, and occasionally do minor tasks on some Ubuntu-based systems.
Point is, I don't have much direct experience yet, but from what I read, systemd is great when it's great, and terrible when it's terrible.
I've mostly run Slackware for my own systems, and it's based on a BSD style init. Also love Alpine which uses OpenRC for init.
To speed / parallelize init process, just add the good old "&" to the end of lines that don't have downstream boot dependencies.
And frankly I don't understand what's all the fuss about boot time / speed anyway. How often are people booting systems? Servers I admin typically go 90 - 180 days uptime, and could go longer but sometimes I reboot them just because (you know, MS-induced habits and all).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 16 2021, @05:10AM
Two things. The best metaphor I've heard about systemd is that it is like the stereotypical crazy girlfriend. As long as you are on her good side and playing by her rules, everything is great. You cross either of those lines, and good luck to you.
The thing about boot time is that was a proxy for speed used by Mac and Windows because it is easy to quantify the time from pushing the power button and the login prompt popping up. Of course, once the benchmark becomes the goal, people naturally change the rules to win that benchmark while forgetting the reason for choosing that as a goal in the first place.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 13 2021, @06:11PM
.nor do they really care about the possible security implications. I'm not saying this is always a bad thing either. Most people wouldn't care about any of these things for a gaming machine
(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Saturday August 14 2021, @09:07AM
Compared to software those companies do systemd doesn't look heavy or complex.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 13 2021, @08:08AM (1 child)
Alpine, as distrowatch lists it, is 'independent', meaning it is an origin point distro, not based on some larger more established one. A bit llike Solus - built from the ground up, nice, but small and really doesn't count in the bigger picture.
For something significant like the Steam project/ecosystem you have to go mainstream, which in 2021 means Debian or Arch. I for one agree with the Arch decision as my own Linux journey has come out of the diapers stage with Mint/Debian and is now running around happily in shorts with Manjaro and RebornOS. I started finding the DebuntuMint family were lagging on too many apps critical to my work, while all those aps were all up to date in the Arch camp. So I switched.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday August 13 2021, @03:19PM
Alpine seems to be a favorite for "docker" containers. (like using the word "kleenex")
Because Alpine is small and minimal.
Alpine has its own C stdlib. That had been a problem for Java containers because Java wants GNU stdlib on Linux. So Java containers had a recipe for adding what was needed. More recently now, prebuilt Java binaries are available that are linked against the musl library on Alpine.
Don't put a mindless tool of corporations in the white house; vote ChatGPT for 2024!
(Score: 4, Informative) by wirelessduck on Friday August 13 2021, @08:36AM
Alpine is built on musl libc, so there would be lots of potential issues running games on that platform.
https://alpinelinux.org/about/ [alpinelinux.org]
https://wiki.musl-libc.org/functional-differences-from-glibc.html [musl-libc.org]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 13 2021, @03:43PM
Debian, usually, is a low effort alternative. I did some work with a bare metal hypervisor that "preferred" CentOS - we could have gone Debian, or Arch, but then support from the hypervisor vendor side would have been minimal. I did about 300% more configuration work in Cent than I do in Debian now since we abandoned the fancy hypervisor and just use VirtualBox.
Arch has always left me with the impression of "control, absolute POWER through control" which usually translates into far more work than a bunch of "apt install x y z".
I did Gentoo a few times from 2005-2010, that level of control was definitely more than I think is practical / warranted for most situations, but at the time - at least at the beginning - it was the only OS that would give me 64 bit gcc access 4GB+ of RAM, so that was worth compiling for 24-36 hours in exchange for simpler software that ran much more smoothly.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Friday August 13 2021, @09:28AM (5 children)
The entire Steam library? Well, let's take a look at the Linux compatibility of games currently available on Steam.
75% of games, 50% of the most popular one. [protondb.com]
My magic 8-ball says "outlook not so good".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 13 2021, @10:07AM (3 children)
Specific, locked-down hardware makes compatibility much easier. For one thing, anti-cheat measures become easier because they can just DRM the whole thing to various degrees. Another is that they don't have to target absolutely everything because they know the exact hardware and software stack it is running. There are other advantages they get that also make it easier too, but those are the biggest.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Opportunist on Friday August 13 2021, @10:19AM (2 children)
While true, it still requires game manufacturers to play nicely. This is easily done if you're a console manufacturer where it's "my way or the highway", i.e. you want to code for my Playstation or X-Box, you WILL code according to those specs.
Not so easy when you're trying to muscle in on a market that already exists, like PC gaming, where your console is but an afterthought for the game developer, where he may consider you an interesting market, but certainly not interesting enough to remodel his 2+ year old game for the maybe 20 licenses sold. Much like, say, Linux in general.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 13 2021, @09:48PM (1 child)
But that is the point, by having the whole stack, you, as the developer, don't have to "remodel" anything. Steam is ironing out those bugs, if anything you get better results with almost no effort.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 13 2021, @10:59PM
It is even less effort. They make the game and then add the DRM library on top. This way, all they have to do is make the game.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 13 2021, @10:43PM
Outlook may be not so good, but you'll have to get that from Microsoft, not Steam.
(Score: 1) by Acabatag on Friday August 13 2021, @11:22AM (3 children)
Won't Windows also be supported? What's the liklihood that Linux on these things is the equivalent of the cardboard prop 'PC' that office furniture sales floors place in retail displays?
Has anybody been analizing what the Windows conversion rate will be when purchasers discover important copy-protection schemes like Easy don't work on Linux? Microsofy could easily roll out a sweet deal for their Xbox system to people who make the 'easy conversion to Windows' on their new deck.
It could easily become the modern equivalent of installing XP on your eeepc 4g back in the day.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday August 13 2021, @01:30PM (1 child)
While installing Windows on it may be doable, it may not be in your best interest, unless they officially support it. Everything they do for this system will be done to tweak settings, etc. to get the best performance for gaming on the device. It would be like installing Windows on your Nintendo Switch. In the event that it's possible or even reasonably usable as a normal Windows desktop, why would you want to?
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1) by Acabatag on Friday August 13 2021, @01:57PM
The Windows advantage for Steam would be they could pitch support over the wall to Microsoft instead of having to maintain their own Linux distro.
The advantage to the customer would be that the deck could be converted into a directly supported Xbox handheld, with Steam Store compatability as a native device as well.
The disasvantage would be having just another Microsoft-dependent device.
Works out for me. My Asus Eee PC 4G is just a tiny Windows XP system at this point that I sometimes use to 'blow away and recover' borked USB flash drives and for other instances where I need a quick legacy-Microsoft system for some reason. Linux-targeted devices that Microsoft has invaded seem ironic but they do exist.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 13 2021, @06:17PM
What a House Nigga.