Just got a steam deck and immediately checked out the desktop mode, and I was somewhat surprised to see KDE and pacman as opposed to GNOME and apt, I have nothing against the former though a strong preference for the latter, anyone know why Volvo went in this direction?
Debian was planning on dropping 32 bit support and Steam is still a 32 bit application so valve freaked out.
Arch rolling gives up to date packages quickly. The most important part for Linux gaming is quickest pushing of GPU and performance related kernel code, so that the most optimal balance between battery life and performance is continuously achieved, because Linux gaming is still in its infancy. Every new update or package possibly giving this benefit matters to Valve, and they need maximum amount of time to optimise and push updates.
There is no GNOME hate angle, unlike what a lot of idiots here want to claim and spread the toxicity for it. KDE people, Snap haters, systemd haters are extremely vile people. Valve does not care about working with UI, since they can design a launcher for any Linux distro themselves, hiding the ugly terminal and filesystem well enough for casual gamers.
I assume because it’s more customizable.
Another point for KDE might be that it works much better on a small screen that may be partially obscured by an overlaid keyboard. I used Bazzite Gnome for a while on the Steam Deck and I much preferred Plasma on there after switching back, despite using Gnome on my main system.
I suspect KDE because most PC gamers are Windows users and KDE is closer to that while Gnome is closer to macOS (both in design and being restrictive).
I believe SteamOS is also immutable and uses a rolling release model. It’s probably logical to make a custom version of Arch. They can make it immutable and still get the latest packages. Fedora Silverblue (or another immutable Linux distro) wouldn’t be as quick to release packages and was probably in alpha when the decision was made.
I suspect KDE because most PC gamers are Windows users and KDE is closer to that while Gnome is closer to macOS (both in design and being restrictive).
For what it’s worth, when I moved from macOS to Linux I found that KDE Plasma customisation made it less frustrating to get the appearance and multitouch gestures closer to what I was missing on a Mac.
ElementaryOS sounds like a perfect fit for you, if you haven’t tried it already. Superb gesture support and consistent UI across all built in apps
That said, a lot of the gesture support has been implemented in Gnome and KDE now anyway, particularly partial gestures which previously had very poor support IIRC
I know this is silly and I can make KDE do this but at some point, my workflow became a mouse to the top left corner to get an overview and get all the windows so I can swap programs. It started with Gnome 3 years ago, and as far as I know, macOS copied hot corners in a way that’s worse in that it requires changing settings.
The other part of my workflow is pressing a remapped CAPS Lock control or whatever and tilde for my terminal to come out guake style. I use ddterm in gnome.
If I can’t switch windows and call up a terminal guake style, I’ll retire.
The macOS version of it also sucks because you can’t close windows from “Mission Control” or whatever they call they call their Gnome clone. Put an X on each window whereas Gnome lets me do that and clear old shit out the way when I need to.
The bottom line is that when I really need macOS, it’s built into the settings. Gnome is effortless. Windows is a constant battle.
macOS does have a setting to remap the caps lock key and game has to recognize game sometimes. They stole the good ideas from Gnome. But if I can’t hit CAPS Lock+tilde and have a real terminal slide down, your operating system is dead to me.
I’m sure I can get there on Windows if I cared to but I’m too busy deleting Candy Crush or whatever.
Hot corners were in OS X before gnome 3 even existed
I stand corrected. I didn’t really use macOS until a few years ago.
I originally got a MacBook because my work life is all Linux and I was working from home and needed that psychological separation. Like, “This computer is for work. MacOS is for watching basketball.”
You can get the switcher in KDE, but you can’t get a real equivalent to gnome’s view. In gnome you can press super to get the overview, but you can also type to open programs. There’s no way to do that in KDE afaik. It’s the main thing keeping me from KDE
Arch gets faster driver updates, KDE is faster at developing Wayland protocol implementations.
Edit: Valve gets their desired stability by turning Arch into a point release distro through image based releases. And, the system is practically unbrickable since it’s immutable. So, in summary it’s the best of both rolling release and point release models. By best, I mean for gaming.
Wayland
🤮
I understand your comment if you have an Nvidia GPU and/or if you don’t do any gaming, but if you have an Intel or AMD GPU and you play games, Wayland is just better. VRR, HDR, Fractional Scaling, Nvidia Reflex (for all GPU brands), in GameScope (wayland compositor made by Valve) you can have FSR, upscaling, on all games. It’s even better than on Windows. And if you use Bazzite, all is set up for you out of the box, you don’t need to be an experienced Linux user to use all of the above tech. Just like on the Steam Deck.
Gaming support is still very much a work in progress all up and down the software stack. Stable distros like Debian tend to ship older proven versions of packages so their packaged software can be up to 18mo behind current releases. The NTSync kernel code that should improve Windows game performance isn’t even scheduled for mainline merge until the 6.10 kernel window in a few weeks - that’s not likely to be in a stable Debian release for a 12-18mo.
TL;DR: Gaming work is very much ongoing and Arch moves faster than Debian does. Shipping 12-18mo old versions of core software on the Steam deck would degrade performance.
It’s pretty common to use debian
unstableas a base.stableis not the only release that debian offers, and despite their names they tend to be more dependable than other distros idea of stable.$ awk -v k=$(uname -r) '/^NAME=/{gsub(/^NAME=|"/, "", $0);print $0,k}' /etc/os-release Debian GNU/Linux 6.7.12-amd64stableis not the only release that debian offers,Did you mean to say “branch” rather than “release”? Debian only releases stable. Everything else is part of the process of preparing and supporting stable.
Testing branch may work well or it may not. Its goal is to refine packages for the next stable release so it has an inherent strive towards quality, but it doesn’t have a commitment to “quality now” like stable does, just to “quality eventually”.
Testing’s quality is highest towards the start of each release cycle when it picks up from the previous stable release and towards the end when it’s getting ready to become the next stable. But the cycle is 2 years long.
No, I meant release: https://www.debian.org/releases/
Debian always has at least three releases in active maintenance: stable, testing and unstable.
Interesting, I didn’t know they consider testing and unstable to be releases too.
Puts on reading glasses back in my day, we had a saying: “there’s nothing more stable than Debian unstable.”
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[…] anyone know why Volvo went in this direction?
So noone is talking about Volvo?
Other than that, SteamOS started with Debian and switched to Arch last minute before the steam deck released.
Volvo probably trying to cast off their reputation for being “safe ang boring” and take on a more edgy image.
Ditching Internal combustion in favour of steam power is also a major shift for them.Wasn’t Volvo the company where some exec got run over when they wanted to demonstrate the automatic emergency stop feature? And all this after they gifted seatbelts to the world.
That actually ended up being untrue. There were claims that it was the CEO, then it switched to “some random executive”.
Turns out it was neither, and the identity of the people (there were two) struck is unknown. Not only that, the car in question didn’t even have a pedestrian detection system, because that’s an optional extra that the XC60 in question didn’t have installed.
The rumour also said that the “CEO” was paralysed, which is also untrue. The injuries sustained were so minor that nobody went to hospital.
For the KDE part, something I haven’t heard most people mention is the wayland support and how fast they are to pioneer and implement new protocols. DRM leasing is the reason why Gnome can’t do VR games and I forget why they wouldn’t implement it, but the why doesn’t really matter for a company focused on gaming. There are quite a number of protocols that have followed this same story with Gnome.
Didn’t GNOME support Wayland way earlier than KDE ?
Switched to it by default in 2016.
Yes, but that isn’t really relevant to the current state of things. I still think Gnome’s wayland implementation is ahead in some ways, but why would that matter when various game related stuff doesn’t work on Gnome. We are talking about a gaming company here.
It was based on debian, but moved to arch.
I think they did it because honestly, arch is better for desktop-usage due to its rolling-release model.
Bugs in debian stick around forever.
I don’t think that’s a good point, since they make their own immutable images, so they can use whatever versions of software they want, and you don’t normally get to update them with the rolling release
Yeah but what’s the point of using Debian when you’re going to have to manually package newer versions of a lot of software?
Why would they manually package them? Just grab the packages you need from
testingorsid. This way you keep the solid Debianstablebase OS and still bring in the latest and greatest of the things that matter for gaming.But why go through those hoops? What is the advantage Debian brings when you have to cherry pick packages and their dependencies from Sid? Stability is no longer an advantage when you are cherry picking from Sid lol.
Stability is no longer an advantage when you are cherry picking from Sid lol.
This makes no sense. When 95% of the system is based on Debian
stable, you get pretty much full stability of the base OS. All you need to pull in from the other releases is Mesa and related packages.Perhaps the kernel as well, but I suspect they’re compiling their own with relevant parameters and features for the SD anyway, so not even that.
Yeah as an Arch user I disagree. Imo a handheld meant to be a plug and play system would hugely benefit from a stable OS with a laid back update schedule. You don’t see PlayStation pushing constant updates the second BSD packages get new versions.
As others have said, Valve has their own immutable release system, so it doesn’t really matter. In this case, the rolling release has even less to do with it. They likely chose Arch due to the up to date packages which benefit gaming.
People shitting on Gnome sound like kids bitching that the free pizza shop doesn’t offer your favorite hamburger.
Also, all this sudden Gnome hate all over Lemmy is trendy as fuck, being trendy used to mean you were a loser with no original style, I guess the capitalists turned it into “viral” and made it cool.
Lol, typical Lemmy to blame everything on capitalism.
Gnome is just incredibly annoying to use. It’s not a trendy thing to say, it’s just my opinion.
I really enjoy gnome, I much prefer it.
That’s fair enough. I don’t understand why personally but you do you.
I find some software annoying too but I’m not 12 so I don’t feel the need to shit on people volunteering their time to make software for people.
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I remember a lot of KDE hate up until Gnome 3, which was controversial, to say the least. It mirrored old-school Mac hate, with a lot of invalid arguments parroted by people who never took time to learn it (or more to the point, to unlearn what they came from).
I’ve swapped between Gnome and KDE a bunch of times, and it hasn’t really made a difference to me in many years. There was a time when running apps built for one on the other was a painful experience either way. Nowadays my DE choice doesn’t really influence my application choices.
This is a dumb take too, it’s important to criticize and scrutinize anything and everything down to the smallest detail to understand what works and what doesn’t, how and why that is the case in order to make better decisions for the future. You have to think critically, especially about software even when it’s a matter of preference.
Do you think the devs aren’t “thinking critically” as they’ve made a very cohesive de?
Besides that, people saying “Gnome sucks, it’s garbage” is not a constructive criticism anyhow.
The only dumb take is the one above this comment.
What? No I was saying that NOT criticizing GNOME just because of the old thought-terminating cliché of “don’t use it then” is silly because it’s important to critique everything and no one is just saying it’s “garbage” apart from people in your head
I never see KDE get near the hate from gnome users because it just doesn’t affect them.
It’s because everyone that uses Linux will stumble across gnome at least once because it’s in Ubuntu which is the first and only distro a lot of people use, so you have to go out of your way to use something else like KDE.
i don’t understand why you’d waste time complaining about any you don’t use.
Why do people complain about anything?
Because why not? I don’t like Gnome but I complain about it because I can and I don’t like it.
I also complain about IOS, macOS, And a lot of other shit that doesn’t matter. I just like to voice my opinion like everyone else. There is no need to listen.
Ubuntu’s version of Gnome is heavily modified to look and feel like their old Unity DE though. Vanilla Gnome like in Fedora or Arch is a vastly different experience.
Arch?
Last time I installed arch it didn’t have any DE (or anything really) by default.
Correct. But if you install gnome, it comes with default configs
That’s true with KDE as well.
Who said it wasn’t
I see you’re upset people don’t like gnome.
I don’t care what people like, I don’t like people shitting on open source projects and dividing the community.
Right.
You don’t like that people don’t like gnome. You care about what they like.
I, personally, think when we love something we want it to be the best it can be. Gnome devs seem to just be red hat employees who don’t actually care about making a good DE, just doing the easiest work while [WONTFIX]ing anything that takes actual effort.
You don’t even talk with gnome devs. You talk with red hat. They’re employees first for a company owned by IBM.
Gnome devs seem to just be red hat employees who don’t actually care about making a good DE
But Gnome is a great DE, I’ve used it as a daily driver for personal and at work for many years. I can’t say I have any major complaints. What’s so terrible about Gnome?
Do you use gnome tweak tools?
Because if I do, then that proves Gnome is terrible and all the devs should drive off a cliff?
If we divided Gnome right out of the open source community, we wouldn’t have lost much.
If we lost the open source community will have gained.
Yes, just that Valve would have ignored Linux existed. Nothing much. Companies would not make software for Linux. Not much really. Coherent ecosystem and work flow does not matter, but ricing every single button matters to the no life NEET kids.
A coherent ecosystem…of blank windows with not enough functionality crammed into a hamburger menu made the way it is mostly for aesthetics. A workflow that doesn’t make sense to most people who are trained on PCs. A dev team who hate their users.
No thanks.
A workflow that doesn’t make sense to most people who are trained on PCs
If you want this use KDE. I for one am very happy to use a desktop that doesn’t follow 30 year old design.
Do you type on a QWERTY keyboard?
It’d be a massive loss. The best DE would be gone.
Naw, Cinnamon will still be here.
Lmao
Splitting the community? Who cares, it doesn’t matter anyways.
I care, and so do many others, it happens to some with empathy when they grow out of their preteen years.
Shitting on Gnome if you use a tiled desktop manager is fair game.
Shitting on Gnome if you use KDE is just dumb
Gnome is shit, I use KDE btw is definitely the new Reddit/Lemmy Linux community circlejerk.
And it’s not even like console fanboy arguments, because in this case it’s pretty one-sided. I don’t see Gnome fans brigading KDE threads and circlejerking about KDE being awful and the devs being cunts.
Idk why people can’t just accept that they’re both amazing DEs but very different in use, with very different project philosophies.
It seems to me that people keep saying “Linux is about choice”, but the second someone chooses something different to what the hivemind likes, the pitchforks are out.
I don’t see Gnome fans brigading KDE threads and circlejerking about KDE being awful and the devs being cunts.
I’m a Gnome user for like 20 years, I don’t prefer KDE but glad it’s there. I never have but would be happy to support KDE and understand any devs being cunts on occasion, I’m sure it’s stressful. I’m glad they are there so I don’t have to use proprietary software.
I’ve used Gnome for a very long time but tried out Plasma 6.0 soon after it came out, and I’m very impressed.
I might switch back to Gnome some day, but KDE just keeps growing on me.
The seamless clipboard sharing feature between mobile and laptop is really cool, and that was just an unexpected bonus attached to a whole set of cool features. And everything feels cohesive in a way that I’m not used to.See, this is a good comment. You like KDE more, awesome! Enjoy! Your attitude makes me want to try it again.
I know you can get most of the KDE Connect features with GSConnect. I assume clipboard sharing works too?
That’s possible. I went very many years without even hearing about that, and I found KDE Connect and had it up and fully operational on day one.
It’s not new, it started when they released GNOME 3.
I was very upset when they released gnome 3. Suddenly things were different, and there were rough edges. I used XFCE for many years after that. But… I have come to appreciate it now. I like that the devs had their vision and didn’t give in to all the demands to make it work differently. It’s their project, and I can use it if I want, or not. I respect it the same way I respect OpenBSD doing their thing. Can you imagine demanding that the OpenBSD devs changed their vision due to popular opinions? “We want closed source nvidia drivers and bluetooth support!” They just tell people to use another OS then. But from that stubbornness something beautiful is created.
Oh yeah, definitely. There were even death threats to the devs for a while after Gnome 3 came out, because anonymity seems to turn some people into monsters.
It just seemed to me that it settled down for a while and now in the past couple of years it’s ramped back up again for some reason.
For KDE, Valve found it easier to work with KDE devs than GNOME devs.
Big surprise.
Doesn’t kde work on debian? I haven’t used it on the desktop in ages, but that seems odd.
On second thought, they may not have the most up-to-date version. So maybe it’s that.
And if steam could make a Qt client while they’re at it…
Of course it does. OP asked multiple questions, this was sipposes to answer why they used KDE instead of Gnome. I personally think Arch would have the advantage of having the newewst drivers, Proton version etc. available.
My hair is a bird.
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But Gnome devs are notoriously hard to work with.
In early Steam Deck showcase videos there were talks with Valve guys like Lawrence Yang, and IIRC they simply said that it is easier for them to build the system that way, not that they couldn’t continue using Debian.
I think the reason for that might be that Debian has pretty strict package and dependency policies and sometimes it’s not easy to put cutting edge solutions on top of the „stable” base, so they would end-up using unstable/sid anyway, which still isn’t ideal as there is some freezing happening every now and then. Also Debian packaging system feels quite dated and strict comparing to PKGBUILD format, and it’s simply easier to build custom packages, having single build instruction file is super convenient and unlike with Debian at times, replacing whatever core system packages without breaking half of the dependency tree is usually easily doable on Arch.
I’ve packaged on both distros, and PKGBUILDs are truly amazing
As for why they adopted KDE, they probably discovered how hard it is to work with Gnome developers.
I remember in an interview talking about the Steam Deck and its controls, GabeN said (paraphrased) “What we learned from the Steam Controller is there needs to be zero learning curve. Players want to pick it up and understand it immediately.”
Given that ethos, it’s not difficult to understand adopting KDE over Gnome. Most of Valve’s customers are coming from Windows, and KDE resembles Windows’ UI, where Gnome resembles iOS after a stroke.
Average GNOME hater is so blind they cannot distinguish between MacOS and iOS. No surprise, considering they never grew out of Windows UI paradigms.
So, what you’re saying is you think Gnome resembles MacOS after a stroke? Fair enough.
Whichever who cares. I find Gnome so feature poor and so “why would you ever want to do that?” and so “You have to do it the way it occurred to us, not the way it occurred to you.” that I legitimately hate it.
No, GNOME is far superior to MacOS, so superior that Windows 11 copied it, and KDE copies Windows. That makes GNOME the godfather compared to hacky KDE.
Windows 11 is still easier to use…
You think so? That shit has 2 right click menus and settings hard to navigate, not to mention the unbearable ad ridden Start menu, shitty Control Panel and AI garbage you cannot escape. You need something like AME project to make it barely usable. Oh and forced updates taking hours of time. All this is not a problem on Linux.
Yes, and I think it’s easier to use than gnome.
Don’t feed the troll…
Why would you ever need such a feature? Closed.
I shared a green text recently that said just this lol
Since the start. Forget working with them, it’s a rough go to even try and communicate with them.
And that goes back to mailing list days, creating a personal grudge against Gnome so firm that I haven’t used it since the early 2000s.
Thankfully there’s KDE for my general use and a wide variety of lightweight options for other uses.
Just saw it too :D
the deck isn’t some server that needs > 100% uptime for years. Debian is poopoo for bleeding edge game releases, especially any alpha/beta/early access stuff
