I really wonder what it means to be based on Arch Linux. Are users supposed to run packman to grab the latest security fixes? Are users going to be installing apps from the AUR or whatever? Why does this thing even need a package manager at all? Or is there more to a Linux distro that I'm not getting? It seems like a distro is mostly defined by it's package manager and repository paradigm or philosophy, with Debian being the slow stodgy stable distro and Arch being bleeding-edge. Everything else they have in common (wayland, systemd, standard components that don't know or care thst they're running on Debian or Arch).
I would have thought Fedora Silverblue would be the perfect OS for this kind of thing. The OS is a read only image you mount and to update you simply mount the newer image. Its the same model mobile OSs use and it means update failures are almost non existent.
> Are users supposed to run packman to grab the latest security fixes?
there are plenty of graphical frontends for updates on Arch.
Another big thing is more recent glibc and mesa for instance which can be huge for performance. Also, Arch makes it fairly easy to rebuild all packages with optimizations for a given CPU ; for instance someone recently made a test of arch built with x86_64-v3. Also there's the way packages are built (much simpler than with debian), etc.
Why does valve need to use a "distro" at all? LFS exists and is trivial to throw together a custom install. You can grab whatever glibc or mesa you want. Also building a kernel with improvements for a certain CPU is dead simple out of the box with Linux. Distros make it hard, and Arch makes it "easier".
As for packages, why does SteamOS need packages? They can just make one large update package that includes all library updates for the latest SteamOS version. Or are they expecting users to say "Oh I want to update just this one library"? Seems like a huge missed opportunity to make SteamOS a "stable target" that Linux devs can make games for. But if everyone is like "I want this weird glibc!" then that's impossible.
Valve probably does not want to maintain their own distro. Using Arch as a core with their own packages on top is far easier and ensures you always have the newest core components.
What does it mean to use Arch as a "core"? Can't they just pull a list of packages that Arch uses (or the latest Ubuntu for that matter), and use those in their Linux insall?
