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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • According to Debian users, “stable” means “unchanging” and not “doesn’t crash or have bugs” … If you still ship 100% of the changes but just delay them by 2 weeks, you have the same number of changes. So by the Debian definition of “stable”, no, it is the exact same as arch.

    By the everyone else definition where “stable” means “doesn’t crash or have bugs”, then also no. Shipping buggy code 2 weeks later doesn’t reduce bugs. And if you use the AUR at all, then things get worse, I’ve found, as the AUR pkgbuilds expect dependencies to match current up to date Arch repos.

    tl;dr - no






  • My arch install is 10 years old at this point.

    I would be interested to know what inspired the need to “feel fresh” from OP. Is this an extremely underpowered laptop that just can’t handle having a few extra packages installed? Is it the Windows bad habit just making them perceive it as “needing a cleanup” ?

    If you have hard drive space, unloaded packages are generally never loaded and just take up storage, not CPU/memory (though you should check to see what services are running too).

    Also importantly. pacman -Qdtq and pacman -Rns are 2 separate commands. “Qdtq” means “Query, dependencies, unrequired, quiet” (“quiet” makes it so just the package names are output, to be more neatly piped into the second command. This queries the unrequired dependencies (ie, packages that were installed along with another package, but are no longer used by another package), and lists them “Rns” means “Remove, no backup, recursively” . and the - at the end means “Use the values from the first half of the pipe”… This removes the packages listed, skips creating any .pacsave fields for config files, and then once the package is removed, checks all of ITS dependencies to see if they can be removed as well.

    For this command, a “dependency” is any package that is installed as a dependency of another package (and hasn’t been directly installed manually). If you installed package X, and it brought in package Y and package Z, then uninstalled package X, and now youre worried about package Y and Z, this will find them and clear them out.

    This also teaches us that if you uninstalled package X with pacman -Rs packageX , the s bit would make sure that package Y and Z were cleaned up at removal time in the first place.

    But overall, there’s very little reason to reinstall arch unless you are running out of disk space due to how many obsolete packages you have hanging around and they are all explicitly installed so wont be cleaned up with the above method.

    But worst case, if you manage to break things just by clearing out unused dependencies, you can just copy your files off and do a full reinstall. Your system works right now, why reinstall? Might as well try to improve it a little bit (if thats even needed) before giving up and starting over.



  • Back in october I travelled for a lan party. I didnt bring my linux desktop with me, and just brought my steam deck and dock, and when I got there, borrowed a keyboard/mouse/monitor.

    Then i swapped it to desktop mode, and the people I was with all commented on “Oh wow! it’s just like a regular computer”

    One of them has explicited said they were fed up with microsoft’s BS and would swap their gaming PC over to steamOS once it’s formally released for desktop (they were uninterested in Bazzite and wanted an official Valve release for their gaming PC).


  • It’s immutable (you can’t break the core OS, there is no deleting system32). You can’t install packages (like you would from AUR), but have access to flatpaks.

    Firefox is preinstalled, but anything from flathub is also available.

    So yes, it has all the things most people need from a desktop OS, and is harder to break, and is supported commercially.

    It has a desktop mode, I’ve never looked into whether you can boot to desktop by default. But I would imagine if they released a desktop friendly version, that would be an option.


  • SteamOS has a web browser.

    It boots by default into Steam Big Picture mode, which is the SteamOS/HTPC style “intended to be used with a controller” layout.

    In the power menu, it has a “switch to desktop” button that drops you to KDE. Firefox is pre-installed, and immediately available for use.

    But also, it’s just an immutable OS with plenty of things installable via flatpak in KDE Discover. Which means Slack, Discord, Zoom, Chrome… all of the “desktop” things most people need are available.





  • The number of different branded headsets using WMR doesn’t make it significant in any way. Based on Steam hardware survey, WMR headsets only account for 2.84% of VR headsets. Index, Quest 2, Quest 3 account for ~70% of VR headsets in use, and they all work on Linux. Index just naturally in SteamVR and it’s my understanding that setting up ALVR for the quest ones isn’t that tricky (but I’ve also never tried). And much of the remaining 30% other headsets work with ALVR too.

    And the point of comparing things to Windows, is that if we’re stating “Linux isn’t ready for gaming because not every VR headset works”, then by that definition Windows isn’t either. Which you probably agree with, but generally speaking “people” / society view Windows as ready for gaming despite it not supporting every headset.

    It’s basically getting into the “Fortnite doesn’t work on Linux” type of situation now. Some things are just never going to work, and it’s because of the creator of those things and not Linux itself, and who cares. Even if the things that don’t work are popular, that doesn’t mean that on the whole, the OS isn’t ready.

    Also, according to steam only 1.9% of accounts have a VR headset. That alone makes VR an edge case. but 2.84% of 1.9% is 0.05% of overall steam accounts using WMR. I think Linux can be ready for gaming without WMR support.




  • This comes a year and a half after they resorted to disabling Wayland support

    Yeah. A lot of progress has been made in the past year and a half. This is a clickbait headline. It’s not like last week they were like “this is super broken… oh well shipping it anyway.” It feels like pointing out their previous criticisms is almost trying to call them out as hypocritical or something.

    It was previously broken. They said it was broken. And now it’s fixed, and they re-enabled it as the default. There’s no bigger story or drama around their previous comments.