We are excited to announce that Arch Linux is entering into a direct collaboration with Valve. Valve is generously providing backing for two critical projects that will have a huge impact on our distribution: a build service infrastructure and a secure signing enclave. By supporting work on a freelance basis for these topics, Valve enables us to work on them without being limited solely by the free time of our volunteers.
This opportunity allows us to address some of the biggest outstanding challenges we have been facing for a while. The collaboration will speed-up the progress that would otherwise take much longer for us to achieve, and will ultimately unblock us from finally pursuing some of our planned endeavors. We are incredibly grateful for Valve to make this possible and for their explicit commitment to help and support Arch Linux.
These projects will follow our usual development and consensus-building workflows. [RFCs] will be created for any wide-ranging changes. Discussions on this mailing list as well as issue, milestone and epic planning in our GitLab will provide transparency and insight into the work. We believe this collaboration will greatly benefit Arch Linux, and are looking forward to share further development on this mailing list as work progresses.
Arch isn’t unstable. Users mess it up by installing a bunch of random crap from the AUR or fiddling with system files.
SteamOS addresses this by making the root level filesystem immutable and guiding the user to install containerized (flatpak) apps.
Exactly. I ran Arch for over 5 years, and the only “instability” I had was:
- Nvidia drivers not matching kernel drivers - also happened on openSUSE Tumbleweed, and has more to do with Nvidia’s driver being closed-source than anything Arch is doing
- systemd and usr merge - this was many years ago, and the only reason I messed it up was because I didn’t actually follow the instructions; and this was an absolutely massive change
- I did something stupid - sometimes this is uninstalling the display manager or some other critical component
That’s really it. I’ve since moved to openSUSE Tumbleweed and an AMD GPU, largely because of built-in snapper support and their server-oriented distros (Leap and MicroOS), and it wasn’t because Arch was “unstable” or anything like that. In fact, I had far fewer issues with Arch than I did with the other distros I used before: Ubuntu and Fedora. It turns out, as you understand Linux better, you tend to mess things up less.
