this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
252 points (99.6% liked)
Steam Deck
14880 readers
176 users here now
A place to discuss and support all things Steam Deck.
Replacement for r/steamdeck_linux.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
Some more Steam Deck specific flairs:
[Boot Screen] - Custom boot screens/videos.
[Selling] - If you are selling your deck.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to the Steam Deck in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Weird that they went to kernel 6.5 which is already a year old, rather than going to the LTS version 6.6 which is still in support.
At some point you have to draw the line in the sand and say this is what we're updating to for this release, we'll update again for the next one. I compare it to Star citizen, who kept updating to the latest and greatest and never delivered a product. I don't care that you upgraded to the latest engine update, finish the product.
Valid, if they created this update before November 2023 when 6.6 was released, and have needed to test Steam OS with the 6.5 kernel for a whole year before releasing it.
Nope, even then, think of how much QA would go into something like this. They probably have 6-8 months of features that were built on this kernel. Upgrading the kernel before would mean needing to redo everything - all of the QA, UAT, months of prep work. Companies who hold up these big releases for us aren't like us just clicking perform upgrade, it's a massive process that needs signoffs and confirmations. That's why I say they probably just drew a line in the sand and said "We can't risk destabilizing it just to perform an upgrade" - or for all we know they did do the upgrade, realized it broke something critical, and decided against it.
We all know if they rolled out a broken release everyone would be on every forum with pitchforks calling Valve the devil. They weren't just being idiots by not upgrading.
Always porting not-yet-upstreamed patches to new release kernels is additional work to the upstreaming work towards the latest development tree. The Valve engineers interviewed around the very first Steam Deck announcement said their goal with moving from Debian to Arch was to minimize the patchset maintenance burden. Their approach surely has that goal in mind. There are only two variants of Steam Deck with minor differences between them. If backporting patches from newer kernels is less work than forward porting their patches, they just stay with that version for a while. Updates to drivers for hardware they don't use and filesystems they don't use aren't relevant to them anyway.