Comment by delusional
5 hours ago
I'm more confused that it's running SteamOS which is supposedly Arch based, but arch doesn't officially support ARM. You have to use the ArchLinuxARM distro for that, which is less maintained. They got to be doing something off label for that.
> arch doesn't officially support ARM
Doesn't really mean much to Valve as SteamOS vendor:
- linux kernel supports aarch64 just fine
- user space supports aarach64 just as fine
- Valve provides runtime for games (be it via proton or native linux), so providing aarch64 builds is up to them anyway
The main point of ArchLinuxARM is providing compatible binaries, which isn't something hard to do in-house.
Even if they are, Valve has a long track record of contributing back to open source projects.
Proton was a community led effort years back. The guy who started that is now an employee at Valve (IIRC) working on Proton, but also getting paid :)
Arch doesn't support ARM at all. Arm is somebody else hobby project.
Arch has been working with Valve on various build system improvements for some time [0], which as I understand it are targeted at making it more feasible for them to eventually support more architectures [1]. This doesn't release for several months; I wonder if there'll be an official Arch Linux ARM by then?
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696041
You mean valve's?
isn't Steam Deck arm based?
No, it's AMD based
No. It's an AMD x64 CPU married to an onboard GPU.