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Comment by boomboomsubban | Hacker News Reader

Aren't up-to-date libraries fairly important for steam?

From my personal experience not really. I’ve steam running on an about 2yo old (at this point) Gentoo system that’s still working perfectly fine. I really should update it but I don’t do much on that system except play a single game.

My point is that new games can need new libraries, so they're not really factoring in your use case.

I said "a little" - Fedora is still more aggressive with updates than Ubuntu or Debian. Just slightly less than Arch.

The most important libraries for Steam are things like Mesa, which Fedora updates on a rolling basis along with the kernel.

fedora will also patch stuff from upstream to include in their distro. for better or worse arch will try to upstream the patch and if they don't like it just keep an older version around if they don't accept it

Both Fedora and Arch share that philosophy, though. There are very very few patches in Fedora compared to the Debian ecosystem - and often the only exceptions are support for features that in the process of being upstreamed, like Firefox' hardware acceleration support that was added by a Red Hat engineer.

This is not always true. Fedora maintains over 100 RedHat exclusive patches for grub2 alone:

https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/grub2/tree/rawhide

Some of these are pretty questionable, particularly disabling the use of "grub-install" on UEFI systems (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1917213)

I don't know a ton about this, but I thought their major issue was games needing new versions of some random libraries. Being more up to date than Debian would still put you (presumably) years behind.

Mesa and the kernel would be less important, as all the hardware needs to be supported by them on release.

> I don't know a ton about this, but I thought their major issue was games needing new versions of some random libraries. Being more up to date than Debian would still put you (presumably) years behind.

That's not the case w/ the Fedora release cycle. Like I said, it's only slightly behind Arch.

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