I find that Fedora hits the right balance of stability while being up to date for anything desktop and specifically gaming focused, Debian has different priorities and packages can be a bit too old. And it’s less of a faff than Arch.
What changed?
I've ran testing on my home server, though since it's a bit old now I've switched it over to stable when testing switched to stable.
The testing happens in Debian Sid.
If you want to help Debian test the next release and actually report issues choose Debian testing.
I wonder how many potential users have been scared off by the name... Maybe Debian devs like it that way, less annoying desktop users to support.
No, just because the Steamdeck's distro is built on Arch, and so you can piggyback on what they are doing.
I don't see why 'piggyback on what [Steam deck is] doing' wouldn't work just as well on any distro, you'd just have a load of extra stuff you're not using too.
That's nothing against Arch, it's what I use, I'm just saying really the only magic is in doing less.
You might be right in terms of a desktop environment. But Arch does have its own opinions, eg it picks systemd by default. And it gives you a default kernel that has a few patches applied and a config picked for you.
> I don't see why 'piggyback on what [Steam deck is] doing' wouldn't work just as well on any distro, you'd just have a load of extra stuff you're not using too.
Yes, that was in my original comment. However setting up all the configs take a bit of time, and with Arch you can just literally copy large parts of the config files from the Steam deck.
One advantage that Arch has over many distros: as a rolling distributions it's usually easier to get up-to-date packages, you mostly get them by default.