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Comment by mackal | Hacker News Reader

A little birdy informed me that SteamOS is based on Ubuntu, they didn't go into more details besides saying it was a dumb choice. I would assume its based on X.org since neither Wayland nor Mir are mature enough.

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> it was a dumb choice On the contrary, I think it's a great choice. Ubuntu has one of the best, if not the best out-of-the-box experience, especially for unexperienced users. It's not a coincidence that it's been adopted by many big cos (Google comes to mind) or administrations. In particular, hardware support will be key to the success of SteamOS and there are only few contenders that compete with the friendliness of Ubuntu (especially a Valve-customized one).

Isn't that mainly related to the UI and the packages installed by default (I haven't used ubuntu in like 5 years, but back then it felt just like debian with more stuff installed by default).

If Valve makes a complete custom environment for steam OS built around big picture will they really benefit more from using ubuntu versus debian, fedora or any other distro?

>Ubuntu has one of the best, if not the best out-of-the-box experience, especially for unexperienced users.

Does anyone _not_ expect Valve to throw that all away in favor of big picture mode? Unity, if it does ship in Steam OS by default, will be the under-the-hood interface.

They will most likely use a much more light weight WM underneath (say Openbox) instead of Unity. If you don't have a WM handling some things and just start steam in BP mode your cursor stays around :P

I think it makes a ton of sense. Steam targeted Ubuntu from the beginning.

But even if they are working with Ubuntu for some of the reasons you mentioned, that doesn't mean that they have to go with Mir. You could install Mir for any distribution. You could install Wayland on any distribution. You could just keep going with X because at least it's stable and people know about it.

My high-level impression (based on a small amount of experience) is that if you want to ship a modified distro, it's easier to base your work on Debian than to based it on Ubuntu. The Debian project puts a lot of effort into making a wide variety of configurations work well. Ubuntu focuses on a single configuration, more or less, and they don't seem to mind if that introduces bugs in other configurations.

I personally switched from Ubuntu back to Debian when I realized that I was dealing with Ubuntu-specific bugs more often than I was benefiting from Ubuntu-specific features.

Yeah, I think Debian would of been a better choice. Personally I would say Gentoo, but that might be more work for them (although Chromebook switched from Ubuntu based to Gentoo based)

You would get the same hardware support from Debian or pretty much any other distro. If they had strict control over the hardware I would say roll their own kernel, but they don't, so a distro like Ubuntu makes sense. But I don't think the price of dealing with working with Ubuntu would be worth it over using something like Debian. Also, Google was using an Ubuntu based distro for Chromebooks, but they have since switched to Gentoo due to problems of working with Ubuntu.

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