Valve's SteamOS Compositor Has Begun Seeing Some Activity Recently

[9Strike]

That's ridiculous. SteamOS came out years ago. It was originally Debian 7 and is now at 9. Sure, Valve could be faster at upgrading, but there's a lot of testing required across drivers and graphics cards to ensure nothing breaks.

Debian is already a stable Distro, if you ask me there is no need to do a lot of testing again. Even Ubuntu is somewhat stable.
Just look at the recent improvements in the Mesa stack. Stretch has Mesa 13.0.6, that's 5 years old. Even in backports you have 18.2, over a year old.
If you buy a new PC and want to play games, this is just way to impractical. Sure with a 5 year old graphics card everything will be fine but then the target of SteamOS is a joke, at least for me.
I rather wish they would put their efforts into improving KDE and software to configure input devices (Keyboard RGB, Mouse DPI etc), and release every half year an Ububtu based version tat looks and feels like Windows 10.
I just don't see the point in making a "SteamOS" that has no use case for most Steam users ("normal gamers") today years after the Steam Machines flopped.

Fedora and Manjaro are good Desktops, no question, but they are nothing for an average gamer who doesn't care about Linux. Some friends just started using it in a VM and guess what, they asked me for help because the solution for a problem they found online didn't work because it was for Debian/Ubuntu.

[aht0]

Gaming studios are very interested in stability. So should players - forget the feature/version creep for once. Thing is, gaming on Linux can only become successful venture with the aid of commercial gaming. Commercial games are usually closed source and so only studios/devs can fix the issues and patch the games.
Once the game is out and money has been collected, all sorts of maintenance means just additional costs. So, gaming studios will want the most stable platform for running their games possible. Sooner or later they are moving on, drop the support, then the 'length of the games life' depends on random chances like: potential game-breaking issues. Which may be caused by new updates to the software used for running said games.
Attract the game studios with stable, reliable platform for their games, that has also long shelf life (thus LTS) - that's the only viable road.
Accountants and shareholders dictate the policy. It does not matter if the particular LTS used for base has 2y old libs or not, if those basically work, it's a pseudo-issue. You have to base your platform on something and there is always something that is newer and shinier elsewhere. At some point, devs putting the platform together have to choose something and they cant choose the newest because possible future regressions 6 months down the road.. Thus please quit whining about the "old" software..

[Ardje]

Honestly SteamOS is a joke. Who would still run Debian 9? They should do a Debian testing based Distro or do an Ubuntu fork of the latest version.

Having a steam machine with only minor edits on the config meant a lot to me in free time and desktop stability. I have a gaming PC. And I have a laptop. And a lot of ARM based desktops.
The steam machine still does what it needs to do: run my games. Except for GTA IV due to that ff-ing nvidia stuff.

[9Strike]

Gaming studios are very interested in stability.

No, they aren't. They only care about a stable ABI, but that doesn't mean "old" software. Games aren't server applications. Look on Windows, new games need new drivers. Sure they rely on the basically never changing Windows API, but that doesn't mean that the underlaying code of Windows doesn't change.

I don't have problems with "old" software, I run all my servers with Debian stable myself, but gaming is different. You literaly can't run modern Games on Stretch because they is no Vulkan support natively (without backports), and even with new versions of DXVK won't work properly, which is funny enough.

[aht0]

9Strike Yes, but "stable ABI" is one thing they won't be getting with Linux, unless they stick to some LTS. Because even each new Linux minor kernel version would introduce anywhere from few tens to many hundreds of ABI changes. In this regard SteamOS is very welcome regardless of the age of it's components - it creates 'unified' gaming distro, so each gaming studio does not have to scratch their collective head trying to figure out which distro they should support, if at all.

Gaming studios have no such problem with Windows - even tho ABIs change on Windows as well, it happens far less often (mostly during Windows releases and/or Service Pack upgrades) and also Microsoft puts huge efforts into retaining backwards binary compatibility to almost ridicoulous degree. I've used Windows Vista drivers on Windows 10 (it does not ALWAYS work but it works often enough for it to be worth giving it a try) and used Windows 2000-specific applications on Windows 10. Random example: I had emu10k1 sound card (belive me, it lacks Win10 driver) which I got running under "10" by installing user-made Win7 (KX drivers) driver (force-applying relevant *.inf files) and setting it's related applications (which came with the driver) into Win7 compatibility mode. And it worked!