SteamOS Didn't Use Ubuntu Over Legal Issues

[SyXbiT]

I'm really glad they went with Debian.
The only downside is that Debian stable is only supported for 3 years. By the time SteamOS becomes stable, they'll only get another 1 year of support from their upstream. Of course, they can do the work themselves, but if they'd gone w/ Ubuntu LTS, they'd have 5 years.
It won't be popular to say, but going with CentOS 7 might have also been good. That gets you almost 10 years of updates!.... It just needs to hurry up and be released first!

[GreatEmerald]

I don't think it could have anything to do with the big-name components that are present in the default Ubuntu install. They wouldn't be running Unity, they wouldn't even need to have it installed. They could use any other desktop, like XFCE if they wanted. And I doubt it has anything to do with Mir by itself, since they are relying on a different graphics stack and wouldn't need to ship Mir at all.
To me it seems like it's was more to do with all the changes going into future Ubuntu versions that aren't really necessary for a gaming console, and they'd rather take the easy road and use a vanilla distro. That may not be the case, but I can't see what legal issues they could be having, considering they could remove and replace anything that's iffy. It might be a mix of the two; not wanting to deal with legal gray areas, so they use a more basic system to bypass it.

They do have GNOME Shell installed, so the desktop choice and its support does matter. And they did say it's because of a legally questionable situation, not anything technical...

[mrugiero]

That is highly disturbing. Do you have a source?

I'll have to look. As my "IIRC" says, I'm not really sure if I am recalling it correctly or maybe I'm wrong. I'll post again in a while telling you if I've found something or not. I think it was in one of the articles in G+ that came out in the controversy peak, a few months ago, but maybe I'm mixing things up.

Still, it is a shame that steam OS won't be able to use PPA's. :/ too bad.

I'm not sure that's true. Sure, it won't have the whole lot of PPAs LaunchPad offers, but PPAs can be set for any apt based distribution, AFAIK. As you probably know, Debian is the father of all apt based distributions.

[mrugiero]

I'm failing to find anything to backup my previous claim, so I guess I was mixing actual developers' claims with speculation or something like that.

On a completely different (but interesting) thing, while searching I found this:

https://github.com/eMir-server/eMir/wiki/Announcing-eMir

[Luke]

Tablet and desktop needs are totally different

I swear all these hate mongering Ubuntu h8rs are so friggin' stupid. Who the hell said that "Canonical wants to be paid"? If that's the case then Linux Mint has been leeching off of Ubuntu for so long I'm surprised that they haven't been sued over it since 2006.



If Canonical kept the same difference in a dominant form of a freakin' desktop that's universally better than the traditional way, then we would have absolutely NO reason for Linux Mint to exist. Ubuntu is more popular than ever btw. China's pretty much got an Ubuntu phone in production at the moment.

By the way, try using Linux Mint or Debian on a tablet, then tell me how much Unity sucks. "Oooo big icons, must be for a tablet!" Such a sad mentality that the majority of the world has these days. So far Windows 8 is the ONLY contendor that exceeds the requirements of a tablet interface, since it's Modern interface is much more than just having big friggin' icons..

Unity is a tablet interface. It's good for those using a touchscreen/small device. If you want to know what many end users with prior computer experience think of tablet UI's with mouse and keyboard, look at the awful receptions that greeted gnome-shell, Unity, and Windows 8/Modern one after another. Windows is worst off as they offer no other DE's, only start menu hacks.

A touchscreen on a large desktop, BTW, has already earned a reputation for causing overuse injuries to the elbow. On a desktop with a keyboard and mouse, or a laptop without a touch screen, any tablet interface will slow things down. The one thing the Windoze crew got right was the keyboard/mouse interface in Win95, a huge improvement on Crapple's version. Only the addition of multiple desktops has really been a functional improvement on that so far as the workflow is concerned. For desktops and large/medium laptops, a new UI is a reinvention of the wheel. It does have one use there: making such machines usable to those whose initial computing experience is on phones/tablets and who never used a Win95 interface. They would work faster on big machines if they learned the big machine UI, but possibly only after a year or more of adaptation to it.

Unfortunately Windows 8 can't be used for any purpose where data security is an issue(for the usual reasons), no matter what the UI.

If I were going to set up a tablet for use standing up, I would probably use a hacked version of Unity, configured to keep online and offline functions strictly separate, block all Ubuntu's ads, and block all tracking functions. The big problem would be getting a tablet free of vender-installed malicious firmware. Certainly it could not come from any cell service provider, and it would have to be totally unlockable.

Another UI option for it would be to start with any light display server, many desktops, but put only program launchers for related programs on each one. Take the normal menus, etc out of the picture. The "all other apps" could just be a link to /usr/share/applications. The tray would be a mess, some custom tray that fullscreens when tapped would be needed,

A hacked gnome-shell could be adapted, having it boot to the overlay with the menu showing and not the desktops. Only problem is this: both Shell and Unity are snails on Atom netbooks, as are all their forks when using x11 as the backend. ARM devices-even with 4 cores, are even slower. I saw one comparison of some ARM proc running at almost 1GHZ (unknown core count) really only being equivalent to a 233 MHZ Pentium 3 for CPU compute power. Software needs to be really light and fast to work on them!

Unless Wayland and Mir become much faster than compositing X on small devices, tablets and phones will have continue to have real performance issues. That's why the first ubuntu phones used Android's "surfaceflinger" display server. I suppose a nonaccelerated X could be used with a QT-based Unity 2d fork, but all those tablets and phones were intended from the start for accelerated graphics.

[Onuca_V]

Why somebody would risk to deal with Canonical in any way possible when you have Debian as an option? Why would Valve do it? I think there are no specific reasons, just potential, mostly avoidable, ones.

[gerddie]

yeah

I'm really glad they went with Debian.
The only downside is that Debian stable is only supported for 3 years. By the time SteamOS becomes stable, they'll only get another 1 year of support from their upstream. Of course, they can do the work themselves, but if they'd gone w/ Ubuntu LTS, they'd have 5 years.

The good thing with Linux distribution is that there is usually no need to do a reinstall from scratch (unless you get owned, of course), Debian can always be upgraded cleanly from one release to the next (and so can Ubuntu LST), which means the release cycle is a minor issue, as long as it is not too short.

Besides, I think regarding Debian and SteamOS the situation is a bit different: When I tried to install Steam on a Wheezy Debian installation, glibc was too old, therefore I suspect that SteamOS is currently based on Jessie (i.e. Debian testing). Jessie will go into freeze by the end of the year, and become the new stable about six month later or so, which would mean if SteamOS sticks to Jessie they will have get the maximum support time, and then Valve could pick up the approx two year Debian release cycle for the base system and pull the latest drivers from testing (if needed for new hardware).

Considering how often the Steam client is updated, five years of support are simply not needed, and as for the games: I still can run games from Loki - just checked, civctp last patched in 2000 still runs on an up-to-date multilib Gentoo installation - which shows that backwards compatibility is also very well handled within Linux.

just my 0.02?

[GreatEmerald]

Unity is a tablet interface. It's good for those using a touchscreen/small device.

No it's not. I tried to use it on my tablet. It was absolutely terrible. For instance, you can't use any scrollbars at all (since they are one pixel in size and you can't hover with your fingers). Also, the 3D requirement meant that it was dog slow.

On the other hand, Plasma Active is a tablet interface and is good for use with a touchscreen. There all programs run in fullscreen, there is an application bar and the main menu at the top (slid down), a desktop wheel instead of buttons for switching desktops etc. I wouldn't really consider using any other UI other than Plasma Active on tablets (at least those that lack a stylus) at this point.

[mrugiero]

The one thing the Windoze crew got right was the keyboard/mouse interface in Win95, a huge improvement on Crapple's version. Only the addition of multiple desktops has really been a functional improvement on that so far as the workflow is concerned.

There are some other minor improvements to productivity, too.
For example, making shortcuts to frequently used applications, or having a search function incorporated in the application menu.

That is highly disturbing. Do you have a source?

Did a final review, found the G+ posts I thought maybe contained such statement and it's not there, so, if anyone else remembers that and was smart enough to bookmark it, I invite them to post it here. Otherwise, the safest bet will be to assume my mind played games with me.

[Luke]

I've never used nor seen Plasma Active

No it's not. I tried to use it on my tablet. It was absolutely terrible. For instance, you can't use any scrollbars at all (since they are one pixel in size and you can't hover with your fingers). Also, the 3D requirement meant that it was dog slow.

On the other hand, Plasma Active is a tablet interface and is good for use with a touchscreen. There all programs run in fullscreen, there is an application bar and the main menu at the top (slid down), a desktop wheel instead of buttons for switching desktops etc. I wouldn't really consider using any other UI other than Plasma Active on tablets (at least those that lack a stylus) at this point.

Nobody can follow all possible DE's, but it seems you have found a better one for the tablet job. I've never had a tablet or smartphone due to trust issues and the fact that I would never use cloud servers to do what I can do locally.. If Unity is no good for tablets, and no good for desktop users with previous computer experience, that only leave those new to computing entirely, a group known to like Unity and for whom it is often recommended.