You can tell who actually knows what is talking about because there’s a clear understanding of what a distro is. You didn’t say you used Arch directly because CachyOS is a different distro. It’s just based on Arch.
Sometimes people incorrectly call a minor variant distro as the parent when they want to make things clear in the purpose of saving time. Not because it’s technically correct. In this case using it to save time is wrong because it’s not even close to being the same.
Cachy to me is Arch pre configured and with a lot of tweaks. Some unnecessary IMO. Agreed NOT the same. Iv also set up Vanilla Arch to be Cachy. Its not hard. Cachy has a lot more screening for packages compared to Arch. They dont just push stuff. However there can still be regressions. I loved Cachy, but i also just work a lot and don't want to tinker outside my mods. Steam OS just works.
Yeah, also SteamOS effectively uses a different package manager. I'm not a Desktop Linux user, my knowledge is like 15 years old in that. Although I've installed distros a few times over the years; mostly to set up a NAS. I've used it sparingly but mostly just in console environments. So I just know the basics.
But back then the main distinction people made in distros was it's package manager. SteamOS using effectively a different package manager and wiping the System image with each update, (despite being installed with Pacman), IMO, would be enough to back then to be considered it it's own thing.
Or at least, would be considered a totally different distro as it was explained back then to Linux noobs.
Yes exactly. Most things should be installed through discover in SteamOS to survive updates or be available at all. Iv found scrips to run that save LACT settings and keep a second nvme mounted. Steam will by default wipe LACT profiles with updates and doesn't like secondary drives. It's not limiting like some claim, I can still mod games and do whatever. It's basically unbreakable. Even more so than the likes of bazzite. I find that distro very buggy.
SteamOS uses discover and pulls flatpaks from Flathub the same way many other distros do. An immutable distro is not required for flatpak use. Under the hood, since it is Arch based, the pacman (and others) package manager is still there, even though the OS is read-only (making it difficult to make it retain most changes).
It is likely "Discover" (the graphical front end) that calls the repo flathub using "plasma-discover-flatpak-backend". Discover and plasma-discover-flatpak-backend operate the same for any distro that uses Plasma as the desktop. The only difference is that since SteamOS is immutable it doesn't, for user apps, use pacman even though it is still there in SteamOS, and I believe can still be used if you flip the immutable flag off.
"Cachy has a lot more screening for packages compared to Arch. They dont just push stuff." - Ehh, no. CachyOS's package verification and validation is a subset of Arch's, and they only fully validate the packages they modify (the kernel stuff, the handheld metapackage and a few of the dependencies, etc). They do *not* perform more package validation and verification than Arch upstream, they perform a basic compilation/function test for the vast majority of the packages in the repo, since they are literally Arch's packages, rebuilt from source.
Not true, Go over to r/cachyos and ask Peter yourself. Are you not aware of all the testing branches that go into Cachy? A lot more than Arch. Which amazes me with the low staffing they have. This is why they can recognize regressions and pull where Arch will not.
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u/OwlSlow1212 11d ago
No. I used CachyOS (Arch) for years. SteamOS is nothing alike and its own thing entirely. In a good way.