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Arch Linux and Valve Collaboration (lists.archlinux.org)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

218 comments fedilink hide all child comments

We are excited to announce that Arch Linux is entering into a direct collaboration with Valve. Valve is generously providing backing for two critical projects that will have a huge impact on our distribution: a build service infrastructure and a secure signing enclave. By supporting work on a freelance basis for these topics, Valve enables us to work on them without being limited solely by the free time of our volunteers.

This opportunity allows us to address some of the biggest outstanding challenges we have been facing for a while. The collaboration will speed-up the progress that would otherwise take much longer for us to achieve, and will ultimately unblock us from finally pursuing some of our planned endeavors. We are incredibly grateful for Valve to make this possible and for their explicit commitment to help and support Arch Linux.

These projects will follow our usual development and consensus-building workflows. [RFCs] will be created for any wide-ranging changes. Discussions on this mailing list as well as issue, milestone and epic planning in our GitLab will provide transparency and insight into the work. We believe this collaboration will greatly benefit Arch Linux, and are looking forward to share further development on this mailing list as work progresses.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Could you link to the thread? I had a good experience with the forums. It sounds like they locked it to prevent people from sending more bullying comments and suspended everyone.

Most of it is just a bunch of "what if" scenarios that never happened.

The link lists a bunch of things that did happen, along with the thing on partial upgrades, which is guidance on the Arch wiki.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/grub-boot-error-after-update/42928/31

They did not just lock it, they hid it away so that people won't see the trolling from their members - none of which got any punishment as far as I can tell. They were at least still able to write in other places. And given that experience I of course did not follow up with another thread, just to experience the same thing.

The link lists a bunch of things that did happen, along with the thing on partial upgrades, which is guidance on the Arch wiki.

It lists a bunch of inconsequential things when it comes to the distro. The worst were the pamac DDOSing incidents. The SSL certificates of their websites I really don't give a damn about but people then keep saying "yeah but if they are sloppy there then...", without being able to provide examples where the distro was ever affected by it. They also keep arguing about the packaging on the AUR potentially being newer than the ones in Manjaro and thus potentially causing breakage, which is a weak argument - especially with how sloppily a lot of AUR packages are maintained. And if you're super paranoid, just update the AUR when Manjaro updates.

Overall, hating on it feels like it became more of a meme with little substance, fueled by the general entitlement and elitism within the Linux community regarding their favorite distros.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

And given that experience I of course did not follow up with another thread, just to experience the same thing.

If they had commented in the new thread, suspension would be definite. IMO, locking it would be a good choice, since if that user commented on the new thread, they's very likely to be stalking you and have a concrete reason to get punished. I'm sure the only disruptive user got a formal warning.

As for being unable to report, that's because of default policies by Discourse, the forum software used by EOS: You can only flag posts after reading 30 posts across 5 topics for 10 minutes. The Manjaro forums use the same forums and configuration. (Not as in exactly the same, just the same on this front.)

It lists a bunch of inconsequential things when it comes to the distro.

You seem to have skipped over the part about shipping the M1 kernel 3 days after its first demo with bugs. They then PR'd a commit they obviously did not understand to archlinuxarm, a much smaller project unaffilated with ARM, causing breakage. This was in October 2022.

The SSL certificates of their websites I really don't give a damn about but people then keep saying "yeah but if they are sloppy there then...", without being able to provide examples where the distro was ever affected by it.

The SSL certificate expiring means you are not able to connect to Manjaro servers to update anything. No Manjaro packages at all can be upgraded or installed while the SSL certificate's expired. That's pretty big.

And if you're super paranoid, just update the AUR when Manjaro updates.

But when Manjaro gives you updates from two weeks prior, AUR gives you new updates from today.

Holding updates does not make the system more secure

Holding all updates for two weeks is just a dumb design choice:

If the concern is breakages, you'll still get the breakages, just two weeks later.
Arch Linux already holds updates to core packages, to packages with wide impact, and that are expected to risk breakage.
Aforementioned deal with partial upgrades. The 2-week long period pretty much guarantees that AUR packages in need of bumping their library versions will have updated before you receive the library update yourself.

They do have a different testing system now—with a good justification of being quite a different system from Arch—where all updates are pushed to a test branch and errors are caught, supposedly. I say supposedly because that did not stop the AUR being DDOS'd for the 2nd time under the same exact system in 2021.

This is all on top on the fact that Manjaro has officially said that they are not Arch, albeit based on Arch. Though at the end of the day, anyone is of course free to use whatever they wants. Manjaro has done some wonderful work for everyone. It's just I need to wait until at least 2028 to trust it.