With PC games, at least in my humble experience, you pretty much always need the latest drivers to run things well (especially so on Linux). With AAA games you will likely need to download several different driver updates within the first month to make it play reasonably well.
My understanding of Arch, is that it's more focused on providing systems which are more up-to-date/current than strictly "stable." [1] This is a pretty big advantage for Valve/Steam/Gamers since its less likely they'll be stuck having to back-port a sea of changes to a dying, but stable, LTS version. Instead they'll be on a platform with a community that prioritizes it. In all honesty, it'll probably make for a more reliable/stable gaming experience since patches will be easier/quicker to ship.
[1] Just to note, I'm not saying Arch is unstable in case someone reads it as that. I honestly was thinking of giving it a go this weekend (currently on a Debian based system), and this is probably the kick I needed to do it.
Historically, this is AWFUL for gaming on Linux, since NVidia is a terrible company which takes forever to get their drivers working on/with new features (Wayland, kernel modesetting, new kernel versions at all for a long time). You seem to be taking a lot of assumptions about what gamers want/need on Windows and cross-applying it.
Steam (via Proton, mostly) already does a lot of development work, and it doesn't care which distro it's on. "Oh no, I updated my kernel and now my graphics drivers don't load at all!" is incredibly common, even with DKMS. Sometimes (mostly) bugs get fixed in Mesa or whatever. Often, new subtle bugs are introduced when a new Wayland/Pipewire/whatever feature goes GA. Having as few moving pieces as possible (by using an LTS distro, or at least something which isn't rolling with upstream and has a modicum of QA) lets you optimize the pieces you need to without worrying that this or that API is going to change underneath you.
Intel and AMD drivers do not have this issue, and Valve was smart enough to not go with NVIDIA, but "I want to be up to date" is a terrible experience.
Additionally, it generally makes for a much less reliable/stable experience (gaming or otherwise) because `pacman -Syu` may at any point break something because you didn't read the release notes, or "mostly" stable features were committed upstream then released so the userbase can put them through their paces and report bugs the developers didn't encounter.
Users of Arch/Fedora Rawhide/whatever accept this, but someone who buys an OEM gaming machine does not need or want this.
Just to note, I AM saying that Arch is unstable. I've been using Linux for 20 years, and I've had my time with Gentoo and Arch. 99% of the tinkering users do is reproducing the work of professional developers at distro vendors who spend a lot of time and effort making sure you never encounter the problems Arch users revel in fixing at all. Sure, you can tell yourself that means you "know" more about the system. But that is time invested that you could have spent doing REAL THINGS, and solving REAL PROBLEMS which are not un-breaking your distro.
> Historically, this is AWFUL for gaming on Linux, since NVidia is a terrible company which takes forever to get their drivers working on/with new features
Historically, sure, but with the leaps and bounds Intel and AMD graphics drivers have made (in no small part thanks to Valve!), we can leave Nvidia in the dust. With said FOSS drivers, "I want to be up to date" is a perfectly reasonable desire and does indeed get the best results as far as gaming goes.
That said, I agree that Arch wouldn't be my first choice for something I'd expect non-technical users to maintain. If Valve really wants a rolling release and close-to-cutting-edge kernel/driver versions, distros like openSUSE Tumbleweed could readily do that (with, at worst, an extra repo for bleeding-edge kernels, though I've yet to find that necessary on my openSUSE-running gaming laptop) without anything even vaguely resembling Arch's maintainability nightmare.
> Sure, you can tell yourself that means you "know" more about the system. But that is time invested that you could have spent doing REAL THINGS, and solving REAL PROBLEMS which are not un-breaking your distro.
You can start a sysadmin career with that kind of experience.
I very recently (last week) applied some of the "how do I unbreak my system" lessons I learned from back when I was a teenager messing around with AMD's old proprietary fglrx drivers (and screwing things up on my personal machine) to "how do I get back into my work Linux machine after the Active Directory sync got hosed and my login credentials failed?"
Not necessarily on Arch specifically, mind you, but a ton of the experience I had that led to me getting my first tech job was breaking stuff and then figuring out how I broke it. It's a great learning experience.
But in this specific case, Valve doesn't need to worry about driver support, since they control the hardware? Unless they mean it to be a general purpose distro that people use on other hardware as well, maybe.
Like the word "free" in free software (freedom vs. free of cost), many folks misunderstand the usage of the word "stable" in regards to computers and technology.
For the uninitiated; In programming, "stable" often refers to the programming interface or features a software developer can count on being available for a particular version of a given piece of code (library, server, etc). To the end user, "stable" often is taken to mean "How often does it crash? Rarely or never? It's stable."
With PC games, at least in my humble experience, you pretty much always need the latest drivers to run things well (especially so on Linux). With AAA games you will likely need to download several different driver updates within the first month to make it play reasonably well.
My understanding of Arch, is that it's more focused on providing systems which are more up-to-date/current than strictly "stable." [1] This is a pretty big advantage for Valve/Steam/Gamers since its less likely they'll be stuck having to back-port a sea of changes to a dying, but stable, LTS version. Instead they'll be on a platform with a community that prioritizes it. In all honesty, it'll probably make for a more reliable/stable gaming experience since patches will be easier/quicker to ship.
[1] Just to note, I'm not saying Arch is unstable in case someone reads it as that. I honestly was thinking of giving it a go this weekend (currently on a Debian based system), and this is probably the kick I needed to do it.