Ever since Valve announced Steam OS last year one small detail has left many in the Linux community a little confused: why is the gaming OS based on Debian rather than Ubuntu?



From OMG! Ubuntu:

Speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2014 Gabe Newell, Valve’s co-founder and managing director, is reported to have blamed “legal issues”. German tech site Heise.de explain (via Google Translate):

Steam OS itself is still a big construction site. This is mainly due to the fact that you have a very late change [in] the underlying distribution. Originally Ubuntu was provided as a basis, but because of legal issues were unclear to some additional components to be switched just before just to Debian. There you have some need to program yourself what Ubuntu would have already had it.

Precisely what the legal issue was, he’s not saying.

  Legal Issues Made Valve Swap Ubuntu for Debian in SteamOS