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Valve Releases Debian-Based SteamOS Beta
An anonymous reader writes that, as promised, "Valve has put out their first SteamOS Linux operating system beta. SteamOS 1.0 'Alchemist' Beta is forked from Debian Wheezy and features its own graphics compositor along with other changes. Right now SteamOS 1.0 is only compatible with NVIDIA graphics cards and uses NVIDIA's closed-source Linux driver. SteamOS can be downloaded from here, but the server seems to be offline under the pressure."
An alternate submission links to another article about the use of a Debian base system as well as an unofficial torrent.
The one distro to rule them all!
When will the clods learn... need to share something big to a lot of people? TORRENT!
No love for Radeon :(
Seeing as i cream my pants every time Valve announces something, it is now time for some new underwear.
At least it isn't like the time I got an auto-reply to my job application at Valve. Sure, they didn't end up hiring me into their utopia, but if you ask me one shitty bed is a fair price to pay at heroin-like bliss.
Isn't it specifically designed for a specific system that specifies a specific model of nVidia graphics controller?
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
UEFI boot support is in the list of HW requirements, which I've managed to avoid so far. There's no mention of TPM but maybe that's the reason?
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
Or maybe nVidia had more engineers to spare to support Valve, what with AMD being busy with the XBone/PS4 launch and all.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It seems like since this is only in beta, its a little early to start making the accusations that they wont support ati. Wait till they actually release the full version.
Maybe they underestimated the demand for their Beta. People seem to be going nuts over it.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Probably because Nvidia was shamed into better supporting Linux before AMD? Because Nvidia has been working better with Valve on this project? Because the optimization for those AMD cards isn't done?
Had you been paying attention, even in the slightest, in the past few months, you would have known what has been going on and what the plan is for SteamOS. Perhaps you should actually do some reading on it instead of just saying that Valve is "screwing a large group of people."
Beta is beta. they've said before they intend to support AMD, but the first gen of hardware is all nVIDIA.
Valve said people should wait a bit before trying the OS anyway, so no surprise here even if they did plan on a release of SteamOS on Steam.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Seeing as 53% of Steam users rely on nVidia hardware and AMD's typically shitty driver situation, it's no big surprise that they're proritizing nVidia machinery first. Once AMD grows up, presents some decent drivers, and puts on their big boy pants, I'm sure Valve will be more than happy to include their drivers as a part of the system.
The Amarri pray for god, the Caldari pray for profit. the Gallente pray for peace, but the Minmatar pray their ships hol
The Catalyst and Mesa drivers are present on the system, but SteamOS Beta 1 is being advertised as NVIDIA-only.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTU0MzY
Although Debian is not one of my desktop distros (which are Gentoo and NixOS), I recognize that it has become the most reliable and best supported distro with the largest community and the most respected pedigree. It's also the most common base or parent for other distros like Ubuntu, so clearly it has the largest slice of the pie. And here's a little secret that is no secret: it just works.
I use it occasionally on little ARM boards like the awesome BeagleBone Black, where you have to overwrite the pile of junk Angstrom distro that comes on the board out of the box. Debian is totally painless and just works in that role. If you need a replacement distro that you can depend on, Debian never disappoints.
It's the "distro franca" of Linux, the GOTO choice for those who don't like pain.
They probably don't want to hear any square pegs complaining that they only get 2 fps out of the AMD drivers.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
At this time, nVidia is trying to go it more alone, while ATI is closely coupling itself to Microsoft and Sony.
It's turned out well for nVidia so far, but the reason they can't give us driver sources like they're doing with Tegra is that they got too far into bed with Microsoft...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Not required, supported. The list is supported hardware. I would assume standard BIOS is supported as well but they wanted to point out that newer UEFI only boards are also supported.
Seems you got modded up, despite being WRONG. UEFI booting is required for the installer, which is why UEFI Support was listed as a hardware requirement in the FAQ you looked at. The requirement is also mentioned further down in the FAQ. Also reference:
http://store.steampowered.com/steamos/buildyourown.
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamuniverse/discussions/1/648814395741989999/
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/12/valve-releases-steamos-beta-early-build-your-own-system-requirements/
One benefit to this is that people won't be trying to install this on an old piece of crap and then complaining it's slow.
No.
Is this some sort of hipster, Ruby on Rails, hyper-ironic moderation or something?
Where the hell did that come from?
and Intel's hardware just isn't sufficient for gaming
An Anandtech review points out that the integrated GPU in Ivy Bridge (previous generation Intel Core) runs Skyrim playably: 46 fps at 720p. From what I've read about the PS3 port of Skyrim, the PS3 doesn't do much better. And because indie PC games tend to be lower budget, they also tend to be lower detail, which means they just might work on Intel.
AMD's typically shitty driver situation, it's no big surprise that they're proritizing nVidia machinery first. Once AMD grows up, presents some decent drivers, and puts on their big boy pants, I'm sure Valve will be more than happy to include their drivers as a part of the system.
Wait. Were you using the same nvidia drivers that I was using among others for the last year, where it was fubared, beyond fubared. And got so bad at one point, that the drivers were causing hard locks across all 400-500-600 series cards. And to top it off, made a shit mess causing massive crashes, again across the board all the while claiming it was "on the users end" until it finally got so bad that they were offering to pay anyone in the continental US to have their rigs shipped to California so they could test them. There's a very good reason why a lot of people have switched to AMD in the last 6 months.
Om, nomnomnom...
One benefit to this is that people won't be trying to install this on an old piece of crap and then complaining it's slow.
But wouldn't it be harder to boot from USB on a UEFI system? Most UEFI systems that I'm aware of default to Secure Boot with Microsoft keys. On the other hand, I guess people smart enough for beta are smart enough to figure out how to go into UEFI configuration and turn off Secure Boot.
He's probably referring to how the modding at sites like Digg and reddit went to hell after the hipsters (many of whom are also Ruby on Railers) showed up. Utterly stupid shit ends up getting modded highly by these people, and sensible content is modded down. Pretty much like we are seeing in this very thread, in fact!
Secure boot was only recently added in v2.2.
And every (non-Apple) x86-64 PC and PC motherboard since the release of Windows 8 has shipped with Secure Boot.
10s if not 100s of millions of shipped systems predate that by many years such as every Intel Mac, Itanium systems from both Intel and HP, etc.
I thought Intel Macs were just EFI, not UEFI. And according to the FAQ, this distro is designed for x86-64, not Itanium. I understand Windows 7 Service Pack 1 for x86-64 supports UEFI, but did most Windows 7 PCs come with UEFI pre-2.2, or did they come with legacy BIOS?
Nah, Digg and Reddit were generally fine until about mid 2008 or so. That's when the Ruby/Mac/iPhone/Web 2.0/"hipster" fanaticism went mainstream, and flooded those sites and others with idiocy that remains to this day. Their communities were actually decent for a few years prior to then, since they were mostly made up of people with university-level education, and some sort of a technical or scientific background. Nowadays, these good people are massively outnumbered by those with a more useless background (like the social "sciences"), those who never even made it to university in the first place, the chronically unemployable, and the social rejects you see working the counters at coffee shops.
I think not - I may be wrong, but the last time I tried to use a proprietary ATI driver under Xorg it tended to have a lot of bugs - like for example, my resolution had to be a multiple of 16 or 32 (can't remember which) in order to enable anti-aliasing.
It's that kind of shit that made me look for a nvidia card on all my new laptops and desktops in the future - nvidia might not opensource their drivers, but at least they work under xorg, and they also offer proper CUDA support for the same (used it for mining LTC at the time).
Then again, I had a surprise with my latest laptop - it uses Optimus: a "new technology" that includes an on-motherboard intel chipset for common graphics as well as a real nvidia GPU for gaming, the later being used only for graphics-intensive stuff. Sounds like a good idea (especially for battery consumption), but almost no official support for Linux systems. Thanks christ for Bumblebee (http://bumblebee-project.org/) - an attempt at Linux support for Optimus. It requires you to run games and the likes through a wrapper that runs a separate framebuffer using the GPU while running an intel-based Xorg. It works pretty well, but still, it's more a hack than a real support for Optimus.
His first sentence is all about ejaculating uncontrollably into his own clothing, somehow because of video games. Interesting, perhaps, but it surely is not insightful.
Actually, his first sentence makes a cognitive leap from observing an involuntary visceral reaction to the Valve branding, to concluding that it is now time for some new underwear. An average slashdot moderator is not in the habit of thinking this far ahead.
You are screwing a large group of people
That large group of people are the ones at fault here.
AMD/ATI has never attempted to even approach NVidia's commitment to make hardware run well with Linux. Yet you people keep buying their hardware. The small cost savings of AMD has always been enough to get even regular Linux desktop users to buy their stuff despite their chronic indifference to anything other than Windows.
The best thing that could possibly happen at this point is for gamers to ignore people like you and buy Steambox compatible hardware, meaning not AMD, in large quantities. Then, maybe, at long last, at least fifteen years too late, that fucking company will finally step up and deal with the problem.
Linus not withstanding, NVidia has provided me with up-to-date, stable, performant Linux drivers for their hardware without fail for almost twenty years. Recently, NVidia has invested even more effort and collaborated with Valve to capture the Steambox platform. If this Debian based, open gaming platform succeeds we all have NVidia to thank. NVidia has EARNED this outcome, and people like you, with your sad-sack AMD crap need to reconsider your behavior.
But you won't. Nope. Instead, you'll download Steambox and try to run it on your Windows-only video hardware, watch it catch on fire and the bitch up a fucking storm all over the Internets about how Steambox is a giant POS.
If Steambox succeeds it will have to be despite you god damned AMD buyers, as always.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Nvidia's got their own driver shittiness. Their drivers take friggin' forever to install on my system. Hybrid hard drive, i7-3930k, 16 gigs of DDR3-2133 in quad channel, dual GTX680 video cards. I started the installation of the latest GeForce experience and R331 game ready driver just about 3 hours ago. About 2 hours of solid grind for no reason I can figure and then an hour or so where everything looks idle and the progress bar doesn't move. Based on experience, I assume it will finish eventually if I let it keep going.
It's ridiculous and it's been an Nvidia problem for quite a while. I can't even remember the last time I had an Nvidia display driver installation that took less than an hour.
You're trying too hard.
Yes. Start visiting another site. The very first comments when the beta went live were about how shitty and wasteful the layout was. No one cared, obviously. Now that Slashdot is throwing the last positive thing it had left in the shitter, it's time to start phasing it out.
Imagine if they had chosen Shuttleworth's os. Now they still support his os, but also many more, apart from itself.
Hail Debian, the mothership.
If Steambox succeeds it will have to be despite you god damned AMD buyers, as always.
Oh, but haven't you heard? AMD are the good guys now because they occasionally trickle out some of the information you need to make a half-assed open source video driver which supports some of their older cards.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Okay, so I just drivers for my 7950GT installed on one machine, then went to the other one and reinstalled the latest drivers for the GTX460. Both times, the cards installed in less than 5 minutes. Both AMD-CPU systems, far slower (one's a dual-core 4850e out of an Acer, the other an Athlon X4 620. Both 4GB RAM.)
You've got something configured incorrectly or your operating system is fucking swiss cheese and you need a fresh install.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Because those using Steam already have Big Picture, which is essentially SteamOS, but not Linux. What's the point of letting you download the OS through Steam when all of the essential functions exist within Steam itself?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
They might get in trouble for shipping the proprietary Nvidia drivers if it is shipped together with the Linux kernel which is GPL.
Bullcrap. The drivers have to compile a module. THE MODULE is not a part of the kernel, it is called by the kernel. OpenGL is the reason why the driver includes binary blobs in the modules that do not include source code, unfortunately OpenGL is not really open it is controlled by a trumped up consortium much the same as the MPGLA model. You cannot legally disclose the software api source but you can use it under license. The OpenGL is overseen by the hardware companies that design and make the chips, Microsoft has a hand in it and also releases hardware acceleration for chipsets within the Windows system files called DirectX.
DirectX does not so much compete with OpenGL, rather it sleeps in the same bed. Nvidia has lately been given a rather frosty pist from Microsoft because they have had too much of a smooch session going on with Android and have also made inroads into peoples living rooms on other devices with tegra based graphics used in other devices with the Linux kernel.
All the while the PC gaming market has been torpedoed by Microsoft with the release of an etch-a-sketch OS with lousy high end graphic support called Windows8. Because it is absolute shit for PC gaming, much the same as Vista and the early Win7 OS was.
Nvidia and Valve seeing an opening with high end gaming, has started to experiment with the SteamOS project with a networked gaming system which will not be dependent upon Microsoft's software or OSes whatsoever. Whether or not this will fly is very problematic as the market for high end graphics cards is currently in the tank, so it is a shot in the dark. Seeing that the market for custom made gaming computers is limited and the hardware for them will only become more and more scarce and expensive.
It has always been the case that gaming and advanced graphics, though supported under Linux rely upon the whim of the manufactures to actually work with proprietary libraries like the not so OpenGL. Same thing applies to using the advanced features in software like Google Earth, you can run it in emulation without hardware acceleration but it sucks unless you have the proprietary drivers installed in Linux. Here in the world of Linux we suck on the hind teats and are forced to accept the fact that not every piece of hardware is open source friendly or can be made that way. Same thing would happen if Steinberg's Asio audio API were ever to be ported to Linux, it would be a game changer in professional audio and Microsoft and Apple both know this and actively prevent it from happening. So for realtime audio, advanced graphics and other high end features Linux is very much a non starter because it has deliberately been prevented from coming to the table by the big players.
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
The "distro franca" in 1994 was Slackware. All distros was a relative pain (and lots of floppies) to install in 1994, but Slackware was the clear leader.
Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that ATI drivers for linux have ALWAYS been terrible.
Linus not withstanding, NVidia has provided me with up-to-date, stable, performant Linux drivers for their hardware without fail for almost twenty years. Recently, NVidia has invested even more effort and collaborated with Valve to capture the Steambox platform. If this Debian based, open gaming platform succeeds we all have NVidia to thank. NVidia has EARNED this outcome, and people like you, with your sad-sack AMD crap need to reconsider your behavior.
Not that I disagree, mostly; I've been spared the most of the horrors of the proprietary NVidia driver I keep reading about, it's been mostly fine. However, one word rebuttal to your argument: "Optimus". (yes, I know, bumblebee, have it installed. it's still a hack)
The other poster covered everything but also:
Not if they just asked nVidia. nVidia own that code and if they wanted to make an exception just for Valve, they can do. And given how closely they have been working together lately, and how beneficial it would be, it would be stupid not to.
It would take about ten minutes to make a "unless it's being distributed as part of a SteamOS installation" disclaimer and throw it into a licence agreement (new or old).
It is the distro with the best cutting-edge version
You had me almost sold there.
But it is enough of a restriction that you have to be aware of your hardware limits when purchasing games.
Which is where an online store like Google Play Store or Steam has an advantage over box sales: it can check your machine against the system requirements and hide the Buy Now button.
Skyrim, incidentally, is not a very good example. It scales rather well to low-end hardware
Then games that scale better to low-end hardware will end up with more sales to people with low-end hardware. Ideally, the same game would be able to produce PS3-class graphics on an Intel system and PS4-class graphics on a stronger system.
Any game made before ~2009 will run just fine on an ivy bridge laptop.
Saying that just days before 2014. Rather like saying pretty much anything made in 2000 will run a game from 1995. ;)
People still enjoy 50-year-old movies. Why is a video game necessarily "expired milk" just because it's five years old?
AMD/ATI has never attempted to even approach NVidia's commitment to make hardware run well with Linux.
Ah, that's why AMD publishes specifications and supports the community implementing free drivers.
I wonder what is in the non-free part of the repositorie!
the CPU along is $329 bucks on Newegg :(. The you need a Motherboard (and if you buy a cheapo you'll take a big performance hit. Then there's RAM, a hard drive, case and power supply, and finally the 'Microsoft tax'
I love the idea of high performance integrated graphics to replace my console, but the trouble Valve is gonna have is the same problem 3DO did. I hadn't noticed it for years, but since Valve isn't making the hardware they're not _subsidizing_ the hardware. Even the PS4/XBone are barely profitable. The cost of decent Intel hardware would have to plummet (or the Tegra 5 would have to be dirt cheap) for this to really work long term...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I bet someone does a re-spin that supports it- it wouldn't be hard since it's Debian derived and in order for it to "work" as they claim, they need OpenGL support- so...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Q: What are the SteamOS Hardware Requirements?
A: NVIDIA graphics card (AMD and Intel graphics support coming soon)
and finally the 'Microsoft tax'
The article is about the lack thereof, unless you're referring to some patent royalty.
Valve is gonna have is the same problem 3DO did.
But not quite so much because the other console makers have caught up in price. The first commercial Steambox will cost $500, the same as an Xbox One. Hopefully by then, Radeon drivers for SteamOS will have caught up.
but since Valve isn't making the hardware they're not _subsidizing_ the hardware.
If an operating system is a component of a computer system, then Valve is subsidizing development of this component.
Who modded this bullshit up?
Hint: check the section labeled "non-free".
lol, obviously fisted is a buntu fanboy, which is a dumbed down version of debian
"ubuntu" is swahili for "i can't configure debian"
Those are all pretty dubious claims... but one thing is for sure... install vanilla debian... and it sure feels like 1994.
The Potato installer was terrible. At that time, Red Hat had a decent installer, and Debian was a masochistics delight. I once figured that it took me a day of interactive time (not counting waits where I did something else) to get Debian up. Red Hat was up in a couple of hours.
The next time I looked, Debian had totally changed their installer, and was better. (I think that was about the time grub was pretty much debugged.)
N.B.: There never was much to choose between Debian and Red Hat on the basic system. Red Hat was better with interfacing to Novell networks, but not hugely.
OTOH, apt-get was far superior to RPM. I'm not certain that it still is, but as I don't like LILO and don't want to prevent my disks from being read by other partitions (SELinux...don't remember the package name), I find Debian preferable, so I haven't kept checking. A few years ago YUM had improved enough that it was nearly comparable to apt-get, especially as one could have a synaptic front-end on either.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Yes. A lot of people care about what Linus says.
Because its beta, and they are trying to eliminate as many non-steamOS bug reports as possible. And NVidia's drivers are WAY, WAY better than AMDs.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
A couple of dodgy NVidia driver versions do not rate the same level of fucktarded-ness as 2 decades of AMD/ATI driver incompetence.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Non hybrid drive here, Windows 8.1 (yes, yes, I'm a masochist and am using it to test shit with), bargain basement haswell CPU (i5-4430), 8 GB of RAM, and the drivers for my GTX760 install in a few minutes like normal. Your computer is borked dude.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Because they can't be arsed putting out a working driver themselves?
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
What way is apt better than yum? Can it do delta downloads? Download multiple packages at the same time?
Wow you're one fanboy. half your claims are wrong.
Ok, negative boy, which half?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
What horrors? (Actually asking. I have not heard of any.)
My experience with the nVidia blob drivers has been entirely positive.
I have had an equal or better experience with the nVidia Linux blob as I have with the Windows blob for ~8 years running. (Okay, I did have to run the installer from the command line way back when.)
In fact, installing the driver is _easier_ on Mint (ergo all Debian-type systems?) than on Windows. Mint may have even come with an up-to-date driver already loaded.
Optimus could be a problem. I don't use dedicated graphics for laptops any more.
ATI, on the other hand, has given me nothing but nightmares. Both open source and blob drivers give terrible experience vs the Windows blob, and I still have issues with the package installs bricking my OS from time to time (pending recovery-mode driver uninstall).
It is the distro with the best packaging system.
While this is mostly a subjective matter, Debian's apt/dpkg is pretty archaic. .debs are nothing but glorified tarballs which get unpacked when installing, (therefore have to be created with fakeroot(1)) to name a random point at which it is inferior to a semi-decent system like Portage you can't use it to install packages from source (unless you use 10 debianisms to build a package beforehands). Searching for something with apt-cache is a joke.
It is the distro with the best variety of packages.
Name one relevant package which isn't available on any relevantt distro.
It is the distro with the best package maintainers.
No. Last time i had the pleasure, the maintainer in question didn't reply for 4 months, finally apologizing for not replying and (redundantly) suggesting i follow up with a patch (which i did 3 months ago, at that time). Guess I'll have to wait another couple months until it finally get applied.
It is the distro with the best release practices.
That is way too vague. Tell me what exactly is 'best' about debian's release practices, and i'll happily show you where it's done better.
It is the distro with the best community.
Vague claim, community is neither the largest nor the smartest. This is pure fanboyism.
It is the distro with the best reliability.
Stupid and wrong piece of uneducated gibberish. What exactly is Debian's role in Linux' or GNU's reliability? How is Debian more reliable than, say, Gentoo? Fanboyism at its finest.
It is the distro with the best stability.
Blah bleh, same as before
It is the distro with the best cutting-edge version.
Meaningless, tell me what exactly is 'best' about it and i happily show you how wrong you are
It is the distro with the best experience in a huge range of usage scenarios.
Can you please get any more vague?
Disclaimer: I'm a BSD person but I'm managing ~150 Debian office boxen at work.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Long ago both nVidia and ATI incorporated patented Microsoft technologies into their GPUs to support DirectX and get their drivers onto the Windows install images. This allowed them to dominate more open competitors who are no longer with us. These core features of their GPUs cannot be documented for the use of OpenGL under NDA. They could create pure OpenGL graphics cards that can have fully open drivers but believe there is no market for it. If the Steambox and SteamOS are fantastically successful it will be proven for them and the chains will be broken. Since Microsoft seems to have chosen a side with AMD, here is nVidia's chance to shine with Team Open. Frankly both were needing to get away from this model anyway because of GPGPU. Open compute is a freaking huge market all by itself and they don't like black box drivers.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Not entirely true. The binary-proprietary firegl ATI driver worked fine back in the days (2003-ish?).
For about half a year or so, better than nVidia, if I remember correct. (And the alternative was VESA...?)
You win. You have convinced me that the post you replied to was a fanboy.
Ok, fair do's.
Now, for extra points, which half of his claims were right. :-)
Watch this Heartland Institute video
A couple of dodgy NVidia driver versions do not rate the same level of fucktarded-ness as 2 decades of AMD/ATI driver incompetence.
A couple of dodgy nvidia driver versions? Uh what? It went on with this, and is still on-going for people. And that's been at least 2 years straight. AMD/ATI and generally nvidia have up/down cycles in their drivers(as a fair point I usually flip-flop every other generation), but even AMD/ATI drivers have been more solid than what nvidia has been pushing out. Before the "forum reset due to it being hacked" there was a single thread with over half a million views, and 170k posts on this one issue.
Om, nomnomnom...
I'm not the OP, but thought I'd correct a few misconceptions you seem to have.
You say that like tarballs are a bad idea. It worked well for Slackware. ;-)
Anyway, more to the point, debs are much more than glorified tarballs. That one deb package file contains control information, which specify version information, dependencies, basic package information, installed size, and much more. It also contains scripts to preinstall, postinstall, preremove, and postremove the package. It really is a one-stop shop when it comes to installing programs under Linux. Other than dependant packages, of course.
You can use apt to install packages from source, but the source code must come from the Debian repository. It needs to contain all the info above, and more. A source install is relatively simple to do. Basic process is "apt-get source package; cd package; debuild -us -uc; dpkg -i ../package.deb". So, that's three "debianisms" to download, build, and then install the package. Not as convenient as Portage, but apt/dpkg was not designed to be a source distribution. It probably could work as one, though. Should be simple enough to create a script which does everything automatically for you. If you want a source distro, then Gentoo is definitely the way to go.
Unsure what you find so funny about apt-cache. I use it regularly to search for packages. It works well for me.
Unsure what you mean by "relevant package" or "relevant distro". I just did a search for a package called "clipit", on packages.gentoo.org. It's a program I like to use to copy between X clipboards, and store a clipboard history. Gentoo doesn't seem to have it. Debian does.
One anecdote does not a conclusion make. I've had some very good experiences when dealing with Debian maintainers. In any case, this is subjective. I'm sure other distributions have some great and enthusiastic maintainers, but Debian ranks highly in my experience.
Not quite. Debian Stable achieves its high reliability by subjecting packages to a good testing period. It suffers jokes from the Linux community for being out of date, but that's what you have to do to achieve that level of reliability. Package maintainers even backport security patches to older package versions, to make sure that they don't install newer package versions on a Stable system.
Debian Testi