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Under the Hood of SteamOS
jones_supa writes "SteamOS has been further inspected to see what kind of technical solutions it uses. The Debian-based OS uses Linux 3.10, shipping with a heap of patches applied, with the most focus being on real-time-like features. The kernel is also using aufs and they seem to be sitting on some bug fixes for upstream on top of that. The kernel is not using the new Intel P-State driver, with the reported reason being, 'it causes issues with sound being choppy during BigPicture trailer video playback.' SteamOS is using SysVinit as its init system. The desktop is backed by X.Org server 1.12.4 and a custom desktop compositor which seems to be a 4,200-line patch on xcompmgr. Catalyst and Mesa components can be found on the system, but so far only NVIDIA is officially supported. The system boots into Big Picture Mode, but the user can drop into a GNOME desktop. Responsible for a great deal of the kernel changes, SteamOS compositor work, and other SteamOS code is Pierre-Loup A. Griffais, a.k.a. 'Plagman'. He was a NVIDIA employee dealing with their Linux support. Another Valve employee doing lots of the SteamOS system-level work is John Vert, who up until last year was a Microsoft employee since 1991. There's also other former Microsoft employees on Valve's Linux team, like Mike Sartain."
Forking/Fragmenting is good when it solves a problem. Not when the differences are between using different conventions.
So... "A Linux-based gaming console" is a problem best solved by stock Ubuntu/Debian, rather than fine-tuning aspects of the OS to handle gaming demands that a desktop or server machine doesn't have? What are you getting at? Of course you fork something if you have a new use case.
Seriously, the iThingamajig audience has already taught me to hear "fragmentation" in the same tone of voice and significance as a Fox News pundit saying "destroying America" (voice: "whiny, desperate, and entitled"; significance: "zero"). You're not helping.
They are not fragmenting, they are deriving. As long as they offer their patches back to Debian or the upstream from there, everything is fine.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.