I recently bought a Steam Deck and I have a lapdock on the way, intending to use the Deck as a dual-purpose gaming handheld and laptop replacement. So on that front, I was wondering what more experienced users could tell me about using it.

I did read through the official FAQ, and a few questions pop up. In no particular order:

  1. Is there a way to boot the Steam Deck directly into desktop mode, without going through the Steam environment first? (Strictly as a time saver)
  2. In practice, how well does sudo steamos-readonly disable and installing things from pacman work out for you? In particular, I want to use PWAs For Firefox and it requires this package in order to work. Do packages actually get wiped with SteamOS updates, as the FAQ warns?
  3. Is it possible to re-enable the read-only filesystem after installing a package, to safeguard it from accidental changes?
  4. Any other tips, tricks or warnings you'd like to share.
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[–] 5 points 5 months ago (3 children)

I am speaking from Bazzite experience so it might be slightly different, but I wouldn't do #2. What I would do is install distrobox (pre installed on Bazzite, with boxbuddy for gui), create an Arch distrobox, and use that to access AUR.

If you want to install a package, you layer it using rpm-ostree. Don't fuck with the immutability imo

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  • [+] 3 points 5 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (2 children)

    Ah, so it is. Quick Google search tells me that layering packages isn't even supported on SteamOS, which seems weird to me.

    So I'm guessing pacman doesn't work properly since it's immutable... What are your options besides flatpak and distrobox?

    Huh.

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  • [+] 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    Rpm-ostree isn't really a traditional package manager (that would be pacman, which SteamOS does apparently have even though it presumably doesn't work correctly).

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