I am having a bit of a brain freeze here but I would like to install pandoc but I don’t want to disable the default steam deck settings to do so even though using pacman on the command line would be way simpler I don’t want to fiddle if I don’t have to fiddle.
Can I not just download a binary and point Linux towards it? I know this is a silly question but frustratingly I am more familiar with how you are supposed to do this on windows with the $home variable nonsense.
Just use pacman, it’s fine, and less fiddly than manually installing a binary to your PATH
Will disabling the read only system access mess up updates on my Steam Deck?
No, but anything you change will be undone by the next update. Better to use something like distrobox, that’s stored in the home directory.
You could theoretically download a binary, but you run into the chance of it being compiled against different versions of libraries than on the Steam Deck’s system. A statically linked binary would fix that particular issue, though.
I just accept that the occasional OS update will uninstall my few pacman programs. When that happens, I run a simple script to reinstall them.