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:
- 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)
- In practice, how well does
sudo steamos-readonly disableand 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? - Is it possible to re-enable the read-only filesystem after installing a package, to safeguard it from accidental changes?
- Any other tips, tricks or warnings you’d like to share.
I think it would be much less hassle for you to install another OS instead of SteamOS. Like Bazzite. You should be able to configure that to your liking more easily.
Wanted to suggest the same thing.
Bazzite is immutable tho, unless I’m mistaken, so if you’d rather use a mutable distro you can look into CachyOS or DraugrOS.
Bazzite will present a similar experience to SteamOS. They’re both immutable/atomic in the same way, but Bazzite has the ability to persist some system changes via package layering, and
distroboxallows for installing packages in a semi-traditional way.But I agree, if you want a more standard Linux experience, CachyOS and others would be better.
Thanks for the advice. I’ll consider it long-term, but want to stick with SteamOS for now. I gave a more detailed reply to a different comment if you’re interested in reading it.