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.
  • Fubarberry@sopuli.xyzMEnglish
    2·
    1 hour ago

    For 2, there are ways to install packages without messing with the read only file system. Easiest ways are using nix packages or using distrobox to install non-flatpak software.

    So for the linked aur PWA package you provided, you could create an arch linux distrobox, enter it, install yay (or another aur helper), install firefox and your pwa package, and then use the distrobox-export --app <package> command to make the installed software directly runnable from the desktop.