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.
Good luck! Incidentally, if you do end up going to CachyOS, I like
webapp-managerfor PWAs; should be in theextraarch repos. I’ve tried a few flatpaks for creating the necessary shortcuts, and I haven’t found one that felt quite as nice. Do go try some, though, because maybe there’s one that works better for you!I forgot to mention. Turns out PWAsForFirefox doesn’t work at all with the Flatpak version of Firefox https://github.com/filips123/PWAsForFirefox/issues/142 so the whole question is moot. The project’s dev seems to be actively involved in making that possible though. I guess I’ll live without nice web-apps on the steam deck for now, it’s not a deal breaker.
Someone said that Distrobox is installed by default, so I’m wondering if you could install Firefox via distrobox and also install PWAsForFirefox to that app in the same container.
I use it on Linux Mint, the biggest issue I have with it is external links:
https://github.com/linuxmint/webapp-manager#how-to-open-links-in-my-main-browser
Really annoying. PWAs For Firefox fixes it, you just gotta change a setting.