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 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
Apparently distrobox come pre-installed. Also I don’t think there’s any rpm-ostree on steamos, that’s a Fedora Atomic thing.
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.
Well that’s not what the OS is designed for, it’s designed to be simple to update and hard to break. If you really want a traditional package manager then you can just install a different OS, I guess.
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).
Yeah that’s what I meant, if you really want to use pacman or one of the traditional package managers then install another distro
Right… I guess I’m just a little surprised that there isn’t a solution akin to Fedora Atomics’ rpm-ostree.
I’ve not read the details for a few years, but I’d guess there isn’t because there doesn’t need to be for the vast majority of users. Even the few who use desktop mode can manage with flatpaks, the few who can’t can use distrobox, etc.