Steam Hardware

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Any desktop-mode tips for a new Steam Deck owner? (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) by NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de to c/steamdeck@sopuli.xyz

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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 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?
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.

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[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 12 hours ago

Thanks, awesome answers all around!

Regarding another distro, I do use CachyOS on my desktop so that's definitely an option, but for the time being I want to give SteamOS a fair shot before I go and install a different OS on it. There's every chance I'll cave and install CachyOS within a month or two.

Don’t bother messing with the system files if possible. Try to use an AppImage or Flatpak instead, [..]

Yes, definitely; I was going to do that anyway. There are only a few corner-cases, like the PWAs For Firefox that I linked in the OP, where this isn't possible or might require a lot more fiddling than I prefer. But in almost all cases, I can work with Flatpaks, AppImages, or through a web browser.

Thanks for answering, I was honestly not sure I'd get much good info here but you proved me dead wrong :)