- Hold the power button down in the main menu, and select Switch to Desktop
- Click on the deck logo at the bottom left of the screen using the right trackpad (clicking the right trackpad = mouse left click), and go to Settings > System Settings.
(If you can't move the mouse with the right trackpad, holding down the STEAM button forces it to act like a mouse. Open Steam using the shortcut on the desktop, and it should start working normally again. - Scroll down to the Users tab in the Personalization section, and click Change Password to set a root password. The terminal will ask you for it when you input the commands listed below.
- Click the deck logo button again go to System > Konsole. This is the terminal.
- Type the following commands in the terminal:
- sudo steamos-readonly disable
- sudo pacman-key --init
- sudo pacman-key --populate
- sudo pacman -S python-wxpython python-requests python-packaging p7zip xdg-utils sdl2 sdl2_image openal enet libunistring libjpeg libpng libtiff libwebp libvorbis flac mpg123 fluidsynth
- After this, you can download and unzip the linux version of RVGL launcher and run rvgl_launcher.py. I believe it will run off of the deck's SSD but I have only used it off of my SD card.
The deck runs on SteamOS 3.0, which is based off of Arch. Valve has decided to ship the deck with a read-only file system by default, so they can release SteamOS updates as whole OS images. This means that any packages installed via pacman (or any method other than the flatpak system) get wiped after every steamOS update. Therefore, you will have to repeat this process after every update to play.
I have also not had any luck adding it to steam as a non-steam game, so you must go into desktop mode to launch the game. That's not that big of a deal to me personally but I know you lose a bit of the deck's convenience by not having it in the main steamos menu.
If anyone has any questions about the install process, or just the overall experience of playing on the Deck, let me know!
![Image](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/150259287497637888/1000175276988321802/IMG_20220722_175848.jpg)