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Bypass Read Only

In SteamOS, /usr is read-only by default, so binaries of packages installed by pacman cannot be placed in /usr/bin.

To solve this problem, you can run steamos-readonly disable. However, packages installed under /usr with read-only disabled will be deleted when SteamOS is updated.

This page introduces a method to manage packages considering the SteamOS specification.

Flatpak​

Flatpak is the officially recommended method of installing packages.

If the application you need is distributed by Flatpak, you should use this method.

For example, you can see the packages I installed from Flatpak on my Steam Deck here.

If you want to check if a package you want is available, you can search for it in the Flathub or run flatpak search application.

Remotes​

By default, only Flathub is added to the repository list, and you need to run flatpak remote-add name *.flatpakrepo to add other repositories.

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists \
  fedora oci+https://registry.fedoraproject.org
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists \
  gnome-nightly https://nightly.gnome.org/gnome-nightly.flatpakrepo
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists \
  kdeapps https://distribute.kde.org/kdeapps.flatpakrepo
  • Flatpak beta
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists \
  flatpak-beta https://flathub.org/beta-repo/flathub-beta.flatpakrepo

Flatpak Remotes Other Than Flathub? - reddit

Create Alternative Root in /home/deck​

The next method is to install packages in an arbitrary directory.

Flatpak is a very easy-to-use package manager, but if you are familiar to pacman or aur-helper, you may be inconvenienced by the small number of packages.

If you want to use an application that is only available in pacman repository, you can use -r option.

For the first time, run the following commands.

mkdir -p /home/deck/root/var/lib/pacman
sudo pacman -Sy -r /home/deck/root

This will create a database of packages under ~/root/var/lib/pacman.

After that, you can save binaries in ~/root/usr/bin by specifying -r /home/deck/root each time you install a package.

sudo pacman -S -r /home/deck/root application

You can run the package by adding ~/root/usr/bin to your PATH.

You can also make ~/.local as root, since ~/.local/bin is often already added to the PATH.

However, if any executable files already exist in ~/.local/bin, the installation of the filesystem package will fail. (This is because /bin is a symbolic link to /usr/bin.)

Build packages on your own​

Needless to write...