So I was thinking, I started playing with the idea of owning a Deck last year, when I was looking at its specs and noticed them to be, at least in theory, on par with the specs of my laptop…
And I kinda had forgotten about this “origin story” until after getting my hands on it a week or so ago, and then I stumbled upon this YT video and saw that I already had left my like there:
Stumbling upon that video triggered forgotten memories =p This was how it all started, how I first got into using Garuda: I wanted to see if I could use an Arch-based distro daily. I started using it in April last year, so almost a year now, and felt no need to go back to Windows ever.
So now that I got my hands on the Deck, and got a 2TB SSD for it, I thought “ok, time to get started”… and then I found out that stuff installed outside flatpak can be erased during SteamOS upgrades, so that’d be a hard no for daily driver.
In addition, anything you install outside of flatpak (via pacman for instance) may be wiped with the next SteamOS update.
I then thought “maybe there’s a way?” and there seem to be some workarounds out there, but the warning on this repo made me wonder about using any of those…
While I will leave this repo here for anyone that wants to use it, I actually personally discourage people from using this.
When creating this I wanted a way to keep changes on my deck persistent, but this is actually a very flawed solution.
This is mostly due to the fact that overlayfs is meant to be used on top of a non-changing RO partition.
After using this for multiple months, I’ve come across multiple issues with my Deck that mostly stem from the fact that if Valve updates something in SteamOS that we previously changed, overlayFS will cause the updated file to be “overwritten” using the old, changed one. YMMV, but for me this led to some functions breaking after using this script over multiple Deck updates.
And so… I thought “what if I try Garuda on it? I’ve been using it for almost a year now, barely had any trouble with games, and the few problems I had using it as a daily driver I got some great help from the forums!”
Then I thought “it’s 2024, the Deck has been around for 2 years now, certainly someone already tried it and shared their experience?” - but the only thing I found (maybe my search skills are in need of sharpening?) was this thread about possible Steam Deck support.
In there, people talk about performance and etc… but that’s not really my worry. My laptop has an NVidia card, and the latest problems I had with Garuda were related to that, which won’t be a problem with Steamdeck’s AMD.
So, this is the idea of this thread, to ask if someone did try to use Steamdeck with Garuda as daily driver, what are their opinions of it?
The idea isn’t using Garuda because it could be better performant than the SteamOS, but if it’s at least as good on the Steamdeck as it is on my laptop (probably better on account of NVidia x AMD) without suffering with the possibility of a wipe from Valve’s updates.
One thing I dunno how Valve does is the Gaming Mode, and I have no idea if that can be reproduced with Garuda… and I remember that trying the Big Picture with my Steam Controller wasn’t such a good experience on the laptop, it’s performance was awful, for example…
