SteamOS is already nice, but I want to customize the desktop interface exactly the way I want it. I like that SteamOS is based on Arch Linux because I’ve used it before and I liked how I could customize almost anything on my installation. Understandably, the Arch install for SteamOS isn’t a regular installation, so there were some things I needed to troubleshoot.

This is a compilation of a couple tweaks I’ve applied to my Steam Deck, with instructions found from various places on the web with sources listed.

Getting pacman to Work

I wanted to install some custom fonts on my Deck, so I needed to use pacman and also install yay. However, SteamOS protects its system files with read-only permissions to avoid accidentally them up. I need to be able to modify those files to update the keyring and install packages, so I disabled the read-only protection. I found a reddit post (linked below) that explained how to do this.

Originally, I thought that I could get away with only disabling the read-only protection to get pacman working, but it turns out that the pacman keyring is empty. This means that SteamOS has no way to verify the authenticity of its downloaded packages, so I fixed that first. This reddit post by u/awkisopen provided a clear explanation for what to do.

Here’s what I did:

  1. Set a password: 
    passwd
  2. Disable SteamOS read-only protection: 
    sudo steamos-readonly disable
  3. Init pacman keyring: 
    sudo pacman-key --init
  4. Populate the keyring with archlinux keys: 
    sudo pacman-key --populate archlinux
  5. Do the same with the SteamOS holo keys1: 
    sudo pacman-key --populate holo

    If this step doesn’t work, try replacing holo with whatever the codename is for your current SteamOS version.

After I completed the last step, I did pacman -Syu to make sure that everything worked and apply any available updates.

Applying the Font

Coming soon…

Applying Dark Mode

Coming soon…

References

  1. https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/t8al0i/comment/kaf7d91/ ↩