Steamdeck Enable Pacman

2025-05-24

I realized I have to search for this every time my Steam Deck is updated. And the first few results are outdated or just broken. So here goes, tested in 2025 with the SteamOS May Update.

Why: I want to use pacman on my steamdeck to install packages that are not otherwise available as flatpaks. You know, like native ruby so I can use the neocities cli from my home folder.

How: SteamOS is read-only by default meaning you can't install anything that doesn't go directly to your home folder. In most cases, this is not a problem. Games and flatpaks all go the home folder by default. But sometimes you need to install something directly to the OS partition, and that requires enabling pacman and removing the write protection of the OS.

The recipe

Remove write-protection:

sudo steamos-readonly disable

Init pacman:

sudo pacman-key --init
sudo pacman-key --populate archlinux
sudo pacman-key --populate holo

Now you can install any official package like so, using "ruby" as an example:

sudo pacman -S ruby

Just beware that any packages that you install will get wiped with the next SteamOS update. You could write a recipe to yourself with packages that needs to be reapplied after each update, or just do like me, and bring them back from your bash history whenever they are missing.

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