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Is there any way to add latte-dock to steam deck desktop mode?

Basically, I'd like to make desktop mode look and feel a little more like MacOS, and this app is kind of essential. Unfortunately I don't know anything about what's happening when it doesn't install. I've set a sudo password, I've disabled read-only, I've initialized the pacman keys (whatever that means), now it says "unknown trust"...

Is there a straightforward tutorial somewhere on how to do something like this for an absolute beginner? I assumed changing the appearance and layout of my desktop should have been an easy and harmless first step for a Linux noob to try, but I already feel like I'm just smashing my head up against a wall.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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7 comments
  • Just a little heads up in case you didn't knew:
    if you install packages like latte-dock from pacman (or build from source in this case) they will vanish with your next Steam Deck update because the Linux on the Steam Deck works quite different to a regular Linux installation

    I wouldn't get so much hung up on latte-dock anyway since it is unmaintained since quite some time and doesn't even work on the latest KDE Plasma 6 (which SteamOS doesn't have yet but will come in the near future)
    customizing the default Plasma Panel (right click on desktop > enter edit mode > add panel) is your best bet nowadays for a similar look

    anyway if you are really dead set on latte dock you will need to "initialize" all public keys first from the Arch Linux and Steam developers until you actually can install anything on the package manager pacman

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

    the last line is specific for SteamOS only

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  • I agree with the others that you would likely be better off modifying KDE to suit your needs.

    If you do want to install pacman packages and have them persist between updates, you could try rwfus which makes an RW overlay that lets you install packages. There are some catches though, mostly you can't update using pacman -Syu and you can't install glibc.

    There's another way to install packages, where you create a temporary folder, download the package there, and then install it in your home directory instead to keep it between updates. I don't have a guide for it, but I do have an example of using it to install the package fakeroot. You'll have to set pacman up first, but then instead of doing a normal pacman install you do the following:

    mkdir -p ~/.local/bin

    sudo pacman --cachedir /tmp -Sw --noconfirm fakeroot

    tar -xf /tmp/fakeroot-*.pkg.tar.zst -C ~/.local --strip-components=1 usr/bin usr/lib

    sudo rm -f /tmp/fakeroot*.pkg.*

    Swap out "fakeroot" for the package name you're trying to install and it should work.

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  • Afaik steam is uses kde plasma, you should be able to customize it and probably use themes to get the Mac OS Look. Maybe start from there. Probably plenty of YouTube guides for that.

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