8 mo. ago • 95%

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.

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
14
- Thank you for this!
  
  I always feel ashamed to have to ask how to do what I imagine is pretty elementary stuff for regular Linux users, but now I feel kind of feel dumb for not just asking in the first place.
  
  customizing the default Plasma Panel (right click on desktop > enter edit mode > add panel) is your best bet nowadays for a similar look
  
  This will be more than enough for me. I was looking for latte-dock because I thought it was the only way to accomplish that look. I didn’t even think to just add another panel.
  
  5
  
  there is no shame in asking question especially if you already put in some effort yourself and mention what you already tried
  
  5
- Definitely recommend customising plasma per the above advice.
  
  I've done the same thing with my steam deck (with White Sur theme) and it's flexible enough to get fairly close.
  
  Until recently I ran a similar setup with latte-dock on my work laptop and but it's not worth the hassle - it's buggy and unmaintained, so I swapped back to icon only task manager.
  
  4
- Great explanation. I'll add that another option is installing a different OS. I'm using Bazzite, and there's probably a way to layer a dock app onto that OS, so that it remains after updates.
  
  But I agree that the easiest solution is to just configure a Plasma panel with some widgets, as I've done exactly that on other computers.
  
  2
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.

5
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.

5

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