Steam Deck

The steam deck is a custom PC hardware from Valve that is focused on gaming. It can, however, also be used as a regular PC, and comes with a customized Plasma session. Also, it is completely unlocked, so one could install any OS they wish on it, including Arch Linux.

It uses a snapshot of Arch Linux mirrors, plus it has two Valve repositories, called holo and jupiter. These repositories replaces several core packages of the Arch Linux distribution, including the kernel, compilers and graphical stack.

Note: SteamOS is an Arch based distribution, it has several packages that differ from the official repositories. It is not supported by the Arch Linux support staff.

A/B updates

The deck uses an A/B update system, with two system partitions that are used for updates. If an update fails or the deck fails to boot it will revert to the previous partition and continue to work normally. This also means that changes made to one of the system partitions are not carried over to the other system partition.

Flatpak

There is a default user called deck that is used for storing steam profiles and games. Other applications can be installed using Flatpak. The /home partition is writable by the user.