Steam Deck Dev Machine dotfiles

Dotfiles to unlock general development capabilities on a Steam Deck.

Keeps SteamOS's read-only mode & stability
Enables VSCode devcontainer development on arbitrary sets of containers (node, postgres, etc)
Enables Docker & Docker-compose
Enables OpenVPN and pulls down NordVPN's ovpn configs
Works alongside Steam Deck updates and even re-imaging the Deck

How it works

Applies all changes via an idempotent ~/.decksetup.sh script
Connects flatpak (vscode) to podman via podman-docker and docker-compose

How it's tested

Tested via:

Reimaging the deck back to factory state
Following the instructions in Quick start below

Examples

~/test/node shows running a node devcontainer with vscode's default config
- demonstrates using runArgs and containerUser to work as a non-root user
~/test/node-pg shows running node & postgres simultaneously with docker-compose
- uses vscode's default config, after commenting out the non-root user

Quick start

You probably want to fork these dotfiles & read through them to tune to your preferences. Otherwise, after running these commands, your Deck will be identical to mine.

Connect to wifi
Go to Power -> Desktop mode
Open a Konsole terminal
Set up dotfiles managed via the HackerNews dotfiles strategy:

cd ~
git config --global init.defaultBranch main
git init --bare ~/.dotfiles
alias dotfiles='/usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME'
dotfiles config status.showUntrackedFiles no
dotfiles remote add origin https://github.com/hunterloftis/dotfiles.git
dotfiles fetch --all
dotfiles reset --hard origin/main
passwd # choose a password for sudoing on your deck
~/.decksetup.sh

If you've already been using podman, you should podman network ls and podman network rm any existing networks, to ensure that they'll be recreated with the podman-dnsname plugin.

Finally, restart your deck.

Troubleshooting

Podman isn't the most resilient software, but at least it's easy to reset:

podman system reset

hunterloftis / dotfiles