Qbert VS junest

I'd recommend qbert rather than disabling the read-only filesystem. It survives updates and you can just turn it off if you want to.

But if you do, qbert will make it behave like a normal arch Linux so you can follow the tutorials on the internet.

This was recommended to me: https://github.com/XargonWan/Qbert

Also, I would advise you use Qbert or Junest to install it, instead of making the filesystem writable, because a SteamOS update will wipe all that data

To do that, you will either need to unlock the read-only part or use qbert to get the same effect in a way that can't break stuff.

for pacman on deck you can use qbert, which will let you leave the system read-only and lets you keep your files between updates. You can even put it into .bashrc so it runs automatically on boot.

Explore the Junest Git project and follow the installation instructions. Activate the environment with junest setup and enable the running-from-host options.

PS: about JuNest (see https://github.com/fsquillace/junest ) this is a lightweight Arch Linux based distro that runs, without root privileges, on top of any other Linux distro. I also suggest to take a look at it.

About JuNest, all the apps installed using it whave always worked well for me. I've also wrote a script and done a pull request (rejected) for a tool that exports the apps to the launcher (as distrobox-export already do) https://github.com/fsquillace/junest/pull/322

JuNest https://github.com/fsquillace/junest looks very complete and good, though I dislike the approach of having to download or build an image. It would be nice to be able to do stuff like clone my filesystem (already ZFS) and branch an environment off that instantly.

I have already done a PR (see here)to the main repository https://github.com/fsquillace/junest but I still get errors in merging this utility during the automatic github-action's test/check. Any idea?

- I have pacman installed through junest. It works for command line programs, did not test for gui software

Have you tried installing JuNest? It will allow you to download, install, and use Arch's precompiled binaries directly (in addition to making it easy to compile, install, and use AUR packages).

As for the rest, I've been testing stuff with distrobox, junest (which is like distrobox, but for arch guest and without the container), and Conty (a lot like Junest but as a single hyper-compressed executable file). Anything requiring an escalation or wanting actual access to root remains an issue, but for the most part, it works well enough.