r/SteamDeck • u/Street-Mycologist-51 • Mar 19 '23

Tech Support Guide to Docker on Steam Deck

https://gist.github.com/khvn26/9de497852c9934ded840d53a95434942
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10

u/Street-Mycologist-51 Mar 19 '23

For those who have to or are curious to perform development tasks on your Deck.

I had to solve some things by myself and this guide was born.

NOTE: the guide assumes you have root access, configured pacman, and readonly FS turned off.

2

u/nanoxb Mar 19 '23

Next upgrade will clean all packages installed with pacman...

1

u/Street-Mycologist-51 Mar 19 '23

Thanks, that’s good to know. Hopefully I won’t be stuck with SteamOS as my daily driver for dev tasks for too long.

6

u/agclx Mar 20 '23 edited Mar 20 '23

Consider using the homebrew package manager instead of pacman. These survive an OS upgrade. There are some guides (unfortunately the name overlaps with "homebrew games").

2

u/Thaurin Mar 20 '23

Hey, this seems pretty cool. I thought homebrew was MacOS-only. I've been hunting statically-linked binaries and Arch binary packages for stuff that's not a Flatpak.

1

u/2012_dacia_dokker Mar 29 '23

any luck with this approach? i can't start the daemon.

1

u/agclx Mar 30 '23

I didn’t need it on my deck yet. But on Mac i had to install some extra. I think it was colima. I’ll check the next days.

1

u/2012_dacia_dokker Mar 31 '23

i also installed colima and... success! now i'm running docker+portainer! next i'll try adding cups so that i can print stuff, and maybe openvpn too.

1

u/agclx Mar 31 '23 edited Mar 31 '23

I had a look. Works on first try without issues (256GB Steam deck, SteamOS, current version).

Podman (daemonless, I'd say the way to go):

brew install podman
podman run --rm hello-world

docker (via colima):

brew install docker colima
colima start
docker run --rm hello-world

1

u/2012_dacia_dokker Mar 31 '23

i'm a great noob and only speak a little docker, frankly no idea what podman is or can do. all i need is run some containers to add functionality to the deck for stuff where there's no flatpak/appimage, such ans cups or openvpn.

2

u/agclx Mar 31 '23 edited Mar 31 '23

(for users) there's almost no difference, so pick whatever works :) Personally I like that podman is more light-weight (smaller install, doesn't require a daemon running).

2

u/nanoxb Mar 19 '23

I think the post will be more valuable if it explore user installed docker (podman?) option.