I was wondering, if it’s as easy as this write up for Nix makes it out to be?
Did anyone try this or something similar?
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I remembered this post I once saw on Mastodon. And I just came across this little thing. Don’t know if it actually running on steamdeck though.
In general, I think the method described in this article should work for guix too. I would definitely try this if I had a steamdeck.
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Found someone running Guix + EXWM on deck a couple of month ago on reddit => steam deck exwm setup (usage of guix system is mentioned in the comments).
I have a somewhat working guix as a foreign package manager running on deck myself, even though I mainly use my device for gaming and rarely ever in desktop mode. Maybe I’ll document what I did to get things going.
Others than that running guix system with nonguix for firmware on it should be as complex/trivial as it is to run guix system on any other x86_64 computer relying on proprietary firmware; as the steam deck basically is just a computer. Running guix system also is way easier than running guix as a foreign package manager on top of its immutable distro.
Thanks, for the links.
I’m also mostly gaming on my Deck and so I’m thinking Guix as a package manager.
I would love to hear how you got guix package manager running on Steam Deck!
Right now I’m using Nix because it was easy to set up but I prefer running Guix!
I had Guix System running on my Steam Deck . It was fairly straight forward to install using the linux kernel from nonguix.
I first tested to install it on an external usb drive, needed to use (bootloader grub-efi-removable-bootloader). The installation I could do from my desktop. Then just plug in the usb drive and select to boot from it and it just worked. Downside is that if the dock (I used the official dock for the steam deck) would loose power the whole OS would freeze.
I then installed Guix to the internal NVMe. I upgraded it at the same time. The steps was roughly
- install new the NVMe.
- install SteamOS using the recovery image
- Shrink the partitions to make room for a guix partition.
- Shrink the partition on the sd card to make room for a boot partition
- Boot into guix live usb. Install it as any normal EFI machine using the sd card boot partition and the space I carved out on the internal NVMe.
However when I recently tried to boot into Guix, the boot manager could not find my Guix boot partition. No idea what has happened, and I’m also having issues trying to boot from a live Guix usb image that I generated from my own Guix channel. I haven’t had time to debug it further.
When it was working, pretty much everything was functioning. I could use the right touchpad as a mouse etc. Only issue was that there where no sound, as you need a newer version of alsa.
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I just recently installed Bazzite on my Deck, and afterwards managed to get Guix Package Manager installed (after some modifications).
I’m really liking it so far. It has the same Steam interface in Game mode but a far better Desktop mode with newer Plasma and lots of Goodies pre-installed.
Flatpak + Distrobox + Nix + Guix gives me all the possibilites I need for pacakges and development, and everything can be updated with the built in ujust tool.
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A quick follow up as I did some tinkering with Guix on my steam deck this weekend. I haven’t touched it since my last entry here.
Booting from a Guix usb image worked fine again. I did that to test to see if I could add back the Guix entry to the UEFI boot manager.
However I did notice in the boot manager that you can boot from a file. So instead of chrooting into my system, I just navigate to the .efi file on my Guix boot partition — forgot the file name for it — and it booted straight into my old Guix setup.
Did a guix pull && sudo guix system reconfigure … && guix home reconfigure … and it now got sound 
. Touch screen seems to be working somewhat ok.
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I use Guix SD on my Steam Deck. The reddit post mentioned by @theesm above was my initial setup around a year back after which I reinstalled SteamOS because I wanted to do the DeckHD upgrade. I’m now back on Guix again. The installation is the same as any desktop machine. Installation via an SD card never worked for me, so I always connected a usb via the usb-c port on the deck. EXWM works well enough and if you are a FOSS nut like me, you can use OpenSD for the controller support, Wine for running games, & goldberg as a steam replacement for your steam games.
Regarding sound, it didn’t work for quite some time in Guix because the alsa-ucm-config package was very old in Guix while support for the steam deck was introduced later. Now the package is updated, so the sound should work by default with pulseaudio or pipewire.
Also, don’t use Guix if you have the 64GB variant of the deck. Valve has some custom patches in their downstream kernel for that version and if you do install Guix on the 64GB deck, your filesystem will kill itself every time. I had packaged the valve kernel for guix but was never able to test it extensively since I upgraded to a higher capacity nvme drive.
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