The Steam Deck is great, I'm less than 24 hours in but already loving it. It does have a few quirks compared to a standard Windows or Linux machine though... it has an immutable filesystem... meaning you can't just install packages using pacman as you normally would, and while you can switch this off temporarily to install things, these changes will likely be overwritten during the next software update cycle.
To work around this, I've found versions of lolcat and fortune that are written in python and installed in the /home/deck folder, which should survive any OS updates. Credit for both these tools goes to the original authors:
- Install pip using
python3 -m ensurepip - Install python version of fortune
python -m pip install --user fortune - Install python version of lolcat
python -m pip install --user lolcat - Create
.bash_profileif not already present - Add the following to
.bash_profileto ensure the path is correct
# set PATH so it includes user's private bin if it exists
if [ -d "$HOME/.local/bin" ] ; then
PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"
fi
- Download a fortunes database (perhaps from here?) and save it to
~/Documents/fortune/ - Add the following to your
.bashrcfile to set the environment variable and execute the program every time you open a terminal session
if [ -d "$HOME/Documents/fortune" ]; then
export FORTUNE_FILE="${HOME}/Documents/fortune/fortunes"
fi
if [ -f "$HOME/.local/bin/fortune" ]; then
"$HOME/.local/bin/fortune" | "$HOME/.local/bin/lolcat"
fi
- Close and reopen your terminal session