Please write a SteamOS Guide (please)

[reddogzz]

tl;dr: Please make a guide for SteamOS --- Perferably one that doesn't start with "Step 1: Uninstall SteamOS"

I decided to install SteamOS, but would like to utilize the functionality of Winapps. I can make it work but QEMU/KVM is a bit frustrating, what with SteamOS overwriting the settings on the system partition every time it decides to update. I know there is a Flatpak of Virtual Machine Manager but I can't seem to get the Flatpak to start the daemon or get privileges to my QCOW2 file on my spare ext4 drive. I also ran into issues with Podman Desktop's Flatpak.  I thought about maybe editing permissions with flatseal but that still wouldn't fix the libvirt daemon issue (as far as I know). I am relatively new to immutable systems, I have a bad habit of breaking things so I figured this filesystem would be good for me.

I am SURE there is an easier way of doing this, but, so far, this is the only way I know how to get a Windows 11 VM working with libvert on SteamOS but it only lasts until the next update and I have to do it all over again:

#install virt-manager package
sudo pacman -S --needed libvirt qemu virt-manager ebtables dnsmasq
sudo pacman -Syu --overwrite "/var/lib/glusterd/**" libvirt qemu virt-manager
sudo pacman -S swtpm
sudo pacman -S dnsmasq

sudo systemctl start libvirtd
sudo virsh net-start default
sudo systemctl start swtpm
sudo systemctl enable swtpm
sudo systemctl enable libvirtd
sudo virsh net-autostart default

lsblk -o NAME,MOUNTPOINT
sudo umount [external drive path]
#because for some reason remounting requires manual creation of the mount point:
sudo mkdir -p [external drive path]
sudo mount /dev/[id] [external drive path]
sudo chown -R 958:958 [external drive path]
sudo chmod -R 770 [external drive path]

When SteamOS wipes it, I just type these commands again and copy/paste my XML.

Also SteamOS also turns off IOMMU by default so at one point I tried:
sudo nano /etc/default/grub
Added the following to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX line: iommu=pt iommu=1 kvm_amd.sev=1 mem_encrypt=on
So it looked like
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="console=tty1 rd.luks=0 rd.lvm=0 rd.md=0 rd.dm=0 rd.systemd.gpt_auto=no iommu=pt iommu=1 kvm_amd.sev=1 mem_encrypt=on"

I saved and sudo update-grub, which reportedly enabled IOMMU in SteamOS but CPU passthough still seemed to throw a BOSD when booting the Win11 VM unless I disabled passthough. My guess is that even though it says its enabled, IOMMU is still supported yet for this distro. I know there are other distros I could try, but I would love to see a walkthough for SteamOS because the only VM software that seems to work out of the box is ... "Boxes" which is a bit lite on the customization. +