Steamdeck Game Mode issues

[jcadle]

When I try to follow the instructions given for Steam Deck installation, including setting up the .desktop shortcut so it can be added as a non-Steam game, it gives me a long error message essentially saying that ani-cli couldn't be found, so it's running bash instead. If I instead run Konsole in game mode, I can run ani-cli as normal by simply typing the command. In Desktop mode, I noticed that the .desktop shortcut doesn't work, and in fact if I try to run ani-cli itself by right-clicking on the shell script in Dolphin and clicking on "Run in Konsole" I get a different error regarding fzf not being installed. I've checked, and fzf is definitely installed, and again, if I just open Konsole and actually type 'ani-cli', it runs as expected. I'm very confused.

[Nannk]

Because of immutability, we are storing executables in .local/bin. To launch them, you need to add .local/bin to your $PATH first. It is usually done by adding export $PATH = newpath .bashrc file and then sourcing that file. Terminal emulators doe the sourcing part when they launch.
By launching script through Dolphin, $PATH is default, so it cant find fzf.
Same for .desktop file. If .bashrc is not sourced, $PATH would not be updated, and the command will not be found.
Thats what source $HOME/.'$(echo $SHELL | sed -nE "s|.*/(.*)\$|\1|p")'rc && ... is for.
You can try getting your shell by running echo $SHELL and replacing that part of the Exec= line in .desktop with for example for bash: source $HOME/.bashrc && ...
As another option, you can try adding PATH=$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH %command% to launch options in steam.

[jcadle]

I did the echo "export PATH=$HOME/.local/bin:\$PATH" >> ".$(echo $SHELL | sed -nE "s|.*/(.*)\$|\1|p")rc" part when I did the initial installation though, and it's still not working when I try to use the .desktop shortcut. I also tried both of your solutions and I'm still having the same issues.

echo $SHELL just returns /bin/bash, and when I updated the exec line with that it didn't seem to help. The .desktop file looks like this now:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Type=Application
Exec=/bin/bash -c "source $HOME/.bashrc && konsole --fullscreen -e ani-cli"
Name=ani-cli

I think what's most confusing to me is that SteamOS is, as you say, an immutable OS, so the instructions that work for everyone else should work on my machine too. I don't understand why they don't.

[jcadle]

So, one other weird thing I've noticed is that while I get this message when running the shortcut from Game mode, I can then simply type 'ani-cli' in the resulting terminal window and it runs normally.