A few questions about the Handled Edition

General
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I recently decided to try CachyOS Handled as an alternative to the stock SteamOS on the Steam Deck, and so far I’m quite happy with the experience. However, I do have a few questions about this edition:

  • What is the current status of firmware update support for Steam Deck hardware?
    I’ve only found information online that there were some issues with this, at least up to the spring release. Since then a lot of work seems to have been done—so I’d like to know the current status: has full support been implemented (BIOS, controllers, the official dock), or are there still some limitations?

  • The installation manuals mention that after installation it’s recommended to enable a firewall, and that UFW is installed by default—but in the Handled Edition there is neither UFW nor firewalld after installation. Why is that?

  • In the Desktop Edition, Snapper support is enabled by default, while in the Handled Edition it isn’t. On the CachyOS Handled GitHub I found mentions that this functionality is either not ready yet or planned to be added—again, what’s the reason it’s missing by default?

  • And lastly—what’s wrong with Discover? If you planned to replace it with something else, why are its traces still present in the system? (Take the “broken” icon on the Plasma panel, for example.)

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  1. here’s what cachyOS claims:
    The CachyOS Handheld Edition provides a GameMode like experience and comes with preinstalled gaming tools. It officially supports the Rog Ally, Steam Deck OLED and LCD, Legion GO and Lenovo Legion Go S.
  2. i dont know that, but its prolly bc firewalls introduce network lag. but thats fine, if you want a firewall, you do something like:
    sudo pacman -S ufw
    sudo systemctl enable –now ufw
  3. You don’t necessarily need snapper. snapper is only an “if you want thing”(atleast for me) bc I rarely find that the filesystem corrupts and I have to use snapshots. But if its not there its prolly not implemented well, and again, I dont use snapper, but snapper might utilize disk which again, reduces performance
  4. Discover is an application for KDE Plasma desktops. It does not have anything to do with the CachyOS team
    While removing it, there could’ve still been traces left due to a bug or how KDE Plasma relies on it, it’s probably fixable and not a big deal
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So, it turned out the hardware support isn’t complete. At the very least, I wasn’t able to update the firmware of the official Valve dock using CachyOS.
I’ve opened an issue — hopefully they’ll finish implementing support in the end.