EDIT (3/5/2023): accusations from the maintainer of the acp5x-ucm-files repo regarding Valve not upstreaming the ALSA UCM configurations are not true. This comment has been removed from the article.

One long-standing issue that the Steam Deck has had with support of distributions other than SteamOS is the lack of audio. But someone finally figured out how to patch audio support in.

This is thanks to OpenSD – one of their repos is acp5x-ucm-files. This will “temporarily provide some missing ALSA UCM configuration files needed to fix the audio on the ACP5x which the Steam Deck uses.”

Basically, all you need to do after cloning the repo is copy the files from alsa into the distro’s alsa directory, which on Arch, would be /usr/share/alsa/. Or just run the install script with sudo ./install.sh. In theory you should be able to run the install script on any distro with kernel 6.1 or later and get audio support.

Looks like the ChimeraOS team got audio up and running on their distro:

Video credit: Matthew Anderson (Ruineka)

Actually, this repo has been around for two months, but I didn’t find out about this project until now.