Major system updates remove other pacman installed programs (non games)

[Fooey]

I've been using my steamdeck as a replacement for my laptop. (XPS15 running Ubuntu)
I have a lot of other programs installed (using pacman), with the main ones being terminator, sublime-text, ansible, libreoffice.
When-ever there is a main system update, I have to re-install all the programs I've manually installed. Is there a way that system updates can stop removing manually installed pacman programs.
Other Linux distro's don't do this.

[Mahjik]

This isn't "just another Linux distro". That being said, there are a few asks for something better in this space in the "Feature Requests" area:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1675200/discussions/2/3428948355368533931/

[Minneyar]

That is intentional, and it's unlikely to change. Valve does that to minimize the possibility of a user messing up their Deck's filesystem.

It's better to install things as flatpaks if you can, install them locally in your user folder if you can't, or install them in a chroot environment if they really do need root filesystem access.