SteamOS 3.4.9 has just been released to the Stable channel as an update to all Deck users. The update contains the following changes: Fixed a GPU driver crash with Starfield Fixed hangs on reboot when switching from upcoming Beta OS releases.

Hello!

I have to RMA my Steam Deck (one of thumbsticks grinds against the plastic case) and I'm trying to backup my non-Steam games (and their Lutris configs).

Apparently Discovery uses flatpak, so Lutris config files aren't where the internet says they are (~/.config/lutris/games/, ~/.config/lutris/system.yml, ~/.local/share/lutris/pga.db).

Could anyone please tell me where I can find these on the Steam Deck and what else I might be missing? I've already backed up ~/Games but I'd rather not have to re-add the games manually :(

Bonus question is if anyone has any tips for painless Steam Deck backup/restore :)

EDIT:

After a long search, I was able to find it. If anyone else is wondering, the Flatpak/Steam Deck Lutris config files are located in ~/.var/app/net.lutris.Lutris/config/lutris.

For some reason, Lutris-installed native Linux games also treat ~/.var/app/net.lutris.Lutris/ as their home folder (e.g. Stardew Valley stores its saves in ~/.var/app/net.lutris.Lutris/.config/StardewValley instead of ~/.config/StardewValley).

If anyone can say why this happens, that would be very appreciated!

So far I have tried a USB stick, a Linux storage gadget, and 2 micro SD cards. Both the USB and emulated storage device booted to the logo then a black screen where the fan spun down then sat there for 3 hours before I tried something else. The weird thing about both the micro sd's is that after booting them once the deck no longer recognises them as bootable drives. I have to reflash the recovery image before I can boot to it again. One of the cards (cheap nameless 16 gig) booted to the logo and sat there for several hours and the other (1TB Sandisk) booted to the logo then a black screen and is still sitting here 2 hours later.

Edit: leaving the 1TB overnight got as far as the touchpads vibrating when touched.

I know it may seem dumb. But I can see the potential of Steam Deck regarding VR. I absolutely hate the VR headsets nowadays for being proprietary. I myself isn't a VR gamer, but it would be great to see Linux on VR.

It's possible I'm misunderstanding something here, but I'm confused.

I remember this splash video on all the old LEGO games I used to play as a kid. Thought I'd try and create a Steam Deck video based on it!

I haven't gone through and done any specific inquiries about which cards are suitable for the SteamDeck, but I figured I'd bring it up for anyone looking to upgrade their SD card storage.

I see so many people talking about using their deck to play games while others are watching TV with their partners or whatever. But I just can’t do it. I hate not hearing the sound effects, music, voice acting when playing a game, and I tend to find myself not using the deck as often as I would like as a result.

Am I just weird?

Any useful software/utilities I should set up with my coming steam deck besides lutris/emudeck?

#Steamdeck

Valve has shared their Steam Survey results for the month of June which shows the Steam on Linux marketshare holding steady.

I want to use my deck as a console in my living room, and to do this I need to be able to wake it up from my controller.
The closest I've seen someone do it online is here, but it uses the dangle which I don't have. There was also this tutorial on the same post for PS controllers via Bluetooth but it seems messy and tedious (I have to manually enable each device to test whether it is the controller or not).
Is there a way to do this or do I have to get up from the couch each time I want to wake my deck up?

Live until June 13th.

Have little time? Always on the go? Need a refresher of recent Steam Deck news? Got you covered here, come get your little fix.

Could be good news regarding performance on Steam Deck.

As I'm not a fan of the new Steam UI, I added the -vgui launch parameter to Steam on my laptop to revert the UI to how it was before. As trying to do this on the Steam Deck in desktop mode told me I didn't have sufficient permissions, I tried it again after using Konsole to take ownership of the Steam shortcut, however even then my attempts to add -vgui to the Arguments tab of the shortcut's properties are not being saved. Does anyone know how to make Steam launch with the old UI in desktop mode on the Steam Deck (without using Windows)?

Edit: Figured out how to do it. If you open the Steam shortcut (.desktop file) on the desktop in KWrite and go to Line 30, you'll find the shortcut's launch parameters. Adding -vgui to the end of that line and saving the edit fixed the issue despite the same modification made via the Properties window not doing so. If it still doesn't save, you might need need to take ownership of that shortcut file via Konsole using 'sudo chown deck:deck /home/deck/Desktop/steam.desktop', though try without the sudo command first.

I want to share an awesome tool called SteamDeck Refresh Rate Unlocker that I recently discovered. This script offers the ability to unlock the refresh rate of your Steam Deck's display, extending beyond the default range of 40Hz to 60Hz. With this tool, you can now achieve a maximum refresh rate of 70Hz, and even lower rates like 20Hz if that suits your preferences.

The script offers several presets to choose from, including:

• 20Hz to 60Hz
• 20Hz to 70Hz
• 30Hz to 60Hz
• 30Hz to 70Hz
• 40Hz to 70Hz

While 70Hz may not be necessary for demanding games and may not be suitable for everyone, it's definitely worth a try, especially if you're sensitive to lower refresh rates. Increasing the refresh rate to 70Hz makes the display 17% faster. Personally, as someone accustomed to a 240Hz screen on my PC, I find it really beneficial for a smoother experience. Both my eyeballs and braincells are grateful.

I'd like to express my gratitude to ryanrudolfoba for developing this fantastic tool. Their dedication to enhancing the Steam Deck experience is highly appreciated!

Keep in mind that overclocking the display panel to 70Hz might cause artifacts on some panels. Just a friendly reminder to proceed with caution.

Hi all,
I have a wireless keyboard that I use with my SteamDeck. They keyboard has the ususal 'windows' and 'menu' buttons. I was wondering if there is a way to set these to work as the 'steam' and '...' buttons on the Deck?

Hi!
I have 3 FPS in demo "The Invincible" on any settings. Warched some videos on YT and everyone has 20-40 fps. What can be wrong? I tried latest proton and proton-GE. Game installed on default 64 gb ssd.

'Salvage' from reddit
Original post:

For those of us with the 64 gig model, having a small home partition can be an issue from time to time. While you can symlink compatdata and shadercache to the sdcard, flatpaks are more difficult and you may have other files taking up space too.

Disclaimer

I am not responsible for you borking your deck or losing any data. This is not for everyone, and if you can get away with symlinking I highly recommend doing that instead. You will not be able to swap out the sdcard without data loss after this process.

​

Prerequisites

1. You must have a btrfs formatted home partition. You can find how to do this [here](https://gitlab.com/popsulfr/steam os-btrfs)
2. You must back up any existing data on your sdcard to an external device or an off site location such as cloud storage. This can take a long time depending on how much data you have.
3. (optional) Back up your /home partition to an external device or off site location such as cloud storage.
4. You must have a sudo password.

​

Using your sdcard as Adoptable Storage

There may be a way to do this more directly without data loss, but I will go with my current solution based on my somewhat limited knowledge of the btrfs filesystem.

How to

1. Make sure your home partition is btrfs and that all the data you care about is backed up.
2. Open konsole and enter a su shell: sudo -s
3. Unmount your sdcard using mount /run/media/mmcblk0p1
4. If your sdcard is not already formatted btrfs from SteamOS BTRFS, do mkfs.btrfs /dev/mmcblk0p1
5. Add the sdcard to the home volume: btrfs device add -f /dev/mmcblk0p1 /home
6. (optional) Balance the filesystem: btrfs filesystem balance start /home. This can take a VERY long time.
7. Reboot and go back to desktop mode.

Restoring data

I will go through the steam folder, but for other files you can pretty much drag and drop.

1. Copy all the data you backed up to /home/deck
2. Enter your steam library folder that was originally on your sdcard.
3. Merge the steamapps folder with your main steam library folder (usually /home/deck/.steam/steam/steamapps)
4. Go to your steam library and click install on all the games that were on your sdcard. Steam should verify them and then let you play. If you know a way to merge the .vdf file please mention it.

Check your swap file

In my case, the swap file was not working, you may have to create a new one.

1. Run the command free -m.
2. If the Swap row doesn't say 0 0 0 your all good. If it does, continue on.

No swap file

Note: I was not able to use the existing @swapfile subvolume from SteamOS BTRFS for some reason, so I will show the process of making a new one.

1. Open konsole and enter a su shell: sudo -s
2. Create the new subvolume: btrfs subvolume create /home/@swap.
3. Set the attributes to allow swap: chatter -R +C /home/@swap.
4. Create the swapfile with truncate -s 0 /home/@swap/swapfile
5. Allocate storage to the swap file. You can allocate as much as you'd like. I tend to do a lot of memmory heavy things, so I will make it 16 gigs: fallocate -l 16384M /home/@swap/swapfile.
6. Set the permissions for it: chmod 600 /home/@swap/swapfile.
7. Make it a swap file: mkswap /home/@swap/swapfile
8. Add the following line to /etc/fstab and save it: /home/@swap/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0
9. Enable swap: swapon /home/@swap/swapfile
10. Run free -m to check if it worked.
11. Reboot and run free -m in konsole again to make sure it stuck.

Leaving extra unallocated space

Btrfs is bad at handling running out of space! Like, really bad! It basically makes its self read only with no way out. To avoid this you should leave a few gigs of unallocated space.

Setting up pacman

If you already have pacman set up skip this.

1. Open konsole and disable the read only filesystem: sudo steamos-readonly disable
2. Run sudo pacman-key --init
3. Populate the keyring: sudo pacman-key --populate archlinux
4. Update with sudo pacman -Syu

Gparted

1. Install gparted: sudo pacman -S gparted
2. Run gparted and give it your sudo password.
3. Select the physical device you want to shrink the partition on.
4. If possible prevent anything from writing to the disk to avoid corruption.
5. Right click the allocated space and hit resize/move.
6. Add to Free Space Following (MiB). I did 3 gigabytes, so that would be 3072.

"Help I ran out of space!"

If you have done this process, just expand the btrfs partition with gparted, delete some files, and run sudo btrfs balance start /home in konsole and wait. Wait a long time. Probably several hours.

After that re-create the unallocated space in case it happens again.

Done!

You now should have a home partition that spans across multiple devices and a working swap file.

P.S. I'm writing this because I have a migraine and can't do anything, but I'm bored. So if there are any mistakes please yell at me in the comments 😂

'Slavage' from reddit.
Original post:

What is apx?

Apx (/à·peks/) is Vanilla OS' package manager. Since Vanilla OS is for the most part an immutable operating system, it can't write packages to the root partition. It creates and manages containers using distrobox and podman (or docker) for various other package managers such as yay, apt, dnf, zypper, and several others. Any package installed in a container can easily be exposed to the host os.

Why would I want the is?

Apx is intended to avoid package conflicts and have all the possible options for places to get packages from. Say you wanted to build a software that is easier to build on Ubuntu than arch, you could run apx install <insert packages here> to install the dependencies without having to find the arch package names or have any conflicting packages. These packages will also not take up space on the fairly-limited-in-size root partition.

Prerequisites

1. Have pacman set up.
2. Disabled read only filesystem
3. An internet connection.
4. Desktop mode.

I recommend you read through all this and use the help of the internet to figure out what any of these commands do you aren't sure about.

How to

1. In a konsole window, install the necessary packages: sudo pacman -Syu base-devel holo-rel/linux-headers linux-neptune-headers holo-rel/linux-lts-headers git glibc gcc gcc-libs fakeroot linux-api-headers libarchive go podman
2. Clone the apx repo and enter the directory it downloads: git clone --recursive https://github.com/Vanilla-OS/apx.git && cd apx
3. Build apx with make build
4. Then install it: sudo make install

Fixing podman

At this point it will not work as podman doesn't work out of the box. Run the following commands to fix it.

sudo touch /etc/subuid

sudo usermod --add-subuids 10000-75535 deck

sudo touch /etc/subgid

sudo usermod --add-subgids 10000-75535 deck  

Allowing graphical applications

(skip if you don't need em)

1. Run kate /etc/systemd/system/apxgui.service
2. Paste in the following:

[Unit]
Description=Run xhost + on boot

[Service]  
Type=simple
ExecStart=xhost +  

[Install]  
WantedBy=default.target  
WantedBy=graphical-session.target  

1. Run sudo systemctl enable apxgui to enable the service.
2. Run sudo systemctl start apxgui to start the service.
3. run xhost +.

Using apx

Run apx to see a list of arguments and options.

To install packages run apx install <package name>. By default it uses the apt container, but you can make it use any other container by using an argument. For example, apx install --xbps neofetch will install neofetch from the Void Linux repository.

You can run programs from specific containers the same way. apx run --xbps neofetch will run the version of neofetch you have installed in the xbps container.

Entering a container's environment is the same: apx enter --yay. You can then use it as if you were using that OS.

If it's not working, that means I probably missed something. Please let me know. I had to noodle through this and looked at my bash history after, so there is a chance I might have missed a required package or something.

Does this console worth it? Also how hot does it get in the summer if you are doing demanding things without AC?

Soulstone Survivors is one of my favourite games in the spirit of Vampire Survivors, and it just got a lot bigger with the new Path of Ascension upgrade.

I know Vampire Survivors is the Big Cheese when it comes to roguelike games on the Deck, but honestly I've had a lot more fun with Soulstone Survivors instead. Great game that's gotten even better with an update a few days ago. Strong recommend. 👍

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2066020/Soulstone_Survivors/

I've just tried it out and it's amazing. Although the back buttons (R4, L4, R5, L5) don't work for some reason.

To get it right now you need to enable factorio beta in steam.

Big improvements and new features for the Steam Desktop client are now out of Beta!