Steam Deck notes
Some notes put together through use of the Steam Deck.
System password
In case anyone isn’t familiar with changing user passwords on most Linux/Unix systems:
By default, the deck user doesn’t have a password set, meaning you can’t
perform any tasks requiring sudo privileges.
To enable, simply open the terminal and type passwd. You’ll then be prompted
to create a new password. Sorted!
% passwd
Screen lock
Note that you’ll have to set a password for the deck user (or any other
user you may have set up) before doing this.
- Navigate to Workspace > Workspace Behavior > Screen Locking
- Check “Lock screen automatically” and set to
10 minutes - Check “After waking from sleep” and apply changes.
- Press the power button once, let the screen turn off, then press it again to show the lock screen.
The native virtual keyboard doesn’t work when pressing STEAM + X, so if you
want to unlock when there isn’t a physical keyboard available, you’ll have to
install qt5-virtualkeyboard.
Someone has put together a
shortcut to lock the screen as Super + L doesn’t work as expected. Right
now, I’m comfortable with continuing to use the power button to lock the
screen.
On-screen keyboard
Via github, this seems the best option for enabling the virtual keyboard for use when unlocking the Deck in desktop mode.
Note that you’ll have to do this after major system updates due to any changes in the system partition being wiped.
I’ve placed this in ~/data/bin/steam-deck-osk.sh.
#!/usr/bin/env bash
# This does initial customization for Steam Deck for initial setup / post update config
# After each major system update, this needs to be re-run as the system partition is wiped in the process
# Worth checking back after each update to see if the OS has been updated to include this by default, however
echo "Setting file system to writable"
sudo steamos-readonly disable
echo "Initializing Pacman"
sudo pacman-key --init
sudo pacman-key --populate
sudo pacman -Syu
echo "Installing on-screen keyboard"
sudo pacman -S qt5-virtualkeyboard --noconfirm
echo "Setting file system back to read-only"
sudo steamos-readonly enable
SSH
Note that you’ll have to set a password for the deck user (or any other
user you may have set up) before doing this.
SSHD comes installed on the Steam Deck, but isn’t enabled by default. To run
just the once:
% sudo systemctl start sshd
If you want to have running permanently instead:
% sudo systemctl enable --now sshd
Next..
There are some things I’d like to try/investigate just because that I’ll need to test first in case it breaks anything. Steam Deck’s OS is tied to some specific defaults that may not play nicely with being switched about. Just nice to have/experiment with.
- Switch to i3 in place of KDE (ooohh looks like someone has already done this)
Create a user separate from the- this isn’t possible without breaking steam integration, as far as I can telldeckaccount- Try different operating systems using the SD slot
- How best to backup? Games look to be installed in
~/, using rsync to send that to another device should- SD cards look to mount at
/run/media/foo, meaning rsync would work there too! - syncthing could be ideal too - looks like this has already been considered and works!
- SD cards look to mount at
- Distrobox - Have this running using the official distrobox guide
- Document using Ansible to spin up distrobox containers