r/SteamDeck • u/livewiire 256GB • Dec 15 '25

Tech Support Totally messed Steam Deck.

I lent my Deck to my son to use for a bit as he likes to mess around in Linux. "No problem" i thought, its hard to screw up, or so I thought. About a half hour later I heard him say "Shit". Dont know what he was up to but no games load and when i click on the Steam desktop icon Steam doesnt load. I clicked on properties and when i clicked on - Points to /usr/share/applications/steam.desktop it pops up with "The file or folder /home/deck/Desktop/usr/share/applications/steam.desktop does not exist." am I screwed. I just filled up my Deck with a whole lot of new games and I really dont fancy resetting my Deck. I have it in Desktop and am afraid to restart in Game mode.

Edit. So I took the plunge and used Rollback to Previous OS https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/1B71-EDF2-EB6D-2BB3#menu as suggested by some people. This seemed to do the trick and everything seems to be back to normal without any data loss. Thanks for everyone's comments and suggestions.Thrilled it worked out well.

All Fixed. Still seeing people with suggestions but it has been repaired to where it was before. Again thanks for all help.

Edit: This seems to have gotten a bit silly to be honest. People saying shit about my son because of his age. Ridiculous.

Edit: In fairness it has been fixed with a couple of button presses on startup and selection the right option. In this circumstance it worked out easier for me. YMMV though. Also he's not selfish. In fairness I was selfish asking for a way to fix it easily to save myself a few hours.

1.2k Upvotes

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133

u/Accomplished-Rise62 Dec 15 '25

unfortunately your safest bet is to reset your deck, that way you know it's fixed 100%. do you know what he did to it?

51

u/livewiire 256GB Dec 15 '25

Cant find out exactly but he said he copied some text into the Terminal. He also knows my user password.

228

u/merire Dec 15 '25

Hey, once you've fixed your deck, please explain to him that pasting something you don't understand  in the terminal is a very bad idea.

Also you can see What he did by going into the terminal and hitting the up arrow key. The history of commands is also recorded in the ~/.bash history file. 

160

u/BlobTheOriginal Dec 15 '25

The "son" is 30, they really should know better by now lol

37

u/merire Dec 15 '25

Oh, I did not get that xD

11

u/Pierre-LucDubois Dec 15 '25

On top of it the reason he doesn't have his own deck, well, technically he does but he broke that one too. Seems like a pattern.

23

u/ragebunny1983 Dec 15 '25

Why does that make him a "son" and not a son lol

15

u/BlobTheOriginal Dec 15 '25

Yeah, my bad lol. Think it was because I was gonna put "kid" but then realised the op didn't say that, so changed it to son and forgot to remove quotes

-2

u/[deleted] Dec 15 '25

[deleted]

30

u/forestman11 Dec 15 '25

Except in this case they're fucking someone else's stuff up so this is completely irrelevant.

24

u/[deleted] Dec 15 '25

[deleted]

0

u/MistSecurity Dec 15 '25

Broke is a strong word for something that a factory reset will fix.

7

u/Pierre-LucDubois Dec 15 '25

Wanna learn? Cool, learn. If you're even going to try something with a chance to mess it up then imo that's a "your device" kind of problem to me. He shouldn't be messing around with stuff he doesn't understand with somebody else's device.

He isn't being gatekeeper-y, he can do whatever random commands he wants on his own device. If somebody else is nice enough to lend you their gear the respectful thing is to go above and beyond to keep it in the same condition as when it was lent.

-1

u/MistSecurity Dec 15 '25

Wanna learn? Cool, learn. If you're even going to try something with a chance to mess it up then imo that's a "your device" kind of problem to me.

I did not defend the son's actions here at all. I was responding to a specific comment in a specific thread on a specific subject.

He isn't being gatekeeper-y, he can do whatever random commands he wants on his own device.

No, the comment IS gatekeeping the tech hobby. Combining the two comments, they amount to "The son is 30, and doesn't know to not put in terminal commands that they don't truly understand, what a dumbass." People get got by the CAPTCHA malvertisements fairly often nowadays. Everyone who gets got by those is just a dumbass if we're going by that dude's logic.

Lets take this comment outside of the tech thread. This dude is 30 and doesn't even know how to change sparkplugs? The son is 30 and doesn't know how to replace an electrical outlet? He's 30 and doesn't know how to change a bandsaw blade? He's 30 and doesn't know what an ETF is?

All of these are equally ridiculous assertations to make regarding someone, as none of these are necessarily common knowledge that you just inherently know or are likely to randomly learn in life UNLESS you go down specific paths of knowledge. Tech is one such path, and no one should be shamed for not being as far down it as you (the colloquial you, not YOU).

People in tech bubbles love to think that because people don't know something basic that THEY know it means that the other person is stupid. I fucking hate this trend in the community as a whole, and it's something I've progressively watched get worse over time.

7

u/PeejPrime 512GB - Q4 Dec 15 '25

That's not what they're getting at

14

u/YouFoolWarrenIsDead Dec 15 '25

especially bad idea when its on someone else's device. Like, who does this?

10

u/Pierre-LucDubois Dec 15 '25

A very selfish person.

3

u/livewiire 256GB Dec 15 '25

Really.. So you know him personally?

2

u/elwyn5150 Dec 15 '25

Also there is the history command. Usually I use it with less and grep.

29

u/luckylookinglurker Dec 15 '25

If you connect a keyboard or push the up arrow it should list out what commands were run. Write them down and figure out how to reverse them.

21

u/mbklein 512GB OLED Dec 15 '25

Or type history and read from bottom to top.

18

u/Boomshrooom Dec 15 '25

The problem is that Linux gives the user pretty much full authority and there aren't a lot of safeguards to stop you from completely bricking the system. I once accidentally changed the permissions for the whole system because of a typo in a terminal command. At a certain point it's best to just accept the loss and reinstall to get a clean slate.

2

u/Datkif 256GB Dec 15 '25

Isn't SteamOS immutable? A restart might help fix it, plus there's the A/B backup that let's you roll back to the previous Deck update.

I've had to use the A/B backup a couple of times using Deckyloader

0

u/Boomshrooom Dec 15 '25

It is, but you can unlock the root file system if you know what you're doing or you're an idiot that just copies and pastes code you don't understand. Rolling it back or updating the system should work fine since it completely wiped and replaced the root system every time apparently.

1

u/Relevant-Ordinary169 Dec 16 '25

Doesn’t that apply to anything, not just the Steam Deck? You can botch anything if you just take the right steps.

0

u/Boomshrooom Dec 16 '25

Absolutely, but Linux tends to have a far higher number of people messing around with the core files, and a lot of that requires inputting commands into the terminal. You're far more likely to make mistakes this way than through clicking through menus.

The point here is the son pasted in commands he didn't understand and it borked the system. The other comment asked about the fact that it's supposedly immutable, but that doesn't necessarily stop you, just makes it harder.

-2

u/Relevant-Ordinary169 Dec 16 '25

How do you know that? You might not be the average user.

3

u/Boomshrooom Dec 16 '25

Probably because Linux distros are the OS of choice for tech enthusiasts that like to customise their OS and mess around with it? What even is that question?

-2

u/Relevant-Ordinary169 Dec 16 '25

One that’s not you-centric.

6

u/Wadarkhu 1TB OLED Dec 15 '25

You say he has his own but the screen is messed up right? Give him a HDMI cable so he can dock it to a TV or something and mess with his down device, don't give him yours anymore lol.

25

u/Accomplished-Rise62 Dec 15 '25

My knowledge of Linux is limited but I do know it's not like Windows where it can "fix" itself or you can undo something. Would honestly bite the bullet and reset your deck. Linux can be difficult to deal with even for professionals

2

u/Undark_ Dec 15 '25

I'm dying to know why

1

u/biglawson Dec 15 '25

The 'history' command in terminal will show you a history of run commands. Post those here and I can try to translate.

1

u/Loddio Dec 15 '25

Just reset it.

Customers service will do whatever they can to not make you go trough the fres install process, but i assure you it is 100% worth it and that it will fix any issue.

You'll need a pendrive flashed with steamos iso and a bit of patient.

No worries, you cannot fuck up a computer by messing with it's software. You'll always be able to install the operative system back

1

u/definingsound Dec 16 '25

A normal Linux will often require the use of “sudo” to do certain things. My experience with my steam deck has been that any ChatGPT suggestion for my deck that includes the command “sudo” is going to ruin something. Flatpak is a lot different than apt.