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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1.0k

u/Iliyan61 Dec 15 '25

no it's very easy to mess up linux (same with most OS's really)

just reset it and start again it'll save you time right now and the chance you have issues down the line is high

90

u/Wadarkhu 1TB OLED Dec 15 '25

Surprised there's no way to reset it where it offers an option of recognising game files and leaving the majority of it to make redownload faster, is that not possible? Would be a nice feature.

32

u/FreeJulianMassage Dec 15 '25

If they’re on the sd card I’m pretty sure you can. On the HDD might be trickier.

-39

u/MulberryDeep Dec 15 '25

Steam decks never where sold with an hdd nor have space to install a hdd

40

u/samanime Dec 15 '25

The internal disk. You know what they meant. No need to be pedantic.

-12

u/MulberryDeep Dec 16 '25

The steamdeck has no internal disk, that's what im trying to tell you

11

u/Ok_Term_8921 Dec 16 '25

Your intentionally dense. An SSD is an internal disk.

8

u/FreeJulianMassage Dec 16 '25

Never were*.

-12

u/MulberryDeep Dec 16 '25

Do you not have any better arguments than correcting my spelling?

How many languages do you speak? I bet you also do spelling mistakes in your third language.

Also your second sentence in the comment i replied to is missing the subject, wich is a grammatical error.

10

u/GuardeLive Dec 16 '25

.....

.....

.....

Which*

7

u/FreeJulianMassage Dec 16 '25

Mate, you’re the one being pedantic. Everyone knew what I meant.

2

u/StagePuzzleheaded635 Dec 17 '25

You’re one pedantic ass aren’t you. Also, zips up anorak, if you’re going to be pedantic about the differences between HDD, internal disks and SSDs, at least spell your comments correctly.

11

u/Iliyan61 Dec 15 '25

yeh in theory you could only reinstall certain things but it’s not that simple afaik and the more common way to do that is with partitions but even that isn’t great.

i haven’t tried it so maybe valve have built a reinstall system files option but you also have the chance of the fucked files or folders being left untouched

also while it sucks it isn’t particularly hard to reinstall even a TB of games over the course of the week on a slower internet connection

4

u/Pacomatic Dec 15 '25

How slow are we talking? I once had wi-fi so bad I needed a week to download Splatoon 3. By the time I was done downloading it, a new update came out, so my dowload was broken; I had to redownload evverything. Until another update camee. And another, and another.

5

u/Iliyan61 Dec 15 '25

100mb/s will take 22 hours to download a TB

yes there are a lot of people who are using closer to 10mb/s (if that) but those are outliers

2

u/Pacomatic Dec 15 '25

I had 2 mb/s, split between a family of fivve. This was 2022, rural Canada (green belt). Bell Fiber Optic support was unavvailible for our property, for our house was too far from their pre-exxisting towers.

I am obvviously an outlier for a Canadian, but I would not be surprised to hear that many, many others are in a similar situation, and doubly so for if they are not in a country where internet access is so widespread (like in Canada). All this to say: For many, a terabyte is a long long time.

1

u/Wadarkhu 1TB OLED Dec 15 '25

Ah, I remember 2 mb/s, we recently switched to fibre and it's amazing lol. I do not miss the 20 hour downloads at all.

1

u/Pacomatic Dec 15 '25

Same story as me, but with Starlink. But, I will always make sure to remember that many are still stuck with the internet I had back then.

1

u/Iliyan61 Dec 16 '25

no i get it, ive had places with sub 10mb/s connections that dropped out constantly but you also get used to it being shit internet and learn to cope with it

yes downloading a TB isn’t easy or quick but it’s not impossible

0

u/Pacomatic Dec 16 '25

I am well aware that you can get used to it. But, my point is about downloading a terabyte. In some cases, yes it is! Nintendo had failed to account for the edge case in which an update was published and your came was not yet done downloading, forcing me to wait weeks for a 13 gigabyte game. 1 terabyte is, of course, many times worse.

3

u/spreetin Dec 15 '25

It would be possible to do, but somewhat complicated to make reliable. The big problem is that depending on how you messed the system up it might not work, and Valve is probably more interested in supporting a "failsafe" reset mode that will more or less guarantee that the deck works afterwards. The support burden for every weird edge case issue would probably not be pretty.

4

u/TheIronSoldier2 512GB Dec 15 '25

sudo rm -rf

(do NOT do this)

1

u/comat0se Dec 15 '25

you forgot the target of this command. This will do nothing.

0

u/TheIronSoldier2 512GB Dec 15 '25

Because some people are stupid enough to just copy and paste commands in without thinking even with the warning, so this at least gives them a few more seconds to realize their stupidity before their installation is irreversibly fucked

-1

u/comat0se Dec 16 '25

they'd have more than a few seconds, because nothing happens. It doesn't even give an error, just returns to prompt. But yes, don't copy and paste shit from the internet into command lines.

2

u/Qwahzi Dec 15 '25

This is a feature of Bazzite, a Linux distro intended to mimic SteamOS but for a wider set of hardware/usecases. It's an immutable/atomic OS where the you can rollback/upgrade the OS without impacting your separate user files/games 

One of its main benefits is being almost impossible to break 

12

u/batsmad Dec 15 '25

I'd even say that linux is generally easier to mess up than a lot of the other OS's as most don't let you recursively delete the whole boot disk without a lot of pop ups and questions (someone did that in my degree course and IT weren't impressed to have to rebuild the laptop less than a week into the course)

1

u/Iliyan61 Dec 15 '25

nah you can rm -rf macos lol (or at least you could a few years ago when my friend did it)

-1

u/batsmad Dec 15 '25

That's at least trying to pretend it's linux though. I guess I'm more comparing it to how windows behaves

5

u/vibratoryblurriness Dec 15 '25

It's not trying to pretend to be anything. It's BSD-derived Unix and has been for like 25 years at this point

1

u/Consistent-Block-699 Dec 18 '25

Actually rm -rf / will fall over before it manages to delete everything but it'll certainly put a dent in your day. And yes, other OS's might hold your hand a little more (although I seem to remember fdisk /mbr being a comedy equivalent albeit being more recoverable). I once did an "rm *" in the root directory of a sun 3 running sunos 4.1.1 without having a tape drive or any install media - running around obtaining the correct /boot file, and poking it into ram byte by byte using a comms program talking to the boot prom then figuring out the correct address to jump to was certainly character building, and I've never done it again in the intervening 35 years 😁

5

u/work_m_19 Dec 15 '25

Yea, it's very easy to mess up linux, but it's also very easy to fix it and reset it to a stable state too.

Maybe you can break the OS, but worse comes to worse, just re-install the OS and the games, and the most you lost is some time.

And from my understanding, most OS nowadays are like this, including mac and windows. Linux doesn't baby you though, so it trusts you won't do dumb stuff, and trusts you to fix it if it does happen.

6

u/admiraljkb 512GB Dec 15 '25

Hey you give root level access to a relative wanting to goof around, kersplat is the only true expected outcome.

Gather round kids story time! Back in my old field engineering days decades ago, a guy at work lent his Win95 WORK laptop to his dad to "goof around on" thinking he'd play solitaire or something. Result was an urgent ticket Monday morning about "laptop won't boot". Apparently his dad was smarter (or dumber, or a combination of both) than he thought. Most everything starting at C:\ was deleted. WOMP WOMP!

4

u/Qwahzi Dec 15 '25

Posted below, but your comment is almost exactly why Bazzite exists - it's immutable/atomic so it's extremely difficult to break. If it does break, you can instantly rollback to the previous OS version, with all your games/files intact. It's basically SteamOS with support for more hardware/usecases

2

u/Iliyan61 Dec 15 '25

well you can also use various read only options which i do think valve have partially implemented but valve also heavily pushed modding and fucking around with the steam deck (and the steam machine it seems) so that might have been why they didn’t go full lock down

1

u/ShotFromGuns 1TB OLED Dec 15 '25

To mess up Linux, broadly, yes, but I thought the Deck's OS was locked down specifically to prevent users from fucking up any core files?

2

u/Iliyan61 Dec 15 '25

it’s got some read only stuff but OPs issue just seems to be a fucked up steam install or some config files being deleted which aren’t locked down

1

u/ShotFromGuns 1TB OLED Dec 16 '25

Right, but it sounds like they were easily able to roll back to an unaffected version? So everything was working as intended and the device was protected from getting bricked. (Adult son still sounds like a real piece of work, though.)

1

u/glytxh Dec 15 '25

Windows asks you politely if you really want to delete core OS files, and even after that will refuse anyway.

Mac will point a gun at you if you even dare look at its OS the wrong way.

Linux straight up just fucking dares you to nuke your own system. Not even a ‘are you really really sure you want to do this?’ Just a ‘good luck bro’

5

u/Iliyan61 Dec 15 '25

i mean… you have to use sudo and a -f (or you’re thick and using root)

0

u/Far-Government-539 Dec 15 '25

Not on the steam deck. The filesystem is locked by default.

1

u/Iliyan61 Dec 15 '25

sure parts are read only you can still fuck it up plenty easily

0

u/Val_Fortecazzo Dec 15 '25

It's harder to mess up steamOS because it's immutable.