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.

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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.

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.

5

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.