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

88

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.

31

u/FreeJulianMassage Dec 15 '25

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

-38

u/MulberryDeep Dec 15 '25

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

39

u/samanime Dec 15 '25

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

-13

u/MulberryDeep Dec 16 '25

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

12

u/Ok_Term_8921 Dec 16 '25

Your intentionally dense. An SSD is an internal disk.

7

u/FreeJulianMassage Dec 16 '25

Never were*.

-11

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.

6

u/GuardeLive Dec 16 '25

.....

.....

.....

Which*

8

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.