This guide was created to run the steam deck ui on a linux desktop before valve officially updated big picture mode for the steam client. This guide no longer serves any purpose.
Big Picture Mode
- The steam client now officially uses the steam deck ui (gamepad ui) for big picture mode.
- A reversed engineered version of valves steam deck OS
- A low maintenance arch based distro specializing in running valves big picture mode
- Run steam in a separate compositor session
- My use case: Continue using your computer for productivity while a game is being streamed using steam in home streaming.
This is an unofficial short guide on running Steam Decks new UI on Manjaro. I am kind of a linux noob, so forgive me if I get a few things wrong in this guide. Also, I have not fully tested everything so there may be some weird issues that I have overlooked.
Link to reddit discussion post:
Specs tested on:
- CPU: i5 4670k
- RAM: 16gb Corsair
- GPU: 5700xt Power Color Red Dragon
- Monitor: Ultrawide 1440x3440
Note: This guide may or may not work with an Nvidia graphics card. Try at your own risk.
- Download manjaro kde
- Flash the image to a USB using 'BalenaEtcher'
- Install to a free partition on your PC
Please note: this guide assumes you use the open source
drivers for an AMD card.
Open konsole
from the applications menu and run the following commands:
- Update packages with
pacman -Syu
- Install
gamescope
usingpacman -S gamescope
Note: This part may be un-necessary. I do not know if this guide will work with
steam-manjaro
. My assumption is that steam-native
is more likely to guarantee that the deck ui has the libraries it needs to run, but I honestly do not know if that is the case.- Uninstall
steam-manjaro
using pacman -Rs steam-manjaro
- Install steam-native
using pacman -S steam-native
Update: The pre-installed steam-manjaro
is the recommended package to use to prevent library compatibility issues. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Steam/Troubleshooting#Steam_native_runtime
Once all the packages are installed, reboot your computer for changes to take effect.
Run steam
for the first time to allow it to update
- Run
steam
in the command line - OR click on the
steam
launcher in the applications menu
Login into steam and go to settings -> Steam Play
and click Enable Steam Play for all other titles
At this point, you should test that games are running properly with proton on steam. You can:
- Download a game and just run it
- Follow the guide below on loading games from an NTFS hard drive (note: it is highly recommended to use Ext4 to store your games)
Once steam is launching games without any issues, exit out of steam
and move on to the next step
Initialize the deck ui:
- Run
steam -steamos3 -gamepadui -steamdeck -steampal
in the command line - Follow through the deck ui's on screen first time setup
- Near the end of the setup, the deck ui will complain that the setup cannot continue
- Exit out of steam again
- Hit
alt+tab
to gain access back to the desktop - Hit
ctl+c
in the terminal to stop steam from running
- Hit
Run the working deck ui:
- Run
gamescope -e -- steam -steamos -gamepadui
- Steam should start running with the new deckui
- Note: You should specificy the gamescope resolution using the
-w -h -W -H
commands. Otherwise steam will default to a resolution that I am assuming is the decks resolution.
- Please check the
gamescope
github for all the flags! https://github.com/Plagman/gamescope - Without the
gamescope
compositor running, you will get weird graphical glitches in the deck ui (you can see the desktop when you open the left hand side menu, you cannot open the steam overlay in game) - You must run
gamescope
with the-e
flag. This enables steam integration with gamescope. If you do not do this, then games will just show a black screen when attempting to run them. Source: ValveSoftware/gamescope#388 - You can run
gamescope
with the-w -h -W -H
flags to specify the resolution of steam and games. - You can use the
-b
command for borderless mode, and the-f
command for full screen mode. - You can use the
-U
command to enable AMD FSR 1.0, and the-r
command to set the frame limit. By default, the framerate limit is unlimited.
Loading existing games onto Steam:
- If you are dualbooting, you can load your existing games into steam. However, if the drive containing your games is formatted as NTFS, steam cannot load the games unless you first fix some issues.
- First: Make windows unlock the hard drives write access
- Disable fast boot in the bios
- Boot into windows, login, then shutdown
- Now, you should be able to create folders on your hard drive in linux using dolphin wihtout any issues
- Second: Update the UUID settings in linux for your hard drive
- Follow this guide: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Using-a-NTFS-disk-with-Linux-and-Windows
- This should allow steam to now launch your games properly
- Third: Add the games folder to steam
- Rename your steam folder on your hard drive to
SteamPlay
- Launch steam normally (no deck ui commands)
- Go to
settings -> download -> steam folder
and select your hard drive - Steam should automatically find the
SteamPlay
folder and load your games
- Rename your steam folder on your hard drive to
- At this point, steam should automatically start a bunch of downloads. Steam needs to get additional files to allow games to work on linux. For now, I suggest pausing all downloads except for a couple games you want to test, and allow steam to download the SteamPlay compatibility tools (Steamworks Common, Steam Runtime Soldier, Proton).
Gamemode:
- Game mode optimizes the OS to allow for better gaming performance
- Install
gamemode
and run steam withgamemoderun
in the command line - You can also flag games in steam to run with
gamemoderun
- Game mode information:
Running steam exclusively:
- I believe that there is a way to disable plasma from running on login and instead run steam only. Doing this would offer a bit more performance as only the gamescope compositor would be running instead of kwin and plasma running in the background. One way to test that this is possible is by switching to a different console using
ctl+alt+f1
. Then rungamescope -e -- steam -steamos -gamepadui
Glorious Eggroll Proton:
- You can use GE Proton if you want. The tool at https://github.com/AUNaseef/protonup can help you download the latest GE proton versions. (you can install protonup from the AUR using yay)
Windows:
- Steams menu overlay did not work for me in Windows 10 when a game was running
- The steam controller did not work in games on Windows 10 with the deck ui running
- The steam controller could not be configured on Windows 10 with the deck ui running
Linux:
- Various settings in the deck ui menu do not work
- Do not play with the deck ui's settings! They may possibly break you steam install. (I believe developer mode will break steam)
- Clicking
Switch to desktop
button in the decks ui's power menu does not work. Instead, hitalt+tab
to escape back to the desktop. Clicking theThis only seems to occur when using wayland.sleep
button in the deck ui's power menu sleeps the computer. However, my computer crashes when attempting to wake back up.- Steams store can look a bit glitchy at weird resolutions like 3440x1440.
- Opening up the left hand menu in the deck ui will make the background go black. The correct behavior should blur the background. You can instead run
-steamos3
which will enable background blurring, but it may cause the left hand menu to not scale correctly making buttons hidden off the screen (the menu gets borked if you change the resolution parameters for gamescope). - The battery indicator does not show up on desktops, but may show on laptops.
This means that on desktops you cannot access the right hand menu which would allow you to access your steam friends list.You can still access the battery indicator menu by pressing Home + A for Steam/Xbox controllers, or Home + X for Playstation controllers.
Other:
- On my laptop, it seems to work with Nvidia cards if you run
prime-run steam -steamos -gamepadui
but it runs at a low framerate. This may because I ran withoutgamescope
. - In the regular steam app, you can enable hardware acceleration
settings -> Interface
. However, I do not know if this affects the deck ui's performance.
Thanks for this. It works well for me on arch. I can run it on tty2 (ctrl+alt+2), as tty1 is in use.
One thing I would note is that installing gamescope, gamemode and lib32-gamemode seemed to break controller support in game even when launching from desktop as usual (it worked in the deck ui), but a reboot fixed it.