Steam Deck

Warning: This article discusses use of the Steam Deck with plain Arch Linux, not SteamOS. While the latter is an Arch-based distribution, it has several packages that differ from the official repositories, and is not supported by the Arch Linux community.

This article or section needs expansion.

Reason: Mention opensd-git^AUR (Discuss in Talk:Steam Deck)

LCD models (Jupiter)
Hardware	PCI/USB ID	Working?
microSD card reader	`1217:8621`	Yes
WiFi	`10ec:c822`	Yes
GPU	`1002:163f`	Yes
Audio	`1002:1640`	Yes
Bluetooth	`13d3:3553`	Yes
Gyroscope	`28de:1205`	Yes
Touchpads	`28de:1205`	Yes
Touchscreen	`2808:1015`	Yes
Steam Deck controls	`28de:1205`	Yes

OLED models (Galileo)
Hardware	PCI/USB ID	Working?
microSD card reader	`1217:8621`	Yes
WiFi	`17cb:1103`	No
GPU	`1002:1435`	Yes
Audio	`1022:15e2`	No
Bluetooth	`17cb:1103`	No
Gyroscope	`28de:1205`	Yes
Touchpads	`28de:1205`	Yes
Touchscreen	`2808:1015`	Yes
Steam Deck controls	`28de:1205`	Yes

The Steam Deck is a gaming-focused handheld PC from Valve. Since it is completely unlocked and by design has full Linux driver compatibility, it can easily be used as an all-purpose handheld PC with Arch Linux.

Installation

A USB flash installation medium can be used through the microSD card slot or the USB-C port.

While booting up the deck, hold down Volume Down and press the Power buttons. Choose your Arch Linux installation medium.

Firmware

As of October 2022, fwupd does not support any devices in the Steam Deck. Updates for the firmware are provided through SteamOS.

Shortcuts

Hold down Volume Up and press the Power button to access the UEFI settings,
Hold down Volume Down and press the Power button to access the UEFI boot menu (called "Boot Manager" in Valve's documentation),
Hold down ⋯ ("Three Dots" button under the right touchpad) and press the Power button to access Valve's bootloader menu,
Hold down Volume Down+Power+⋯ ("Three Dots" button under the right touchpad) to reset the UEFI settings to their defaults (keep the two buttons other than Power held after the first blink of the LED: the LED will blink during the operation and stop once done, then release the buttons).

Advanced settings

Warning:

As opposed to regular UEFI settings available on consumer boards, there are no guardrails after following the instructions below: backup your firmware, it is possible to completely "brick" your device, which then requires an SPI chip programmer to fix.
While undervolting will at worst "brick" your device, overclocking or overvolting should be done with the usual caveats in mind.

AMD's CBS (Custom BIOS Settings) and PBS (Platform BIOS Settings) are not accessible by default, but can be unlocked (running the resulting binary will be silent and finish with a return code of 119) to have access to undervolting and overclocking options. These options are then visible when booting into the Steam Deck firmware, but there are restrictions on the TDP settings that can be overcome using a different method of loading the UEFI form browser.

A fix is needed for AMD Van Gogh APU PowerPlay limits to scale properly after higher frequencies are set when overclocking the CPU and GPU of the APU in the BIOS after unlocking it.

Wireless

As of mainline kernel version 6.6.2, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth only work on the LCD models. They can be made to work on the OLED models by using the neptune kernel from Valve's jupiter repository.

Audio

As of mainline kernel version 6.6.2, the built-in speakers, microphone, and headphone jack only work on the LCD models. On OLED models, they can be made to work with the neptune kernel from the jupiter repository, but this additionally requires manually installing the relevant firmware and ALSA configuration files from the steamdeck-dsp and alsa-ucm-conf packages from jupiter.

Tip: Audio defaults are very low in ALSA. For speakers, under the acp5x card, you will want to raise the following items.

Analog PCM
Digital
Digital PCM
Left Analog PCM
Left Digital PCM
Right Analog PCM
Right Digital PCM

Display

Orientation

On Wayland with GDM, the display and touchscreen work correctly in all orientations, without any tweaks. Depending on the model, the orientation may default to portrait but can be changed as normal in a desktop environment's settings.

On Xorg, a manual orientation fix may be needed depending on the display manager used. If the screen defaults to portrait, it can be rotated using xrandr.

$ xrandr -o right

The touchscreen can then be mapped to the proper orientation using xinput.

$ xinput --map-to-output 'pointer:FTS3528:00 2808:1015' eDP

To have this persist on reboots, put this in a shell script and add it to your window manager startup script.

Refresh rates

This article or section needs expansion.

Reason: Check which rates are auto-detected on the BOE OLED, experiment with forced KMS on both Samsung and BOE OLEDs, experiment with EDID editing. (Discuss in Talk:Steam Deck)

The Steam Deck's display supports a wide range of refresh rates, but display managers will not auto-detect most of them.

On LCD models, only 60Hz is auto-detected, but 50Hz works well when force-enabled via KMS:

video=eDP-1:800x1280M@50

On OLED models with the Samsung display, 90Hz and 60Hz are auto-detected.

Gamut

The OLED models are billed as HDR-capable and have a much wider gamut than sRGB, but this causes sRGB-targeting content, including most games, to appear greatly oversaturated. There is no way to reconfigure the display itself to better handle sRGB content (even on SteamOS, the "vibrancy" adjustment is only handled by gamescope). Fortunately, the display's EDID exposes fairly accurate color information and as such GNOME and KDE will auto-generate an ICC profile that can be used to good effect absent per-device calibration. This profile can even be converted to a LUT via displaycal and injected into games through vkbasalt^AUR.

Fan controls

The Steam Deck's fan control can be enhanced by a daemon provided in Valve's jupiter repository, but are fully functional without it.

If you are using a mainline kernel, you need patches from Valve's kernel to expose the corresponding ACPI functionality, for example by installing the user-adapted jupiter-dkms^AUR ACPI platform driver in DKMS form.

Hardware buttons

Volume up and down buttons

With acpid you can map your volume buttons. Using PipeWire and pipewire-alsa, you can add the following to /etc/acpi/handler.sh and then restart acpid.service:

/etc/acpi/handler.sh

button/volumeup)
    case "$2" in
        VOLUP) amixer set Master 2%+ ;;
        *)   logger "ACPI action undefined: $2" ;;
    esac
    ;;
button/volumedown)
    case "$2" in
        VOLDN) amixer set Master 2%- ;;
        *)   logger "ACPI action undefined: $2" ;;
    esac
;;

Note: Without pipewire-alsa there will not be a Master item. To use pactl instead of amixer, you would need to configure your system.

Power button

The power button is handled by systemd-logind. By default a press will shut your system down. To change this behavior to suspend on press instead, add the following option in /etc/systemd/logind.conf and restart systemd-logind.service:

HandlePowerKey=suspend

Mimic SteamOS behavior

Auto-login

To set your system to automatically login without password, you can use any display manager and configure it to do so, for example LightDM.

Big Picture Networking

To enable Steam Big Picture networking support, you must use NetworkManager.

Steam client integration

You can launch steam with the -steamos launch option to enable fullscreen UI elements such as login and client updates.