Steam Deck
Hardware | PCI/USB ID | Working? |
---|---|---|
microSD card reader | 1217:8621 |
Yes |
WiFi (LCD/Jupiter) | 10ec:c822 |
Yes |
WiFi (OLED/Galileo) | 17cb:1103 |
No |
GPU (LCD/Jupiter) | 1002:163f |
Yes |
GPU (OLED/Galileo) | 1002:1435
| |
Audio | 1022:15e2 |
Yes |
Bluetooth (LCD/Jupiter) | 13d3:3553 |
Yes |
Bluetooth (OLED/Galileo) | 17cb:1103 |
No |
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.
Accessibility
The firmware has white text on black background, which should be fine with OCR. Blind users may still want to request the help of a sighted person to change firmware settings or selecting a boot device.
Navigation can be done with a keyboard and mouse, or the physical buttons (DPad
and A
,B
,X
,Y
) and tactile screen of the device.
There is a single LED at the top of the device, but it does not provide diagnostic codes.
Installation
You can install Arch Linux from the SteamOS "Desktop Mode", although this way of installing is more involved than using a USB flash installation medium through the microSD card slot or the USB-C port.
If you choose to use an Arch Linux installation medium, hold down Volume Down
and press the Power
buttons to boot on it when starting up the deck.
Firmware
fwupd does not support any devices in the Steam Deck. Updates for the firmware are provided through SteamOS.
For the LCD models, firmware F7A0131 is the first to enable support for the amd_pstate
CPU frequency scaling driver.
Shortcuts
- Hold down
Volume Up
and press thePower
button to access the UEFI settings, - Hold down
Volume Down
and press thePower
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 thePower
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 thanPower
held after the first blink of the LED: the LED will blink during the operation and stop once done, then release the buttons).
Wireless
Since 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
Since 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.
- 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
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 vkbasaltAUR.
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 steamdeck-dkmsAUR ACPI platform driver in DKMS form.
Function keys
Key | Visible?1 | Marked?2 | Effect |
---|---|---|---|
Volume Down |
Yes | Yes | VolumnDown
|
Volume Up |
Yes | Yes | VolumnUp
|
Power |
Yes3 | Yes | XF86PowerOff
|
Select |
Yes | Yes | Tab
|
DPad Up |
Yes | Yes | Up
|
DPad Left |
Yes | Yes | Left
|
DPad Right |
Yes | Yes | Right
|
DPad Down |
Yes | Yes | Down
|
Start |
Yes | Yes | Escape
|
A |
Yes | Yes | Enter
|
B |
Yes | Yes | Escape
|
X |
No | Yes | |
Y |
No | Yes | |
Steam |
No | Yes | |
⋯ "Three dots" |
No | Yes | |
L1 |
No | Yes | |
L2 |
Yes | Yes | Right click
|
R1 |
No | Yes | |
R2 |
Yes | Yes | Left click
|
R4 |
No | Yes | |
R5 |
No | Yes | |
L4 |
No | Yes | |
L5 |
No | Yes |
- The key is visible to
xev
and similar tools. - The physical key has a symbol on it, which describes its function.
- systemd-logind handles this by default.
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.
On-screen keyboard
See KDE#Plasma Mobile, GNOME on-screen keyboard or List of applications/Utilities#On-screen keyboards for information on how to set up an on-screen keyboard.
Alternative Steam Deck controller driver
You can use sc-controllerAUR as an alternative to the Steam client controller driver.
If the C0rn3j fork listed above gives you trouble with the right touchpad only working as a joystick mouse, or with the right joystick refusing to work ingame, try the kozec beta branch.
This is useful if you wish to use complex profiles without using Steam, for non-Steam games, or as a fix for games that send double inputs.
You can use this while using Steam, just ensure the profile you wish to use is selected before launching a game. If you want to go back to the Steam driver, disable sc-controller from the UI using the green button on the top left and if Steam is already open it will automatically switch.