Docked Steam Deck/bazzite desktop tips?

[myxal]

Using bazzite on a desktop with controller attached (too lazy to disconnect).

I fired up Oxygen not Included yesterday, probably the first time straight from Steam's big picture (Plasma not running) - and got stuck almost immediately as the game triggered a text input (sensor settings). Hitting 'submit' in gamescope's textinput window applied the string, but didn't make its window, or the in-game window with the text input go away. Gamescope's text input could not be dismissed, none of the buttons were responding, even though the text field was. Had to switch to another VTY and kill the whole thing.

I'm guessing the SteamDeck=0 %command% tip I learned recently applies here as well. People who are playing on a similar setup, do you have any more suggestions how to make the game and steam behave? Or perhaps a way to recover from the stuck-input-box I missed?

[gigamoi]

Hi.

I don't have a steam deck nor use bazzite so I can't help you much but, just to give you a reference point, game runs fine out of the box on my kubuntu based machine. As you probably suspect already, your issue most likely comes from whatever steam deck/bazzite additional input layer you have in there.

[SharraShimada]

Suggestion: Use another linux distri. No i wont recommend anything specific, thats up to you. But Bazzite is, even they say so, not suited for gaming at all. You cant fix problems in a locked installation. You cant even update a driver and have to wait until the maintainer releases a new version of bazzite. Its just dumb in my eye.

Edited August 24, 2025 by SharraShimada

[blakemw]

16 hours ago, SharraShimada said:

Suggestion: Use another linux distri. No i wont recommend anything specific, thats up to you. But Bazzite is, even they say so, suited for gaming at all. You cant fix problems in a locked installation. You cant even update a driver and have to wait until the maintainer releases a new version of bazzite. Its just dumb in my eye.

Agreed. Maybe I'm dumb or biased, but when I tried Bazzite it was just horrible to try and tweak it. I figure it's fine if it does exactly what you want out of the box or are really into immutable but it's not fun otherwise, the online documentation is not good because it's a niche distro built on immutable fedora which is also fairly niche.

I would recommend CachyOS if you want maximum performance and to be able to say "I use Arch btw", it's really good and there's lots of documentation for Arch (which is generally applicable to CachyOS). Alternatively you can be an Ubuntu peasant (Ubuntu or some derivative), as there's tons of good documentation for Ubuntu (which is generally applicable to derivatives) and of any distro you're most likely to find your issue covered in the Ubuntosphere.

Edited August 24, 2025 by blakemw

[myxal]

 

On 8/23/2025 at 7:01 PM, SharraShimada said:

You cant even update a driver and have to wait until the maintainer releases a new version of bazzite. Its just dumb in my eye.

Driver for what? For most drivers in Linux (kernel modules), my rule of thumb is "don't touch it" - either get distro-approved way of installing latest stack (kernel, mesa, wayland, etc.), or just wait for the new driver to hit stable. This is not windows where stable ABI means you can mix and match driver releases and OS updates from entire generation. I see how out-of-tree drivers might be a problem on atomic/'immutable' distros specifically, but what hardware needs that these days?.. (Oh, right - nvidia. Welp, there's a reason everybody tells you to stay away when buying new hardware.)

FWIW I do have OpenSUSE TW for OS-level tweaking that Bazzite doesn't support and more tinker-friendly attitude. Haven't set up games on it, Bazzites good enough for that (and my tinkering hasn't yielded many improvements so far, lol).

Of the issues I've hit, none are bazzite specific, and searching/LLM-ing them doesn't yield anything arch-specific, or more likely, anything at all.

• AIO cooler's RGB - controlled by mobo's ARGB controller. OpenRGB are not tracking udev rules in the repo - the error message links to a 2+year-old 'stable' version doesn't set permissions on my controller's device nodes. Updated rules are supposed to be generated by the build process and there's a link in the readme to where the latest generated rules should be, but it's broken. So etiher way I have to edit the rules, works the same for bazzite as conventional distros. Even so, either I'm misunderstanding how ARGB control is supposed to work (never done it before), or the support is broken (can't control individual LEDs on exactly the output the AIO is plugged into).
• Realtek's audio codec. Credit to the arch community, it's where you find the kinds users who take this head-on: Patch QEMU to snoop on windows driver's handling of the HDA device, and re-play the commands on Linux. Sounds cool, not sure how useful those unmaintained patches are after 5+ years of qemu development. The version shipped with openSUSE comes with support for tracing a bunch of vfio_* events, but none match what's in the guide. It doesn't help that even on Windows the sound card's microphone barely works - I never got the OS to work either connection flawlessly in the same boot session - either the front or the back was borked, and when I enabled tracing, both were broken. Here was where Bbazziite had to step aside, as their qemu build doesn't support tracing any vfio_* events.
• Also installed Pop-OS! - is this still alive, even? Being ubuntu-based I'd expect a new LTS-based release by now, or at least HWE for the released one. Network doesn't work because of missing drivers (Realtek 2.5GbE). I could probably attach a USB NIC to download backports (does the package even included wired nic drivers?), but I wasn't bothered enough to try.

Edited August 25, 2025 by myxal

[int_ua]

Reported the issue here, vote with reactions I guess

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/12187

[myxal]

Thanks but isn't this a bug in ONI? Other games use the steam text input box correctly, where it disappears after hitting submit.

[int_ua]

3 hours ago, myxal said:

Thanks but isn't this a bug in ONI? Other games use the steam text input box correctly, where it disappears after hitting submit.

Maybe it can be fixed by Klei but I think it shouldn't be possible to put SteamOS in such state in the first place. Reporting it as an ONI bug might help, I will comment/confirm it too if you do it.