Common Problems In Desktop Mode

Overview of this Page
This page contains possible solutions to problems you may meet while in the desktop environment of the SteamDeck.

My screen is black and there is some white text
If your screen looks like the following: it is likely that you have pressed ctrl+alt+function2-7 inadvertently. To get back to where you were, press ctrl+alt+f1. If this does not work, you have likely stopped or crashed the desktop environment KDE Plasma. To restart it, you must first log back in with your username and password on this black screen. note that when typing the password, the password will not appear, but it is actually still being typed. After, type `sudo systemctl start sddm` to start the desktop environment again.

Everything is frozen
There are a few ways to attempt to solve this. There may be an application hitting your system hard with a lot of work to do which may cause slowdowns, you may want to use a system monitoring utility like `htop`, `ksysguard` or any other application to check-up on what is using up the system's resources.

The following will help if the desktop environment itself is hanging. If there is another application causing slowdowns, these methods will not work.

1. Press alt+f2, and type in `kwin_x11 --replace` and hit enter.

2. Press alt+f2, to open krunner, if this pops up, type in `kquitapp5 plasmashell && kstart5 plasmashell`. This command should restart the environment. You can also try to open terminal to restart the desktop environment if krunner is not opening. If you that doesn't work, see the next solution

3. Press ctrl+alt+f2 and login. Then type `sudo systemctl restart display-manager`. This method will cause you to lose the windows that you have been working with, but it should work.