First boot of the Deck UI hanged on "Update complete, launching Steam..."

Hello! A few weeks ago I installed Bazzite on a desktop PC. I went with the

bazzite-deck-stable

bazzite-deck-stable

bazzite-deck-stable

bazzite-deck-stable image, version

41.20250106.2

41.20250106.2

41.20250106.2

41.20250106.2. After going through the installer (and a secure boot MOK enrollment), I got a bunch of progress bars. However, after waiting through them all, the animation just froze and it has been sitting like this ever since*

Well, almost. Turns out it's only Steam that hanged (or maybe some other thing inside gamescope). After a while systemd normally suspends the machine. But also switching VTs works so I can just log in on a second one and get a shell.

I am sure that simply rebooting will make the problem go away. But while it is in this state, is there anything I can check to figure out why it's frozen?

Yes. I was busy with other things and totally not putting this off. I swear.

HikariKnight•2/8/25, 6:55 PM

that image you showed is 100% steam, if rebooting doesnt get you into gamemode then go into TTY and run steamos-session-select desktopsteamos-session-select desktop and then open the terminal there and run

ujust fix-reset-steam

ujust fix-reset-steam

you need the desktop for that command as it will reinstall steam and remove the broken files and try save as much userdata as possible (like game saves, game installs, etc)

mskiptrOP•2/8/25, 7:03 PM

There's no user data as this is a fresh install

Mmskiptr There's no user data as this is a fresh install

HikariKnight•2/8/25, 7:03 PM

im just explaining the command

HHikariKnight im just explaining the command

mskiptrOP•2/8/25, 7:04 PM

Ah alright

HikariKnight•2/8/25, 7:04 PM

since we tell people to run it when steam is having weird issues and they go "but what about my games" and such

HikariKnight•2/8/25, 7:05 PM

but yeah run the ujust command i gave from the desktop and login to steam when it appears again

HikariKnight•2/8/25, 7:05 PM

once logged in, try returning to gamemode and see if it behaves

HikariKnight•2/8/25, 7:05 PM

sadly we cant auto fix steam crapping itself at random on first boot :clueless:

HikariKnight•2/8/25, 7:05 PM

good thing it doesnt happen very often

mskiptrOP•2/8/25, 7:08 PM

Thanks for the tips! For now I am trying to figure out the root cause, but once I do (or when I give up) they will definitely be helpful.

mskiptrOP•2/8/25, 7:08 PM

I'm currently looking through the logs.

journalctl

journalctl

shows a lot of warnings and errors but so far nothing seems related.

mskiptrOP•2/8/25, 7:10 PM

It's nice that even the progress metrics from Steam are logged tho!

HikariKnight•2/8/25, 7:10 PM

my guess the root cause is steam just crapped itself during its own install/update process and need to be reinstalled

HikariKnight•2/8/25, 7:11 PM

also any warnings/errors about extest can be ignored

HikariKnight•2/8/25, 7:11 PM

those are normal, its just complaining that the process isnt 32bit/64bit native and you will always get one or the other error

mskiptrOP•2/8/25, 7:19 PM

It seems to be just the UI that broke and the rest of Steam is alive in the background. I've just found logs of it downloading a new update today.

HikariKnight•2/8/25, 7:20 PM

do you have more than 1 screen?

HikariKnight•2/8/25, 7:20 PM

what hardware

mskiptrOP•2/8/25, 7:21 PM

@HikariKnight Do you know which process specifically is responsible for that image I sent?

Mmskiptr @HikariKnight Do you know which process specifically is responsible for that ima...

HikariKnight•2/8/25, 7:22 PM

yes, its called

steam

steam

HHikariKnight do you have more than 1 screen?

mskiptrOP•2/8/25, 7:23 PM

It's just this one monitor (connected via DP to AMD RX 550). The CPU is Intel.

HikariKnight•2/8/25, 7:25 PM

try add this to ~/.config/environment.d/10-gamescope-session.conf~/.config/environment.d/10-gamescope-session.conf

ENABLE_GAMESCOPE_WSI=0

ENABLE_GAMESCOPE_WSI=0

HikariKnight•2/8/25, 7:25 PM

and reboot

mskiptrOP•2/8/25, 7:26 PM

rn_image_picker_lib_temp_9dfcdda0-0545-43fd-bbf8-30fbb25719f6.jpg

HikariKnight•2/8/25, 7:26 PM

if that does not help idk, will have to dig up my rx 570 test card or ask @Valerie to nicely to test

Valerie•2/8/25, 7:26 PM

I can test my 580 tomorrow

HikariKnight•2/8/25, 7:27 PM

polaris cards has been rough in the past but the issue was fixed, so might be a regression

HikariKnight•2/8/25, 7:33 PM

but then you got a black screen and the whole system froze when it was polaris that had issues

mskiptrOP•2/8/25, 7:35 PM

Thanks for all the help offered, but maybe I haven't expressed myself clearly enough. I don't want to needlessly waste your time on this, so let me say that a bit more bluntly:

I expect this is an ephemeral problem that will go away after a reboot. But I still want to investigate it a bit in case it can be fixed easily. If you have ideas, do share them. But do not waste your time trying to troubleshoot it remotely! It is not worth it.

HikariKnight•2/8/25, 7:36 PM

thing is that there are only 3 things that it can be

HikariKnight•2/8/25, 7:37 PM

steam crapping itself
gamescope regression (would affect more people with the same hardware)
amdgpu driver issue (would affect more people with the same hardware)

HikariKnight•2/8/25, 7:39 PM

and if its a regression you can just brh rebase stable-41.20241104brh rebase stable-41.20241104 to go back to an older image (i choose this one because its around the time i still used my polaris card so i know it will work for polaris cards) and then just stay there until we figure out where the regression is and report it to the right place and wait for upstream to fix

mskiptrOP•2/8/25, 7:39 PM

I mainly expect the first, so my plan is to stare at the logs a little more, maybe take a crashdump of the sus processes, or simply go on "a killing spree" to hopefully see which part of that tree above was responsible. After that I'll try out your suggestions that involve reboots to rule out or confirm the other two options.

HikariKnight•2/8/25, 7:41 PM

also that image i used as a rebase example, is the oldest one in the archive atm so it will be the next one to be pruned, you can use brh listbrh list to see all image updates for the last 90 ish days

mskiptrOP•2/8/25, 8:11 PM

Is graphical.targetgraphical.target relevant for the Deck UI or gamescope?

mskiptrOP•2/8/25, 8:16 PM

Because it's only being reached once bazzite-flatpak-manager.servicebazzite-flatpak-manager.service finishes, and that triggers bazzite-tdpfix.servicebazzite-tdpfix.service which in turn seems to make one of the earlier warnings (about

sudo

sudo

refusing to let teetee write into /sys/**/hwmon1/power{1,2}_cap/sys/**/hwmon1/power{1,2}_cap) finally go away.

HikariKnight•2/8/25, 8:31 PM

bazzite-tdpfix.service fixes steam locking random gpus to 15W tdp

HikariKnight•2/8/25, 8:32 PM

and it doesnt even use tee

HikariKnight•2/8/25, 8:37 PM

steam however will be spamming 15W with tee to the power cap if it is allowed to

HikariKnight•2/8/25, 8:37 PM

the tdpfix stops that on affected hardware

HikariKnight•2/8/25, 8:38 PM

graphical.target means that whatever service requires the graphics to load first

HHikariKnight the tdpfix stops that on affected hardware

mskiptrOP•2/8/25, 8:47 PM

Yes. When steam is not busy with downloading its updates, there are a lot of failed attempts to use sudo ("$USER : a password is required ; PWD=/var/home/$USER/.local/share/Steam ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/use/bin/tee /sys/class/hwmon1/power?_cap"). They stop once the bazzite-flatpak-managerbazzite-flatpak-manager service is done and graphical.targetgraphical.target is reached. So maybe that fixup should be applied earlier in the boot process

HikariKnight•2/8/25, 8:49 PM

cant do it earlier

HikariKnight•2/8/25, 8:49 PM

it is as early as it can be without bricking your system

Mmskiptr Yes. When steam is not busy with downloading its updates, there are a lot of fai...

mskiptrOP•2/8/25, 8:51 PM

Or maybe not. It seems there are more of those messages from sudo later on…

HHikariKnight it is as early as it can be without bricking your system

mskiptrOP•2/8/25, 8:53 PM

Does it depend on Flatpaks being up to date? Because that is the only thing that holds up the graphicalgraphical target.

HHikariKnight graphical.target means that whatever service requires the graphics to load first

mskiptrOP•2/8/25, 8:54 PM