Please mention whether you’re on stable, beta, or a different update channel. There’s a good chance most bugs on the stable update channel have been fixed already, so anyone on the beta update can let people know if the bug they’re facing is already fixed.
There’s still some crackling audio on resume from suspend, occasionally. Would love to see that bug ironed out completely.
I’d recommend trying the “Pause games” decky plugin, it can pause the game process immediately before suspending which fixes most of the audio bugs.
On beta, the two bugs that annoy me the most are both related to docked play.
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The first one is that pressing home + A on a controller to open the QAM will open it for just a moment before opening the full steam overlay instead. It’s acting like it’s counting it as two home presses.
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Second one is that every SteamOS update somehow messes up my bluetooth pairing for controllers. The controllers are still listed, but won’t connect. Have to forget them and repair before they’ll work again.
I have these exact same issues, never heard of someone else experiencing them.
I’d say the Bluetooth issues, and the inability for me to turn the steam deck on when docked at a distance (without extras) are my biggest pet peeves right now. Otherwise I’m a happy camper.
The Home + A is annoying, but I usually get it after a few attempts.
I would love to see a Bluetooth headset fully working.
Interesting. In my experience when on any Linux distribution I have to decide if I want good Audio quality and not use the microphone of the headset or if I want to use a worse audio code but activate the microphone. I thought this still was a widespread issue, or did I miss something?
I’m a musician who is just getting started producing on Linux. I haven’t had issues with audio aside from my audio interface not being compatible due to have software control for hardware which i hated anyways. Using a focuarite interface now and its been good. Pulseaudio has been pretty solid for a while now which is what the steamdeck uses from what i can see online.
Both my mic and headphones have worked great with all distros I’ve tried. That said, sometimes stuff just doesn’t wanna play well with Linux, even if it seems like it should and im typically not using bluetooth devices on Linux for audio so im not as familiar with issues they may have.
You might try another set of headphones to see if its an issue with the headohones themselves. And or, try them with a different distro/pc because it may be a issue with the deck itself.
This is a Bluetooth issue, not Linux or Deck specific. When microphone is enabled on a headset, Bluetooth will switch to a different audio codec. That codec supports one output channel (microphone) and one input channel, so it will be mono audio. The sound quality is good enough for audio calls but not for anything else. The only thing you can do is to disable the microphone. Or, you can do what people have done for couple decades now: complain at Bluetooth Special Interest Group until they improve the standard.
- random crashes
- not having audio in the startup animation
If you turn off your deck being online and then turn it on again somewhere with no internet access, sometimes it will not get past the “looking for updates” screen before loading steam. I’ve had that happen more than enough times. Only way to exit from that loop is connecting to internet, but that’s not always possible.
