SteamDeckHomebrew
[Request] Safe mode
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- [x] I have searched existing issues
- [x] This issue is not a duplicate of an existing one
- [x] This is not a request for a plugin
Feature Request Description
Restart Decky without loading any third party plugins, so you can update or remove them
Further Description
If you have an plugin that causes issues & prevents major parts of the Steam UI working, you’ll get an error screen, which lets you restart Steam without Decky loaded at all, but then you can’t remove or update any plugins as well, Decky isn’t loaded, or update Decky itself which is handy, until the problem is with a plugin not Decky itself.
As far as I can tell, Decky provides no escape hatch for users stuck in this situation, other than to pull out their phone, and ugh, join yet another bloody Discord server and ask around and hope somebody is around to help.
It would be ideal to have a way to launch Steam without Decky just enough of Decky loaded so you can manage your installed plugins, but not actually load them and cause these issues.
Oh yes please. The recent Steam Client update from today f*ed up Decky for my Steam Decks and it is annoying to handle this while plugin devs are working on fixes.
This is a great idea, I think we definitely need features in Decky like this or #350 to handle misbehaving extensions in order to be able to update them, because the alternative is needing to remove all of them and add them back one by one, which is far from ideal.
i am also in need of this feature atm :)
If you're able to plug in a USB keyboard (anything that has a USB-A port and connects to USB-C shoudl work, like an OTG adapter, or a usb-c hub, or a dock) then you can hold Esc while the deck is booting up and it'll boot straight into desktop mode so you can uninstall deckyloader. i've had to do this before
i am also in need of this feature atm :)
If you're able to plug in a USB keyboard (anything that has a USB-A port and connects to USB-C shoudl work, like an OTG adapter, or a usb-c hub, or a dock) then you can hold Esc while the deck is booting up and it'll boot straight into desktop mode so you can uninstall deckyloader. i've had to do this before
This is a good workaround but I don't think this is a good alternative or replacement to the feature suggestion. This feature is literally being suggested so people don't have to completely uninstall Decky just to get rid of a single problematic plugin. I mean I'm probably not alone in thinking that Decky should have some guardrails so you don't have to completely uninstall it in case any plugins go awry.
seconded! i've seen people with straight up bricked systems and it'd be nice to just disable decky on boot
It would be nice to test if broken things are a result of plugins, or as a result of decky itself. It would also be nice to be able to disable plugins without having to remove them, and then just be able to disable half your plugins at once without having to go to desktop mode.
This should be a top priority. The latest Decky update didn't help at all, and even worse, my deck won't boot the OS anymore, even after performing the Reinstall SteamOS option in the Recovery Image. My system's effectively in a bricked state until I can get a storage device capable of backing up my data so I can wipe it.
Seconded!
At the very least, file permissions could be not so tight so that plugins could be deleted or moved without using the console. Doing that one by one for each plugin to weed out the problematic ones is needlessly tedious. ESPECIALLY if you don't have a physical keyboard, which not having to use a physical keyboard is a big aspect of a device like the Steam Deck.
If Decky can disable plugins while keeping your config intact via the installer, it would make sense to allow you do to that on a per-plugin basis if you're getting a crash so you can more easily disable the problematic ones.
Especially given how often this happens, I also think this should be top priority.
