Steam Deck

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A place to discuss and support all things Steam Deck.

Replacement for r/steamdeck_linux.

As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title

The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.

Some more Steam Deck specific flairs:
[Boot Screen] - Custom boot screens/videos.
[Selling] - If you are selling your deck.

These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.

Rules:

Follow the rules of Sopuli
Posts must be related to the Steam Deck in an obvious way.
No piracy, there are other communities for that.
Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
Have fun.

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founded 3 years ago

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Had to reimage my deck; impressed by how well a backup of my home folder carried over system and app settings (lemmy.world)

submitted 13 hours ago by takeheart@lemmy.world to c/steamdeck@sopuli.xyz

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So after I last updated my deck I got a generic error message. No biggie. But then suddenly on the next reboot: stuck at the boot logo. Tried lots of things, no way of getting back in. Not with the current kernel, not with the previous one. Really annoying as I use my deck as a general purpose computer too.

So I created a recovery USB. Reinstalling the OS (which attempts to preserve user data and games) failed silently. So I reluctantly copied my entire home folder to an external drive and went with the nuclear option of completely reimaging the internal drive. After steam os finished installation I restored my entire home folder from the backup and restarted the machine.

I was expecting to having to manually reinstall and reconfigure so many apps and settings. And was verily not looking forward to it. But lo and behold: pretty much everything worked just the way it did before the fumbled system update. My desktop layout and window arrangements remained the same, settings and preferences were preserved, it didn't even log me out of email account. No manual imports of settings required. I had to reinstall most apps via the Discover store first, that much is true. But that took just a couple of minutes.

So yeah, really happy with how that went. Last time I had to reinstall everything on a Windows system it was a major pain as settings are all over the place (on the system drive, in the registry, inside appdata, inside the my documents folder, etc). I guess it has to do with the Linux philosophy of "everything is a file".

In the future I'll actually move my /home/ folder to my SSD card so that if this ever happens again the process is even less painful.

PSA: when you backup your home folder make sure to include all the hidden folders and files (anything starting with a dot like the .config folder).

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[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 1 points 5 hours ago

You don't even need that. I have switched between several distros and always kept the same filesystem and just deleted everything but the /home folder. No problems. Every installer supported that.