this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
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Steam Deck

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desktop user password issues. can't do squat in desktop. (discuss.tchncs.de)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de to c/steamdeck@sopuli.xyz
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I have the one default user "deck" in desktop mode. It looks like it's set to a standard account type.

I can't add a user or change this without a pop up asking "Authentication is required to change user data" and wanting "authenticating as root" password.

Leaving it blank fails. Putting in my sudo password that I have set and at this point double checked multiple times from within Konsole fails as well. I'll go in Konsole and type "passwd" then I'll type the current password and it will say "changing password for deck" and the change works fine. I'll close Konsole, but still have the same issue outside of konsole. Entering a password fails when trying to modify user or update anything.

I can't update anything on desktop now, and I can't figure out what the heck the issue with it is.

Does anyone have a clue? Thanks

Edit\update: Tried a million things. Couldn't get back root access. Made a steam OS boot image on a micro SD card and used it in the steam deck to re-install steam OS but keep my downloads\user files etc. This worked and got back "deck" as admin account as it should be. All better.

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[–] NateNate60@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago (3 children)

I'm not sure exactly what causes this, but you can work around it as long as you can actually run commands as root (i.e. using sudo) in the terminal.

The command to add a new user is adduser.

The command to add a user to the administrators group (i.e. give them the ability to use sudo) is usermod -aG wheel.

These commands should be run as root by prepending sudo.

[–] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I'm trying to sudo in a user or elevate deck to admin. Either way if I try to sudo anything, I get asked " [sudo]password for deck: " and when I put in a password it says " deck is not in the sudoers file. "

So I haven't been able to do anything worthwhile, yet.

[–] NateNate60@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

If you know the root password, then you can switch to the account called root using the su root command.

In Linux there is always a user called root, which is the only account allowed to perform most system management tasks. The sudo command just executes a commend as root. Most of the time you don't need to actually sign into the root account, just use sudo, but you can actually sign into it in the terminal as it is a real bona fide user account.

The sudoers file is located at /etc/sudoers. Do keep in mind that this file should not be edited directly. You can use the cat command which will print the content of a file to the terminal. So try cat /etc/sudoers.

[–] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 day ago

I'm unable to su root or access the sudoers file. I'm going to try using a steam os image file on a flash drive to reinstall my steam deck os.