Various issues on a Steam Deck OLED after a fresh Bazzite install
First off, in desktop mode the screen just... Shuts off, randomly. I still get sounds when I press the volume buttons and the track pads still give feedback and if I wait long enough it'll come back on, but yeah. (EDIT: I have been provided a possible workaround for this one)
Secondly, the randomized Wi-Fi MAC address thing plays absolute havoc with my DHCP server and I can't figure out how to turn it off.
Thirdly, when I was trying to install all my games again that I had before I installed Bazzite, I found that the ones I had on the microSD from before were behaving.. Oddly. Like one had an update and the update seemed to go okay going through downloading and patching just fine, but it got to "installing" and just got stuck at 0%. And then when I tried to pause or stop the download or verify the game files Steam just seemed to get completely stuck. Even rebooting got stuck in the Shutting Down Steam screen and I had to hard power off the system.
Fourth, after having some similar problems with other games I decided to try to format the microSD card, but when I did it from game mode it would complete the formatting and then say the device needed to be formatted before being used, not letting me actually use it.
Fifth, when I finally got it to acknowledge the microSD card again, which I did by going into desktop mode, noticing it was definitely already formatted, and adding it manually to steam's storage list, it seems to work but re-downloading that same game I was having trouble with it's downloading in weird bursts.
So far I'm not really too happy with my freshly installed Bazzite experience and I'm kind of sad about it because I really like the idea of it, it seems like it's basically SteamOS but better, but...
21 Replies
the mac address is not randomized by default, you can go into the wifi settings and set the mac address to whatever you want or empty it to use the adapters mac address
Weird, because I didn't change anything and ip addr shows it being randomized
for the sdcard, i have no issues with my sdcards so there i can only guess possible issue with the sdcard or its not a1 or a2 ranked
Specifically it shows "link/ether (some randomized stuff) brd (the usual ff:ff:ff) permaddr (my actual mac address)"
Also Bazzite 40 is based on Fedora 40 right? Fedora 40 does randomize wifi macs by default.
oh thats funny, the gui is lying.
we dont do anything special its 99% fedora defaults
I suppose I can just force my actual MAC in the cloned Mac address in the GUI? There's guides for how to disable it for fedora I found on Google but they involve modifying something in /usr/lib and I figured that'd be somewhat no go on a mostly immutable distro
if the same location in /etc exists then /etc takes priority
like /usr/lib/systemd --> /etc/systemd
Ahh, nice
since a lot of guides have you edit systemd files in /usr/lib/systemd for whatever reason when its not the right way to do it
what is the file they need you to edit?
/usr/lib/NetworkManager/conf.d/22-wifi-mac-addr.conf
copy the file to the /etc version of the path and do the changes
then follow the rest of the guide
think that should work
Alright, thanks
Re the microSD thing, I hope it's not a case that the card is just coincidentally failing, 512gb microSDs aren't exactly cheap. I've seen plenty of microSDs fail rapidly from my days screwing around with Pis tho so I certainly wouldn't count it out as a possibility
Thanks for all your help and patience
yeah i hope it isnt the case but its not something i can replicate myself so all i can do is warrant a guess based on the behavior you described
also when it comes to reformating the sdcard, the automounter from steamos has a tendency to remount the card as soon as you try to reformat it. i believe kyle wrote a message long ago on how to turn off the sdcard automounting temporarily but i cant find it
Apologies for my initial downer attitude, the screen blanking and not being able to get it back except by waiting a seemingly random amount of time was really frustrating
the screen blanking is a fairly new issue, i have a PR up to automatically apply the workaround on handhelds (since i cant replicate on desktop and laptops and VMs) at least until we figure out the cause
It's not doing that anymore since the workaround so I'm grateful
glad that works, took a while for me to notice it was the screen idle causing the issues and not sleep itself
could the screen issue you were getting @Dizzy be similar to the one I was getting here? https://discord.com/channels/1072614816579063828/1276710673149198477
never was able to figure it out and kyle could never reproduce it
though i guess mine is slightly diffrent in that the screen never recovers until i put the deck to sleep and then wake it up
Not sure if only because I was able to get into desktop mode and use it enough to turn off the power management setting HikariKnight advised me to turn off and that seems to have fixed it
Just wanted to report copying that conf.d file from usr/lib to etc and editing it so it said "preserve" instead of "stable-ssid" successfully turned off the randomized MAC in both game and desktop mode
Also my microSD card seems to have... Randomly started working right again? The particular game that had caused the big issue before with steam freezing up trying to install patches and etc was reinstalled to it after the reformat and while it did kind of chug installing it, it loads and runs fine.
So that's pretty much all my issues either resolved or just "a known issue y'all are working on" and worked around
Thanks again for everyone's help
Have you tried turning off the screen sleep feature in the kde settings?
they did this before making this thread and also talked about in this thread