Yes, it breaks.
this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2026
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Steam Hardware
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Adding this here but also addressing what the other commenter said: it can break but my personal experience over the past 2 years is that it rarely does. I can only remember one occasion where I needed to reinstall it and that was very recent.
But I am on Steam stable, I only use a few decky plugins, like css loader, emudecky and I don't even remember what else, nothing with system access.
So this will vary with what you use it for.
It did for me when i ran beta which they warn about. Almost hosed it one time and that was the final straw.
I don't know about steam beta, but I have not had any problems with Decky Loader itself. The ProtonDB badges plugin broke once after a stable steam update in all the time I have used it.
Use Stable Steam. Before any version update I disable SteamGridDB, as this one is prone to breaking.
I stopped using CSS loader since we have Big Art Mode as an option now, which also caused crashes on occasion.
You could add the Decky installer package (might be the wrong word here) to Steam from Desktop mode to run a reinstall without going to Desktop mode for convenience. Or more future-proofed, use this.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SteamDeckHomebrew/decky-installer/main/cli/install_release.sh
I'm mainly interested into showing the ProtonDB rating. But I don't want to use Stable Steam.
Just a heads up, LSFG-VK combined with PowerTools can give you a major FPS boost in a bunch of games making them enjoyable not just playable. IMO must haves on the deck.
I’ve had issues with that plugin before, during 3.6 I want to say.
Up to you.
If an update to SteamOS does bork your system, you can always roll back.
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/1b71-edf2-eb6d-2bb3#menu
Otherwise, happy tinkering. I recommend MicroSDeck if you have multiple SD cards you swap between too.
And Decky Localsend, so you can transfer files without going out of game mode.
And Decky Localsend, so you can transfer files without going out of game mode.
I actually have a different way of handling file transfer. I use my filemanager with SSH to directly access files like they would be local.
As for an update to bork the system, I'm not that concerned about it. I am one of the pre-orders and it never borked for me. But good to know that in such a case there is a solution. My only concern with Decky Loader is just that it breaks with frequent updates. It's unfortunate.
9 times out of ten rerunning the installer and selecting repair for Decky fixes it.
The other time it broke was due to SteamGrid crashing whenever I would hover over the Decky icon after hitting thr QAM.
It happens but it is more often the plugins themselves. I recently deactivated a few that were problematic in the last Steam client.
There's not really anything they can do to prevent it from breaking on beta update channel. Stable is generally safe from decky breaking.
I'm usually on SteamOS/Steam client beta update as well. If an update breaks Decky and I need the plugins for a game I'm playing, I'll sometimes switch just the Steam Client back to stable, which will usually fix things. That can cause it's own issues as well (having a mismatch between beta SteamOS and stable Steam client), but it's generally worked fine when I tried it.
Stable is generally safe from decky breaking.
Not in my experience. It breaks every few weeks. It's annoying af
I wonder if the reinstall of Decky Loader can be automated in a hidden way, that is triggered with a Steam update. This would at least make it almost look seamless, provided the plugins themselves doesn't break.
In my experience, that probably wouldn't work most of the time. There has been a time or two when Decky got wiped by a Steam update and immediate reinstalling fixed it, but the vast majority of the time it's just broken for that version of Steam, and won't work again unless you downgrade steam or the Decky devs release a new update.
Ah man, my last hope just disappeared. Valve needs to make the client more configurable (including font size, my biggest issue) and add an API for extensions that work on PC as well as the handheld. Well thanks for sharing your experience, I guess with Steam Beta I will have to pass on Decky Loader again.
You can install Decky on desktop linux as well, although the decky menus (and most of the plugins) will only work in big picture mode.
I have never used it, but these crashes are reinstallation are preventing me from doing it.
Now I wonder why Steam OS isn’t allowing plugins naturally without installing DeckyLoader.
A bit like Firefox or Gnome are making good use of extensions to personnalize your system.
I know Gnome is known for making it hard on extension creators to keep up with their updates, but the worst I’ve had is an extension not working until it gets updated.