The most common Steam Deck problems and how to fix them

digitaltrends.com:

The Steam Deck is packed with excellent features, has solid performance, and has decent battery life. But as our review noted, it does still need some work. Fortunately, Valve has been regularly posting important software updates to fix issues and add new features that gamers have wanted, and it’s slowly becoming a more stable, versatile device for it.

But if you’re still running into problems or bugs that make you want to throw your Steam Deck across the room, hold on for a minute. We’ve collected the issues that people are running into, and the solutions that we’ve found can make things much better. Let’s do a little troubleshooting.

Note: Before you try any of the steps we’ve listed below, it’s always a good idea to bring your Steam Deck online and check for any software updates. Valve has released plenty of fixes through its updates, and getting the latest version of Steam Deck’s software could fix your problem the speedy way.

My Steam Deck keeps crashing

If you’ve applied the latest updates but games keep crashing, try holding down the Steam Deck Power button for about 10 seconds to initiate a reboot.

If rebooting doesn’t help, we suggest visiting the Steam Deck Recovery webpage and following its instructions to download the recovery image. You’ll need an extra USB stick and the right utility to run the recovery, but Steam provides good instructions for these steps. When in recovery, choose to Reinstall Steam OS, which attempts to save your downloaded games and progress while resetting the Steam Deck.

If nothing is making a difference, try playing a variety of other games to compare performance. If only one or two games are crashing, they may not be well-optimized to run on the Steam Deck.

My Steam Deck can’t reach Steam Servers

At some point during 2023, an error started popping up telling Steam Deck users that their Steam Deck could not reach Steam servers. As it turned out, this was a Wi-Fi issue that triggered power-saving mode on the Steam Deck.

Luckily,