How many times have you had to re-image your deck?

[Schlingus]

I'm currently in the middle of re-imaging my deck a second time. I picked up the Jsaux dock two weeks ago and everything was fine, but after an update a few days ago the deck wouldn't boot. I grabbed the SteamOS recovery image and flashed that to a thumb drive and chose Reinstall OS. Everything went great for a day until I restarted the deck to apply an update and it wouldn't boot again.

I do not have an nvme drive in my Jsaux dock and just use it to plug the thing into my tv and use a wireless logitech mouse+keyboard. I'm using the stable update branch and rarely use desktop mode.

Has anyone else been having boot issues with their deck recently or am I just unlucky?

[Mahjik]

Got my Deck at the end of May 2022. Zero re-images up to this point (knocking on every piece of wood I can find).

[bean]

Originally posted by Mahjik:

Got my Deck at the end of May 2022. Zero re-images up to this point (knocking on every piece of wood I can find).

April 22, zero reimages

[Schlingus]

The re-imaging is not going well this time... I may have accidentally plugged the wrong USB into my deck and had it boot into KDE Neon instead of the SteamOS recovery image. I am no longer able to use the deck's controls in the Bios.

[Jâbbérwôkkï]

Since Q3 here, I only re-imaged mine after trying Windows on it. Found I preferred having access to performance tweaks through Steam Deck controls instead of digging through Windows settings. May dual boot later, but for now, no problems have caused me to need to re-image.

[roflBeck]

Uhh, zero? I got mine in like, July and I've not reinstalled on it at all. That's a nice thing about Linux, it doesn't bit rot like Windows does. I just use game mode for Steam games and desktop mode for emulators. No big issues here.

[jrepin]

Have it for more then half a year and never had to do re-image it.

[Chris Hansen with Dateline NBC]

Zero. And this is from an oldschool Linux nerd that does all sorts of funky shiznit with my Deck. I have had it since August.

[Canadian Gamer]

I was in the second week of Decks shipped out, and I haven't had to re-image it yet. I use the official Dock.

[ClassicGOD]

I reimaged my deck twice. Once because I messed up the bootloader while playing with multiple OS on the drive and once when I got new drive.

That being said I have to mention that many if not most SteamOS issues can be solved without reimaging but instead by booting previous copy of SteamOS that Steam Deck is keeping on a separate partition. You do this by powering the Deck down, pressing and holding the (•••) button and short pressing the power button. Keep holding the (•••) button until you see a menu. Select the older version of SteamOS in the menu and check if it will boot. In 90% of the cases that will be enough to fix most "SteamOS not booting" issues.

[Haruspex]

Once, and it was only because I upgraded my 64 GB eMMC SSD to a 1 TB NVME SSD.

[ReBoot]

Exactly 0 times. Same goes for factory-resetting it, exactly 0.

[Ussul w+m1]

0 times.
I have to say that the 1st deck died on me so I had to use steam support and RMA. They were very nice about it and within a week I had second one.
I use a lot of linux desktop for plex and other stuff. For me it is more small pc then hendheld device.
Valve did a really good job. I would like to change few settings, but I guess it is for other plp better this way.

[Duffvader]

Also never reimagined.
Have my SD since beginning of October.

[Bee🐝]

We have two decks we received in July and neither has been re-imaged.

[Veica]

I have once. This was like two weeks after getting the device. I had a dualboot setup with Windows on the SD card, and decided I didn't want it anymore, so I tried to reformat the SD card through SteamOS in desktop mode and then *something* happened. I don't know exactly what, because the SteamOS side should've been unaffected but I wonder... Either way, it's been fine since the reimage.