App widgets, similar to Xbox Game Bar Overlay

[horner.tj]

At the moment, Steam Deck is a great gaming machine, and also a great Linux-based portable. The problem is that these things are pretty distinct and mutually exclusive. Here's what I mean: you have a gorgeous UI for browsing games, interacting with the Steam community, etc AND you have KDE, a great desktop environment for doing whatever you want as a Linux box. But you can only have one of these active at once.

So if you wanted to, for example, use Discord or Spotify in the desktop environment in the background while you play a game launched from the Deck UI, that's not (easily) possible at the moment. Switching back into "gaming mode" will close all applications on the KDE desktop.

There are definitely workarounds for this — you could go into the desktop and launch Steam from there (and if you wanted the fancy Deck UI, launch it with `-gamepadui`). However, this is anything but seamless.

It would be great if developers were provided some kind of API (similar to how Xbox Game Bar widgets[docs.microsoft.com] work) that would allow them to integrate their app's functionality directly in the Deck UI, perhaps as a tab in the Quick Settings, or in the Steam Overlay during gameplay.

Ideally, these app widgets would be installed from the Steam store for easy access, but could be of course installed from anywhere else.

And it would be VERY cool if players were able to provide a path to an arbitrary application to display as a widget, eliminating the need for developers to implement the widget API in their application, and effectively turning the Deck's UI into a powerful gaming-focused window manager. The trackpad on the Deck could provide a virtual mouse similar to desktop mode making normal desktop applications a breeze.

EDIT: So, apparently you can actually run multiple non-Steam games at once and they will be switchable from the Steam menu. You can add your desktop apps and can switch between them in the Deck UI. So that's a good workaround for now!

[NTripleOne]

Originally posted by horner.tj:

EDIT: So, apparently you can actually run multiple non-Steam games at once and they will be switchable from the Steam menu. You can add your desktop apps and can switch between them in the Deck UI. So that's a good workaround for now!

While this is possible - it definitely seems a little buggy sometimes as during my testing occasionally I was unable to get other apps to close properly.

Test scenario was having a game, discord and spotify open at the same time. Not an unreasonable or unlikely combination by any means.

When it came time to close them down, spotify wouldn't respond to requests to quit from the overlay - and it wasn't possible to quit manually as the linux versions of spotify and discord don't have window controls in the app like they do on windows, they're externally provided by your window manager (at least I assume that's how it works, not a desktop linux person I'm afraid)

Eventually after trying to quit it through the overlay several times it closed. Discord on the other hand was having none of it. While it responded to the first overlay close request, something went wrong in the process and I was left with the steamos "waiting for game to display something" screen. Repeated exit requests had no effect and the only way to get it out of the overlay task switcher was to reboot.

[horner.tj]

I think this is actually a bug with the Deck UI. Sometimes when I have multiple games open, and I try to exit Game A, it closes Game B instead. Then it just hangs when I try to close either of them (I assume it's still waiting for Game A to close) so I end up having to restart the whole system, just like your case.

As a side note, is Spotify working for you? It just plays a few seconds of music then inexplicably stops for me. I could probably get the Spotify web client working more reliably but it's a weird issue, almost like it's struggling to access the internet

[NTripleOne]

Originally posted by horner.tj:

As a side note, is Spotify working for you? It just plays a few seconds of music then inexplicably stops for me. I could probably get the Spotify web client working more reliably but it's a weird issue, almost like it's struggling to access the internet

Yeah it seems to be, I installed it off of discover and it seems to be working fine - although the in-app volume control doesn't do anything when playing back in gaming mode.