Turning a Steam Deck into a safe device for children or people recovering from Internet addiction (or any kind of addictive content accessible through the Internet) can be a bit of a tricky task.

For most people, it might first be worth considering if a Steam Deck is a responsible purchase considering the potential downsides to owning one. This includes not just evaluating its impact on your life as a gaming machine, but also as a full desktop PC under the hood running an OS which might make filtering on it difficult.

However, the odds are high that you’re reading this precisely because you already have a Steam Deck. If you derive joy from the device to a degree that selling/getting rid of it fills you with sorrow, but at the same time feel it’s a hindrance to recovery, this page can guide you to attempt everything possible to ameliorate it before making the decision to cut it off.

Option A: Valve’s native solution

Setting parental controls in gaming mode

This section and the following section will make use of a feature called Steam Families which allows setting various parental controls. These controls will not only manage what kind of content and features are accessible within the Steam Deck’s gaming mode, but in the next section we’ll show how to lock away the desktop mode of the device as well–effectively removing the most harmful aspect of the Deck for a recovering addict.

To achieve this, you will basically just need to create a second Steam account and make a “family”. Then you’ll invite your primary Steam account to join the family as a child. You can configure a variety of parental controls for any accounts attached to the family as a child, such as:

  • Block inappropiate/mature games shown in the store
  • Block specific games from the library
  • Block community generated content and pages (but not your own profile page)
  • Limit play time of games

For a fuller explanation of Steam Families and FAQ, see: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/054C-3167-DD7F-49D4

Once you are finished setting parental controls to manage how the Deck works in gaming mode, you can proceed to the next section to manage desktop mode.

Block access to desktop mode

On the Steam Deck, sign-in as the second account you created in the previous section–that is, the family manager. While logged in with this account, press the STEAM button, then go to Settings > Security and toggle When switching to desktop mode ON.

You will need to set a 6-digit numeric PIN here but you mustn’t know/remember the PIN. Either have a friend set the PIN for you, or do the following:

  • close your eyes
  • rotate the device
  • tap a random pattern on the screen where you contact the screen 6 times
  • try your best to do the same pattern again to confirm the PIN

It’s significantly easier to have a second person help you rather than attempt the above hacky solution, but if you have no other way then just try your best until you get it right.

Now you can sign-out the second account so that only your primary account remains on the Deck.

Anytime you try to switch to the desktop mode, the Deck will ask for the PIN. If you try to recover the PIN, it will tell you to log in as the second account. To finish closing this loop, change the password of the second account to something randomly generated and impossible to remember, and then store the password on https://lockbox.pluckeye.net .

Option B: Plucky

How to install Plucky

Preface: Steam Deck is not a fully supported device, but it can be made to work with Plucky. It will require maintenance with each Deck update because the updates will break Plucky, but the maintenance process is not very difficult nor time consuming; the biggest problem will be the potential danger posed by intermittent periods of having an unfiltered device–something that could be detrimental to a recovering addict. If you are undeterred, read on.

Valve’s Steam Deck runs a customized version of Arch Linux called SteamOS. Since Plucky is supported on Linux, this means that it’s possible to install Plucky on a Steam Deck, but the installation process involves some extra steps compared to installing on a standard Linux desktop.

This is primarily due to the fact that Valve, for security reasons, ships the Deck’s operating system with an immutable file system. [1] The manufacturer expects the user to only install apps and software via flatpaks in the Discover store. Plucky doesn’t come as a flatpak, so in order to get it installed it’s necessary to disable read-only mode and make the OS writable. Valve allows the end-user to do this as there isn’t a stability risk in doing so (assuming you carefully follow this guide and don’t run random commands you find on the internet), but it comes with a caveat: because the user is not intended to write things to directories that are defaulted to read-only, Valve warns that “whatever you install may be wiped with the next SteamOS update.” [2]

This simply means that, when an update occurs, it will be necessary to quickly run the steps in the recovery section on this page to repair the broken/missing files. If you have followed these steps before and are trying to repair Plucky after upgrading the Deck OS, go straight to recovery steps after an OS upgrade.

If you aren’t using a keyboard + mouse, and are instead using the Deck’s native interface, please refer to the controls below.

Deck Button Input
A Enter
Right touchpad Mouse
Right Trigger Left-click
Left Trigger Right-click
X Open on-screen keyboard
Y Space
B Escape / Backspace
D-Pad Arrow keys

General advice

Unless otherwise stated, accept default on all prompts issued by Konsole when following the terminal steps.

Remember, A is the same as Enter, so you don’t have to open the keyboard and type ‘y’ every time to accept the default.

The bash commands are written so that you can copy and paste them directly into Konsole, since typing on the Deck’s on-screen keyboard is not the fastest nor most efficient method, and can lead to more typos than a physical keyboard.

Installation steps

  1. Create a sudo password

    There are many tutorials out there for how to do this, but the quickest is to use passwd inside Konsole (the Deck’s pre-installed terminal). We will be using Konsole a lot for this guide, so make sure to keep it open.

    passwd

  2. Disable steamos-readonly to make the operating system writable. When prompted, enter the password you created in step 1.

    sudo steamos-readonly disable

  3. Initialize the keyring, populate it, and sync package databases with the repo indexes.

    sudo pacman-key --init
sudo pacman-key --populate archlinux
sudo pacman -Sy

  4. Open the Discover store, click on Installed, and remove all browsers (the Deck comes with Firefox’s flatpak by default,so make sure to remove that). If you are following this guide on the Steam Deck itself, print off these instructions, or follow them from another device because you won’t have a web browser until after completing the next step.

  5. Depending on which browser(s) you want, the commands you enter will be a bit different. Firefox is particularly straightforward as all the dependencies you will need are already installed. Chromium browsers (Chrome, Edge, and Brave) require other dependencies and will also need to be installed with an AUR-helper like yay.

    Firefox

    sudo pacman -S firefox

    Prerequisite for Chromium browsers

    sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel

    It’s outside the scope of this guide, so here is a tutorial for installing yay for those who need it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBeSJvYkV7I&t=489s.

    For the following commands, do not use sudo

    Chrome

    yay -S google-chrome

    Edge

    yay -S microsoft-edge-stable-bin

    Brave

    yay -S brave-bin

  6. Download plucky-install.tar from https://getplucky.net and save in Downloads folder

  7. Install the .tar we downloaded like a normal Linux installation.

    cd /tmp
rm -f ./pluck*install*
for tarball in $HOME/Downloads/pluck*.tar*; do echo $tarball; done
tar xf $tarball
sudo ./plucky-install

  8. Wait patiently for the silent install to complete. It is finished when it opens your defaut browser and loads the welcome page.

  9. Verify it installed properly by running pluck version in Konsole.

    If it returns the version number, it installed properly. If it says bash: pluck: command not found, you did not disable read-only mode in step 2.

Post-install setup

All that’s left is to create a proper configuration for the device.

The Discover store will be blocked by default while feature system is turned on. If some functionality from the store is needed, it should probably be allowed on a schedule. Likewise with package managers.

To allow installing/updating non-Steam apps and software on Saturdays at 10am until noon:

pluck + when A10-12 allow program plasma-discover
pluck + when A10-12 allow program git-remote-http

Some other recommended settings:

pluck + block image
pluck + block video
pluck + system

Jon has shared a public configuration that whitelists Valve’s IP addresses. [3] Importing this configuration should mean no further configuration is required for allowing Valve/Steam resources: https://u.pluckeye.net/configurations/76004

Don’t forget to visit https://u.pluckeye.net and sign-in at least once in order to associate the device with your account. Also, assign the newly associated device with a configuration (see next section).

Create a new config called ‘Steam Deck’

It might be useful to create a new configuration just for the Deck. Particularly if you use other devices with your primary configuration, you may not want overlap with Deck-specific rules like allow program steam.

Recovery steps after an OS upgrade

After upgrading a test Deck from OS version 3.3.2 to 3.3.3, the following things were broken: Plucky, Firefox, Chrome, and Brave (in other words, everything installed by means other than the Discover store).

Recovery is rather simple, though. In case you find yourself unable to access this page, it may be beneficial to save the following bash commands to a text file in the home directory. You should also leave plucky-install.tar in your Downloads folder.

sudo steamos-readonly disable
sudo pacman-key --init
sudo pacman-key --populate archlinux
sudo pacman -Sy
sudo pacman -S --overwrite \* base-devel
sudo pacman -S --overwrite \* firefox
yay -S --overwrite \* google-chrome
yay -S --overwrite \* brave-bin
cd /tmp
rm -f ./pluck*install*
for tarball in $HOME/Downloads/pluck*.tar*; do echo $tarball; done
tar xf $tarball
sudo ./plucky-install

After running the commands on the test Deck, everything was restored to a working state without any data loss. Plucky’s config remained, as did all browser configuration and personal data.

Troubleshooting

PGP package errors

One user reported encountering an error following the recovery steps after a Steam Deck update. When trying to install Firefox, he received an error stating the package “is unknown trust”.

The solution he found was to refresh the keys.

sudo pacman-key --refresh-keys

After doing so, he reported being able to follow the rest of the above commands and have everything working again.

Last updated: 2025-12-02