Plucky can be installed on a Steam Deck, but due to SteamOS being an unsupported Linux distro the installation won’t survive Steam updates. This means you will need to re-install Plucky after every OS update.

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 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

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 flatpak 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 but it comes with a caveat: “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.

Navigation controls

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

Tips

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).

   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 flatpak Firefox by default,so make sure to remove that). If you’re following this guide on the Steam Deck itself, print 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 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

   Edge

   yay -S microsoft-edge-stable-bin
   

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

7. Install the .tar we downloaded.

   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’s 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

For configurations specific to the Steam client, see the generic steam page.

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

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

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 directory.

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 \* microsoft-edge-stable-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 user 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.