Not sure whats going on, I open the case with the buds in hold down the button and put it in pairing. The Steam Deck sees it but won’t pair with it. Idk what’s going on. I have reset it, disconnected it from the iPhone, idk what else to try. Desktop mode and Game mode won’t pair :-/
This is what worked for me. Put your deck on desktop mode and from there go to the Bluetooth icon in the taskbar and connect them from there. If you can’t see your AirPods restart the deck on desktop mode. Once connected obviously switch back to regular mode. This worked for me, I had tried all the tricks I saw