I added a custom session to my display manager which starts Gamescope with the Steam Deck UI. This works great mostly, but exiting it is a challenge.

  • Trying to bring up the menu just blurs the screen. The menu can be navigated with the gamepad, but it does not show up. Submenus do show up (e.g. power settings).
  • With this menu’s power settings, I can restart the computer, but the “switch to desktop mode” menu point just brings up an OSD saying “switching to desktops” which just stays there and does nothing. There is no (apparent) way to log out and end up back at the display manager.

So my questions are:

  • Is it possible to get the menu to show up at least? Is this a known issue?
  • Is there a way to “log out” to get to the display manager? Maybe it is possible to bind a custom command to the “switch to desktop mode” toggle?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

  • @[email protected]English
    3•8 months ago

    Is it on a tty in embedded mode? If so does switching ttys using CTRL+ALT+F{1…10} work? Usually the display manager is on F1 or F7. If it’s not in embedded mode, does Left Alt + Enter work?

    EDIT: Re-read and realized I didn’t understand completely. You’re starting it with your display manager. I’m not sure how you would kill it in that case.

  • @[email protected]English
    2•8 months ago

    I’m using this package: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/gamescope-session-steam-git Looking at the source here: https://github.com/ChimeraOS/gamescope-session-steam/blob/main/usr/bin/steamos-session-select

    You can see it looks for a script to shutdown steam or defaults to normal shutdown. I pointed os-session-select to a script that restarts my sddm service, before shutting down steam, so it returns me into the default session. It was a bit finicky though and I hacked a systemd service into it to ensure the script didn’t get killed.

    Hope this helps. Might clean it up some time and put it in a repository/on the aur.

    EDIT: I was inspired by ChimeraOS; it uses that os-session-select for its main project as well to return to the gnome desktop.

    • @RuneFOPEnglish
      1•8 months ago

      That helps a lot, thank you! I will look at it. Would really appreciate if you shared your work. Do you have the problem where you don’t see the menu or is this only me?

      • @[email protected]English
        1•8 months ago

        I haven’t had the issue with the menu, never had as far as I remember. It might be because of the way you set up the session. If you try installing the aur package I linked and start that session, the menu hopefully just works as it did for me.

        • @RuneFOPEnglish
          1•8 months ago

          Also, switching to desktop works now, but the menu is still invisible.

        • @RuneFOPEnglish
          1•8 months ago

          That session does not work for me at all, or to be precise, it works only when I disconnect my second display. I might have to search for an option to disable that before launching the session.

          • @[email protected]English
            1•8 months ago

            Oh interesting & unfortunate. I can confirm I use one display, running it on my TV. I must say, big picture on my desktop session gets closer to the experience than when I initially set this up. I hope they add the quick settings overlay to the normal big picture mode some time. I might switch back to running on my desktop session.

            • @RuneFOPEnglish
              1•8 months ago

              Now, launching games does not work… This sure lacks some polish😅

              • @[email protected]English
                1•8 months ago

                I definitely did not run into this many issues when I installed it… Just kinda worked for me, so I’m not sure where you should investigate

            • @RuneFOPEnglish
              1•8 months ago

              I got it to work following the customization instructions on their GitHub. The only problem that remains now is the still invisible menu.