The latest operating system update for Valve’sSteam Deckhas inadvertently broken many users' SD card setups, especially those pertaining to emulators. While Valve’s ability to patch the Deck on the fly and introduce hugely important new features has been an important aspect of the device’s success and popularity, update 3.4 shows the more problematic side of this approach.Steam Deckcomes with a relatively humble 512 GB of internal storage at most, with the lower-spec models having as little as 64 GB of capacity. This means that most users need to rely on SD cards to expand their gaming storage, and while the medium has proven surprisingly reliable for gaming purposes thanks to Valve’s OS-level optimizations, a tiny change in update 3.4 has caused substantial problems for many users.RELATED:Valve is Giving Away Yet More Steam DecksSteamOS 3.4 was beta testedfor just over a week ahead of its official, stable release, but the change that caused the most problems wasn’t even included as part of the beta build. Namely, Valve changed the default SD card path without announcing the change ahead of time. While a subsequent hotfix did revert the change almost immediately afterward, virtually anything installed on an SD card was broken in the interim.
According to Pierre-Loup Griffais, a Valve developer working on SteamOS, the change was made so that the Deck complied with the unified standard way of mounting external devices on Linux, which is likely important forfuture revisions of the Steam Deck. The only problem was the manner in which the change was executed. Griffais' team took critical feedback to heart and decided to roll back the problematic change for the time being, though he did make it clear that it would be introduced once more with SteamOS 3.5 sometime next year.
With that in mind, gamers that use top-notch SD cards like theSandisk Extreme Pro for the Steam Deckdon’t really have much to worry about for the time being. With Valve having reverted the SD card path, developers of tools such as Emudeck have ample time to accommodate the change that’ll be reintroduced down the line. SteamOS 3.5, however, may cause problems of a similar nature once it launches.
The most problematic part of the entire situation is the fact that Valve didn’t communicate the change in any meaningful capacity, and users on Twitter have voiced their complaints accordingly. Given Valve’s history of transparency with the Deck’s development, it’s strange that such a meaningful change wouldn’t be given more attention, and it’s something thatusers looking to optimize their Steam Decksought to keep in mind moving forward.
