Certain Steam Deck plugins via Decky Loader are causing bootloops

Update: Now fixed!

Original article below:

Uh oh. Not only did we recently have the issue with The Jackbox Megapicker breaking the Steam Deck, but now plugins via Decky Loader too.

The main issue here is with the upcoming 3.x.x release series, which has been in development for a while now. The issue shouldn't be present with the current stable 2.x.x series.

Writing in an announcement on the Decky Loader Discord, developer "Train" mentioned this:

The Music Control plugin is delisted and should be uninstalled as it causes Steam BPM to "bootloop" in newer versions of Decky Loader such as the current pre-releases of 3.X.X. We also have users experiencing the same issue without that plugin installed so I would recommend manually deleting one plugin at a time to see which plugin is [affecting] you. You will need to delete any [affected] plugin(s) from ~/homebrew/plugins/ (You will need to use sudo to delete the files, suggest using konsole and using sudo rm -r /path/to/plugin). Pressing Ctrl+Alt+Semicolon on a USB keyboard connected to your deck while the deck is booting up and before it crashes, should get you to the Desktop and allow you to bypass the "bootloops" and delete the plugin. A pre-connected Bluetooth keyboard should also do the trick.

One user in the Decky Loader Discord has been collecting the names of various plugins that cause the bootloop issue and those that are okay (credit to user "IᖇIS ᑎᕮᗷᑌᒪᗩ"). This list keeps changing, but this is what they noted at time of posting the article:

The following plugins break Decky Loader 3.x.x pre-release (unbootable Deck):

• DeckRoulette 1.1.3-0950f29
• GameView Music 1.1.0-1
• MicroSDeck 0.9.1-1 (see list below)
• MusicControl 1.1.5 (see list below)
• Network Info 1.0.1-13b914b
• Remote Play Whatever 1.0.0
• System Toolbox 1.0.2-1

The following plugins DO NOT break Decky Loader 3.x.x pre-release:

• MetaDeck 2.0.2-4a7335d
• MicroSDeck 0.10.3
• MusicControl 1.1.6-a93c611
• Save Manager 0.0.1-0ef2a15
• Syncthing 0.2.1-389a842
• EmuDecky 1.0.7

The following plugins DO NOT break Decky Loader 3.x.x pre-release, but are themselves broken on it, while they were working fine on 2.12.3:

• Controller Tools 1.2.2

So you might want to go and check what you're using with Decky Loader, before any plugins may cause you some issues. Decky Loader is a community project, not supported by Valve, so you're generally on your own for issues it causes and will have to fix any problems yourself. As much as I like the idea of Decky Loader, it does seem to cause a fair few problems.

More about Decky Loader on the GitHub.