Decky Loader plugins should no longer cause bootloops on Steam Deck

The Decky Loader developers have announced that their plugin system for Steam Deck should no longer cause bootloops with the latest pre-release build.

News I covered just recently, users discovered a number of plugins that would cause the Steam Deck to get stuck where the Big Picture Mode just wouldn't appear. Thankfully you could fix it with some manual effort, but that should no longer be needed.

As of "Prerelease v3.0.0-pre8", the developers noted it fixes a "race condition causing crash loops". Additionally, posting in their Discord server, developer "Train" said:

We're also taking steps to ensure future issues do not cause breakage to this degree and to notify users of when plugins are delisted or issues with Decky Loader are discovered by us or made known to us by users. Thanks everyone for being patient and contributing.

They also mentioned in a GamingOnLinux comment:

[…] To those wondering, we're currently working on an MOTD feature to allow us to better notify users of issues with plugins and we're working on delisting broken plugins.
As of the most recent pre-release of Decky, v3.0.0-pre7, we now have a screen and logic that catches these loops and stops decky and should allow you to find and remove any of the effected plugins. We also have future plans to ensure plugins are easier to report as broken but we don't have anything concrete in that regard yet. Have a lovely week everyone.

While the developer who fixed the issue "AAGaming" also mentioned in a GamingOnLinux comment:

We've fixed this in the latest prerelease (v3.0.0-pre8), broken plugins shouldn't be able to cause bootloops anymore. It was caused by an extremely hard to find race condition in a new feature of @decky/ui (previously decky-frontend-lib)

So thankfully, you should be pretty safe to use the latest pre-release version again with various plugins on Steam Deck.

The Decky Loader team certainly have their work cut out for them, given that all of this is community-made with no direct support for plugins from Valve. Hopefully in future Valve might consider some sort of API to help make their job easier.

More about Decky Loader on the GitHub.