What Valve called the "jackbrick megabricker" (ouch), The Jackbox Megapicker should now stop breaking your Steam Deck after the latest update to the Native Linux version.
For those who missed it: recently the team at party game developer Jackbox Games, Inc. released their launcher called The Jackbox Megapicker to bring together all their games and help you get your party started a little easier considering how many they've released now.
However, it came with an issue where it would break your Steam Deck. Valve ended up forcing it to use Proton to get around the issue but now the Jackbox team have released an update that amongst other improvements notes "A small subset of Steam Deck users experienced a boot loop if they restarted their Steam Deck after launching The Jackbox Megapicker. This has been resolved in the Megapicker.".
Check it out on Steam. Plus don't forget you can also grab a free to keep copy of their game Drawful 2 until August 28th to celebrate the launch.
I hope something serious was technically learned now to not repeat this possibility ever again by a SINGLE GAME.
How was this even possible? Isn't SteamOS immutable for its boot to start with?
According to the game dev on the GOL Discord:
inside of the .steam folder a steam symlink was getting replaced by a folder preventing the deck to start steam the next time around. deleting the folder recreates the symlink and brings the deck back to life.
I did try it out with a variety of games and had little issue with it running on desktop with Nobara. JBPPs have gotten A LOT better on linux for me in the last year or so. Hopefully this leads to smoother releases in the future.
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