this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2024
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Steam Deck

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When the OLED decks first came out, many people found they had wifi issues after attempting to connect to 5Ghz wifi 6 enabled routers. This has thankfully been fixed with software updates, and is no longer an issue on new OLED decks.

Unfortunately, some of the refurbished OLED decks will still have this issue when first turned on. The problem will be fixed once the Deck updates, but you have to successfully connect to the internet before you can update, and this issue can make that hard to do.

The issue can also affect you if you do a factory reset on your OLED deck or reinstall SteamOS.

The issue: When connecting to a 5Ghz Wifi 6 network with certain Wifi 6 features turned on, the wifi card on the deck will crash. After that, it won't connect to any network until the Deck is rebooted.

The fix: First, you'll have to reboot the deck to restart the wifi. If it still doesn't show wifi networks after rebooting, you may have to factory reset by holding the ". . ." button while booting up the deck and selecting factory reset from the menu there.

Once the deck is rebooting and can see wifi networks again, you need to connect to a 2.4Ghz wifi network and update the deck. You can alternatively disable wifi 6/AX features on your router temporarily,

Once the deck is done installing updates and rebooting, you should be able to connect to the faster 5Ghz network to download your games.

Overall it's not a hard issue to work around, but it can be very confusing to a new user if they're not familiar with the issue and the work around.

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[–] JoYo@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

the OG steam decks have wifi issues. anyone know if the radio drivers are proprietary?

[–] Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Both wifi drivers are in the linux kernel and open source as far as I can tell.

LCD deck uses rtw88_8822ce, which has been in the linux kernel since 5/2019. Source code here

OLED deck uses ath11k_pci, which has been in the linux kernel since 9/2023. Source code here

The Arch Wiki page on the Steam Deck is also a good source for this sort of thing, since it looks at what's needed to run standard Arch on the Deck.

[–] JoYo@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 days ago

oh ok that's good I guess. they don't work half the time.