Beginners Guide to Installing the Steam Deck Decky Loader Homebrew App Store

Today I'll be showing how to install a popular plugin tool for the Steam Deck that offers some fantastic homebrew features.

Written Tutorial
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My Steam Deck Accessories (affiliate links below)
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Mentioned Links
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Mentioned Command
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Summary
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Here is the OLED version of the Steam Deck and in today's video I'll be showing you how to install a homebrew plugin app store called Decky Loader.

Valve has added and continues to add some great features to Steam OS. But when you're releasing software for the mass market you have to draw the line when it comes to which features can be added and which features should be added.

This is where Decky Loader comes into play. It allows for the entire Steam Deck community to code and release their own plugins that can be added to Steam OS. Some really great plugins include a fan control plugin called Fantastic, a boot animation management plugin called Animation Changer, a custom library plugin for both Steam and non-Steam games called SteamGridDB, and many, many more.

INSTALL
To begin installing Decky Loader on the Steam Deck, we first need to boot over into Desktop Mode.
STEPS

If you are not afraid of the command line, there's a single command you can copy and paste that will download and install Decky Loader for you. I will be sure to include that in the video description below.

For everyone else, I'll be showing you how to download it from the website and install it using the graphical user interface.

We are going to need to open up a web browser and then visit their website

The installer needs to be downloaded, so let's tap or click on the Download button up here.

The wiki page points out that if you download this file with Firefox, the file itself will need to be renamed to remove the .download extension from it.

And this file needs to be moved to the desktop of the Steam Deck as well.

Now we can double-click on this installer file to begin the process.

You will either be asked to enter your admin password here. . .or you can allow Decky Loader to temporarily set the admin password to Decky!
If you choose the later, the installer will remove this password once it has finished.

This is where you will get to choose which version of Decky Loader you want to install.
For most users, the Latest Release will be enough. So if this is your first time installing it, go ahead and choose this version just to try things out and see if you like it.

I only recently switched to the pre-release version to fix an issue with the beta version of Steam OS.
But I'll likely go back once that bug gets ironed out.

Now that Decky Loader has been installed, let's go back into Gaming Mode on the Steam Deck so I can show you how to access it.

Once here, press the Quick Settings button down in bottom right of the Steam Deck here.
If everything was installed correctly, you will see a new icon at the bottom here.

Decky Loader uses the traditional plugin icon since it installs plugins for Steam OS.
And when accessing it, you'll see all of the plugins you currently have installed here.

As you'll notice, there isn't anything here because we have a fresh install.
But we can tap the Store icon in the top right corner to bring up the repository for Decky Loader.

This loads a list of plugins that you can install with a single tap.
I recently began testing the Pause Game plugin and have really begun to enjoy its benefits.
So much so that I'll be doing a dedicated video about it in the near future.

Once installed. We go back to the Decky Loader menu here.
And you can see the newly installed plugin.

These features are accessible by tapping it or selecting it with the controller itself.

These homebrew Steam OS plugins from the developer community help bring some much needed love to so many aspects of the operating system. Many plugins seem like they should already be established features and I can only imagine Valve will bring some of them to the masses by working with some these developers.

[Butterballbx]

Thank you for your help nice smooth and straight to the point. I be so intimidated downloading and configuration this system. I’ve always been a console person.🙌

[kellyd]

i downloaded css loader and got the outran theme and unfortunately it didn't work the way it was advertised, i was so bummed

[Shonathn]

I'm encountering a problem where when I try to launch the installer to install decky loader, it does not prompt asking me for my password and just opens up a blank terminal. Do you know what may be causing this or a possible solution to this problem?

[captivatedlunt]

It says I need a password but I don’t have one