Steam Deck crashes when taking a screenshot

[Drakon74]

Your system information

• Steam client version: 1751405894
• SteamOS version: 3.7.13
• Opted into Steam client beta?: No
• Opted into SteamOS beta?: No
• Have you checked for updates in Settings > System?: Yes

Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:

When playing on an external monitor / TV, most of the times the entire OS crashes when taking a screenshot. You can hear the screenshot sound, but then everything freezes and a second later just black screen. The Steam Deck then seems to soft reboot, as it is back in just a few seconds.

It seems more likely to happen, the longer the game is running.

Steps for reproducing this issue:

1. Hook up to an external TV
2. Start a game and play a bit (to make the chances higher)
3. Take a screenshot

[nomadfh]

This started happening to me and I had to reinstall steamos (including wiping user data) to fix it. I'm not sure what caused it but it does seem to go away with a reinstall (including after updating). Hopefully some folks come up with a more precise way to fix it.

[matte-schwartz]

were there any modifications you made to the system before you wiped it that you didn't make after you wiped it, i.e. plugins of some sort or extra packages?

[nomadfh]

Nothing that I can recall. To note, before I wiped my system, I initially had an issue where screenshotting in game mode would simply do nothing. It would play the sound and that's it. But after a while, taking a a screenshot would OCCASIONALLY reboot the system. After seeing a thread on reddit suggest that I remove this file: /home/deck/.local/share/Steam/userdata/(your steam id)/760/screenshots.vdf, it started rebooting each time I took a screenshot instead of just every now and then, although that thread suggested that "fix" worked for a lot of people, but certainly not me.

[Drakon74]

The thing for me is, that this started happening on a brand new OLED (half a year old, replacing my old LCD) after the big Steam OS Update in May, 3.7.8. Since then i have this issue.

I never did anything to the steam files or OS in desktop mode, besides installing brave over the discovery store. Didn't even set password for root access. The only thing which i "took over" from my LCD was literally the SD Card, everything else was freshly downloaded in Steam. And before the update the screenshotting worked without crashing.

[outerwinnie]

Same issue here, happening in portatil.

[TiZ-HugLife]

This is likely a Steam client issue and less likely to be a SteamOS issue; when this issue occurs (I experience it, too) it is only Steam that crashes, not the entire system. If it was the entire system, you'd have to wait for the boot sequence, but it's just a Steam restart. Of course, this is still extremely disruptive, especially if you like to take screenshots of completed roguelite runs. Oops, your successful run didn't actually happen!