An unannounced change to Steam OS forces Valve to back down.
One of the advantages of Steam Deck compared to other competing consoles is, without a doubt, the Versatility of Valve’s OS and the optimization and support that it has received, receives and will continue to receive for the coming years and future models. Although the latest Steam OS update has caused some controversy among the user community for a major change that has annoyed a good part of the fans.
It is specifically about version 3.4 of SteamOS, which introduced a change in the default path of the SD card, which instantly caused problems for all users who had content installed on their cards. Something, on the other hand, normal, since the most premium version of Steam Deck comes with 512 GB of space, but there are other models that have just 64 GB of space and they have to pull external storage for pretty much everything.
A mistake that will be repeated
The fact is that this adjustment was introduced without warning with the update and was a huge headache for some fans, so, after complaints, he quickly backed down and reverted this particular setting before re-rolling the patch. According to Pierre-Loup Griffais, a developer at Valve, the change will still come with version 3.5, as it is a necessary adjustment for the console to comply with the unified standard way to mount external devices in linux. Still, he agrees that it should be done in the least invasive way possible for users.
There are good reasons to change it, for instance the path is now unified with the standard way of mounting in Desktop mode, which can avoid breakage if you set up external drives through there. I agree it should only change if we can make the transition seamless.
—Pierre-Loup Griffais (@Plagman2) December 21, 2022
So users who have SD cards in the Steam Deck from which they run e.g. emulators shouldn’t have any problems right now, but With the arrival of the 3.5 update, they could suffer some setbacks. Although that will be seen later. Meanwhile, Valve is already thinking about Steam Deck 2 and the changes it should introduce.