You may want to skip the latest Steam Deck system update as reports indicate it comes with some serious issues. It seems that SteamOS version 3.6.24 causes Valve’s handheld to overheat among other problems.
According to Valve’s patch notes, the update fixes issues relating to disappearing mouse pointer, render problems in Avowed, DualShock 3 pairing, and the performance deterioration in No Rest for the Wicked. Unfortunately, users running the update are facing unexpected bugs of varied severity.
Most notably, a broken quick-access menu, audio popping, and frozen TDP/GPU frequency sliders. But all of these are nothing compared to what seems to be an incorrect power limit causing the handheld to send more power to the chip, resulting in overheating. In turn, this could force the machine to reboot for safety reasons, causing yet another problem. After rebooting, some are experiencing boot loops as the handheld tries to fix itself over and over.
So, until a fix is available you better refrain from installing this update. Note that you won’t find an option to disable updates, however, it shouldn’t install automatically as the patch needs manual approval. That said, if you have already updated your Steam Deck, I recommend turning off your machine and then powering it up while holding the quick access menu button. This should bring up a control panel from which you can recover/rollback your handheld to a prior state.
A fix to the stable release of the update is en route, as Valve has deployed a new system update version to its beta branch. It shouldn’t be long before it gets a general release but there’s no word on when that will be exactly.
