Lately my Stream Deck has not been accepting “mouse” clicks, whether it be my trackball, the touch pad on my keyboard, or the Steam Deck’s own hardware buttons. A restart of the deck had been working, but today it does not. Also now when restarting, the Deck boots into game mode instead of back into desktop.
Anyone else have this issue and find a solution?
There’s been a reoccurring bug (originally happened in 2022 but apparently has come back a few times) where the Deck’s on-screen keyboard can leave behind a UI layer that will intercept clicks. Closing Steam will usually fix it, and I think holding the steam button down (to override steam input) may let you do clicks while it’s acting up.
There’s a variation where the mouse won’t work normally, but while the keyboard is open you can interact with the screen with touch instead.
Final things I know of to check for is to make sure you don’t have a stuck button or something. Apparently people have had weird input issues like this that ended up being a stuck back button or something similar.
I saw about the on screen keyboard. I have tried both with Steam open, minimized to dock, and closed.
Clicking on the taskbar works fine, and the very top of the screen. For now, toggling Bluetooth off/on is working.
This sounds like some invisible app is open and intercepting the clicks. If you can get into kDE’s settings configure it to always start an empty session and not start the same programs that were open when it shut down. Maybe you can get to that window by alt-tabbing.
It is looking more and more like it is Bluetooth related. After my initial post I discovered I could click on the Bluetooth icon and then navigate using my keyboard to the on/off slider. Once I restarted Bluetooth and reconnected my devices I could click again.
Yesterday I stopped by work (been home sick since Thursday) and grabbed my usb keyboard and trackball, since connecting them (they are what I use at work with my Steam deck) I have had no issues with clicks.
Just thought of something. When you press Ctrl+Alt+Escape your mouse cursor should change into a red skull and bones. Clicking on the invisible app should kill it.
I gave that a try, clicked away everything, then when I clicked on the desktop the screen went black with only my mouse cursor. I had to reboot to get back to the desktop.
I don’t know about clicking, except that with the trackpads I struggle to click correctly, but I think my Steam Deck always restarted in game mode.
I’d have to check again though…
I haven’t encountered this, but it’s rare that I’m in actual desktop mode. Normally I’m using a flavor of Nested Desktop.
