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Valve makes Steam Deck custom boot screens easier (updated)

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Update 5/10/22: in a later Beta update, Valve changed the folders for custom videos so it's now:

~/.steam/root/config/uioverrides/movies/

If you don't have .steam for whatever reason it's:

~/.local/share/Steam/config/uioverrides/movies/

You still need to make the extra folders yourself.


Original article below:

Valve just released a fresh Beta update for the Steam Deck, as they loved seeing all the custom boot screens so much they've now made it officially supported. This is currently available in the Beta and Preview channels you can swap over to by going into Settings > System > Steam Update Channel.

Yes, that's right, a hardware vendor just changed their software to let you officially override their bootup and suspend animations. What a time to be alive. Covered by me with a guide before, it's now easier than ever and with less steps needed.

From their changelog post:

It's been great to see all the community activity around custom boot videos, so we made a couple updates to make this a bit easier to do. The new folder location below will be a safer place to save your video files, and they won't be wiped with every Steam update.

Custom boot videos

  • Steam Deck will now look for custom boot and suspend animations in steamui/overrides/movies/. Please note that you'll need to create this folder first.
  • Play custom boot animations in full screen

General

  • Fixed issue with startup haptics

Resolution: applies to Preview Channel only

  • Added a toggle allowing Steam Deck to automatically control the display resolution for external displays. When toggled on, Steam Deck will automatically adjust the resolution for best performance on higher resolution displays.

So really all you need to do is make the folder "overrides" and inside it a folder "movies" so it ends up as:

~/.local/share/Steam/steamui/overrides/movies

Then put your custom movie files in that match the names of what Valve use. Then it's done and in my own testing it does work. I especially like the handheld history animation from Redditor TareXmd shown in the below quick video:

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You can find many more boot videos on the SteamDeckBootVids Reddit.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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About the author -
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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Purple Library Guy Oct 4, 2022
You know, all companies are in it to make money. But making money is really complicated; there's no one sure way. So what I've noticed is there's some leeway for personality (although being publicly traded tends to crush that); everyone "logically" comes to the conclusion that the best way to make money is to be the kind of person they are. Assholes are sure that the only way to make money is to be an asshole. Decent people tend to figure you can make money by being decent. So you get Valve with the instinct to say hey, if we enable our users to do cool stuff that'll probably result in money down the road somewhere, whereas many other companies have the instinct to say hey, if we make sure we control everything and our users can only do what we tell them, that'll probably make money down the road somewhere.

(Then there's business schools; the job of business schools is to try to mold everyone in the money-making game into uniform assholery.)
fenglengshun Oct 5, 2022
Well, I can see why Valve employee wouldn't choose Gnome. This is a proof that they really like customization, and Gnome's arm-length approach to customization likely alienate them.

The recent KDE talk says that their choice for KDE was very much because of the preferences of the people developing Steam Deck and nothing says that they prefer customization than officially adopting boot screen customization.

It's very nice too - boot is one of those things I'm too afraid to touch, because I just don't want to deal with the hassle of fixing grub. I'm really hoping that official SteamOS release is out soon.
pericojones Oct 5, 2022
Maybe they'll put ads at startup like what Amazon does with Kindles and have an "Ad Supported" Deck
Liam Dawe Oct 5, 2022
Update 5/10/22: in a later Beta update, Valve changed the folders for custom videos so it's now:

~/.steam/steam/config/uioverrides/movies/

If you don't have .steam for whatever reason it's:

~/.local/share/Steam/config/uioverrides/movies/

You still need to make the extra folders yourself.
itscalledreality Oct 5, 2022
This was already a part of Plasma if people are looking for similar functionality. In fact I think there is a dialog that will show you the custom videos you can use.
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