It will happen, your games or apps will be unresponsive on Steam Deck, what can you do when it happens?

The screen below will probably happen to you if you use launchers like GOG, Battle.Net or some some games..

At the beginning – disclaimer – don’t try this is you are not sure what you are doing, this process may damage your software, device, you or your soul – I cannot be responsible for any type of damage.

There is couple of thing we can do, and I will write them now…

In Gaming Mode

If you are in gaming mode, you have few options to close software or game that is not responding…

First, you can try and press Steam button, you will get in game menu – you can try and press Exit game – see if anything happens.

In my experience, probably nothing will happen. You can press B button to go back. Then you will be back to screen from the beginning of the guide – you can press B button – to Abort Game – if you have screen like the one on the picture below.

If that still doesn’t work – you can try and press and hold Steam + B button – press them long

That should do the trick.

If that also doesn’t help – you can try and press Steam button and select Home , or press Steam button – select Power – switch to Desktop mode – switching to Desktop mode usually kills process.

If anything doesn’t end your misery, skip to the end of the guide, to hard reseting…

In Desktop Mode

If you are playing in Desktop Mode, you also have a few options…

GUI

If it is non-Steam Game you are playing through Steam (because you imported it) you can try to Stop it. After you close the window of the game it will say running – try and use Stop button

If that still doesn’t work, press Steam orb button at the bottom left of the screen, select System menu and press on System Monitor

You can try to get to System menu both ways listed below (in case you are stuck inside unresponsive software)

Pressing L5 button (rear left bottom paddle) can also bring you up the menu in which you can select System then.

This can also by done by pressing both Thumbstick inward at the same time (not left, right, up, down – but inward)

System Monitor will open – select Processes from left side menu (in yellow), then under Processes list select process that won’t quit (marked in green I selected firefox for this example) and click on End Process at the top left corner of the window (selected in yellow)

You will be asked to confirm – End . After you clicked on End, process should be gone.

Terminal

There is one other way to try this – through Terminal – press Steam orb (you can get this menu also by pressing L5 or both thumbsticks inward – as I mentioned above) select System and press Konsole

To get On-Screen Keyboard press Steam + X button

We will first try to find process ID of the process we want to quit. In this example we will again try to quit Firefox.

First command we will try is pidof

pidof firefox

If we are not sure what is the exact name of the process we are trying to quit, we can also try to find PID with following command, that will show us names and PIDs of our apps.

In Konsole type following command

top

It will dynamically list your processes – we need PID from the beginning of the column.

As you can see firefox has PID number 41506 – so, same result both ways

Press Ctrl+C to end top command

Now in terminal your next command should be the one that will terminate the process.

kill -9 will send signal to end process and all processes connected to it. So kill -9 will end our Firefox and all processes connected to it.

kill -9 41506

So, we can also try

killall firefox

The thing is, it won’t work, if you don’t know exact name of the process – firefox is firefox-bin, only then this command will work. But above command top can show you exact name.

If that all doesn’t work – we can always try our last resort

Hard Reset

This can damage your SteamOS installation, software or saves – in some cases it may also damage your hardware – be careful, and don’t do this often – it will for certain corrupt your system.

In the end, if nothing worked, and your device is stuck, frozen – press and hold physical Power button until Steam Deck shuts down.

You should be able to boot back normally, but doing this often, as I mentioned – can do damage to your Deck. So try to investigate why your game/software or SteamOS doesn’t work good.

This is it for all types of quitting games or software on the Steam Deck – if you know some other good way, or I missed something, please let me know.