Some people may not be aware that the Steam Deck has sounds effects that play when you interact with the UI. I had become so used to Gaming Mode being quiet that I never even thought about it. But it turns out that my audio had been muted from when I had recently been in Desktop Mode browsing the store on Steam.
It turns out, there’s a bug that keeps the audio status across the Desktop to Gaming Mode.
So when Steam had automatically muted Chromium while it was playing a trailer, it was muting all of the audio while I was in Gaming Mode too. I discovered this recently while I was browsing through the Steam Deck subreddit. Someone made a post about this issue and offered a solution. So let me share how I was able to workaround this bug without having to make any changes to SteamOS.
Boot into Desktop Mode
Since your audio was likely muted while you were in Desktop Mode, you’ll need to switch over to that. So press the Steam button and then select the Power option. Then you can choose the Switch to Desktop option and wait for your Steam Deck to reboot.
I have a suspicion that most people are going to experience this issue from Steam itself, so let’s check that first. Open up the Steam app and then begin browsing the Steam Store. Click on a game that has a trailer with sound. Let the trailer begin to play and then click the speaker icon in the taskbar.
Now click on the Apps tab (if it isn’t selected already) and check to see if Chromium is muted or not. I suspect it’s going to be.
Check Multiple Apps
However, that may not be the case for everyone. In the thread on Reddit I also saw someone mention how they had a similar issue but it was the Moonlight application that had become muted while they were in Desktop Mode. So if it isn’t from Steam, and you don’t use Moonlight, then maybe it was another app you had open that plays audio and had become muted by accident.
That’s where another aspect of this bug comes into play, people muting apps on accident.
If you’ve ever looked at the icon for an open app that sits in the taskbar then you may have seen the little speaker icon in the top right corner. This is a feature of KDE that allows you to know which apps is currently playing sounds. And if you click that little speaker it will actually mute the app entirely.
So another way this could be happening is from people mis-clicking that taskbar icon. . .or intentionally muting the app without knowing it will carry over into Gaming Mode.
Fixing the Muted Audio Bug on Steam Deck
Future Bug Fix Update
All we can do is hope that Valve sees this as an issue and fixes this behavior in the future. I can’t image there are any technical reasons why the operating system is handling things in this way. So I suspect we will get some sort of bug fix for this issue in the future. Let’s just hope that it comes sooner rather than later.
But at least we know a workaround to this issue and the fix isn’t that difficult, either.