desktop user password issues. can't do squat in desktop.

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de⁩ to ⁨steamdeck@sopuli.xyz⁩

I have the one default user “deck” in desktop mode. It looks like it’s set to a standard account type.

I can’t add a user or change this without a pop up asking “Authentication is required to change user data” and wanting “authenticating as root” password.

Leaving it blank fails. Putting in my sudo password that I have set and at this point double checked multiple times from within Konsole fails as well. I’ll go in Konsole and type “passwd” then I’ll type the current password and it will say “changing password for deck” and the change works fine. I’ll close Konsole, but still have the same issue outside of konsole. Entering a password fails when trying to modify user or update anything.

I can’t update anything on desktop now, and I can’t figure out what the heck the issue with it is.

Does anyone have a clue? Thanks

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NateNate60@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
I’m not sure exactly what causes this, but you can work around it as long as you can actually run commands as root (i.e. using sudo) in the terminal.

The command to add a new user is adduser.

The command to add a user to the administrators group (i.e. give them the ability to use sudo) is usermod -aG wheel.

These commands should be run as root by prepending sudo.

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- ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  I’m trying to sudo in a user or elevate deck to admin. Either way if I try to sudo anything, I get asked " [sudo]password for deck: " and when I put in a password it says " deck is not in the sudoers file. "
  
  So I haven’t been able to do anything worthwhile, yet.
  
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  - NateNate60@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    If you know the root password, then you can switch to the account called root using the su root command.
    
    The sudoers file is located at /etc/sudoers. Do keep in mind that this file should not be edited directly. You can use the cat command which will print the content of a file to the terminal. So try cat /etc/sudoers.
    
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_cryptagion@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Check on Reddit, somebody posted a tutorial on how to reset the desktop user password on the Steam Deck.

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- ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  I’ve done that reset like 3 times now. If I open Konsole and check my password, it’s correct and will also let me change it within there. But when I go to users or try to update things in the normal desktop GUI the password doesn’t work. I’m not sure how to force updates or modify users just within Konsole.
  
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  - _cryptagion@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    well if you want to update the flatpaks, then you can use flatpak update --noninteractive. there’s also a deckyloader plugin (I forget the name) that updates them from game mode automatically on whatever schedule you set.
    
    if it’s the system, then that updates outside of desktop mode from the setting page.
    
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