Valve He launched Steam OS 3.7.8 as a major update. Among other improvements, it was upgraded to Plasma 6 (.2.5) and introduced an option to limit battery charge, but also an annoying bug that prevents the device from connecting to WiFi networks. There was also a bug that caused the update to jump multiple times, but installing it a second time seemed to have fixed it, but it hasn't. In the comments of the release note There are many comments complaining, but also solutions temporary.
Because Valve hasn't yet acknowledged the bug, and there's no word on whether they're working on a fix. I hope so, but there are already workarounds. It's important to emphasize that these are temporary solutions, and remember the way out to make the way back if you want to return to the default settings. Here are the solutions so you can reconnect to your WiFi network with the Steam Deck.
Reconnect to your Wi-Fi with SteamOS 3.7.8
There are at least three solutions:
The first one doesn't guarantee much, but it has worked in some cases. All you need to do is go to the network section in Settings, select the Wi-Fi network it won't connect to, and then click "Forget." After resetting the password, if this method worked for you, it will connect without a problem. In this regard, going to the desktop and forgetting all networks, performing a sort of soft reset of the connections, can also work.
The second solution is the one that gives the best results, and is to revert to the previous version. You'll find the full explanation in this article.
The third option is through the developer section:
- Go to Settings/System and activate developer mode. The developer section will appear below.
- We access the developer section.
- In the WiFi section, we disable the power management option and force the WPA supplicant backend.
With this done, in some cases it will only connect to 2.4GHz networks, but in my case it has also connected to 5GHz networks.
Temporary solutions
The first solution doesn't require backtracking. The second does, by updating to the latest version. And the third would only require enabling Wi-Fi power management and disabling the Wi-Fi Suplicant backend.
And that's all there is to it. We're waiting for Valve to release a patch so you can connect to Wi-Fi again on SteamOS 3.7.8.