Make Your Steam Deck Unique With Custom Themes and Plugins Using Decky Loader

hello hello it's Steam from flip screen games and in today's video I'm going to show you how to customize your steam deck using open source plugins and themes so you can transform its look from this to this we're going to go over how to install plugins and themes we're looking to audio packs and then I'm going to touch on some of my favorite plugins so by the end of the video you'll know everything you need in order to customize your steam deck exactly how you want now before we can install the deki plug-in loader we're going to need to enable developer mode if you haven't already to do this in gaming mode you go to settings and then we're going to scroll down to system and we're going to turn on developer mode this then unlocks a new menu that we can scroll down to called developer and from here we're going to want to turn on CEF remote debugging this is going to allow us to install the decky plug-in loader and to do that we're going to head over to desktop now so I'm going to click power and then switch to desktop here we are in desktop mode and I'm going to open up Firefox and go to deck brew.xyz we're going to click onto decky loader on the left and then we're going to follow the installation instructions this is gonna just walk you through the instructions but it's very very simple we're just going to copy this command here and we're going to open up and paste this into the console so click on the copy button we're then going to go down to the steam icon for the application launcher and we're going to search for console that's k-o-n-s-o-l-e we're going to open up the console now before we paste that command we're going to need to set a password for our steam deck by default there is no password set by Steam OS and we can do this very simply by running the password command now that is p a s s w d this is going to allow us to set a password now in my case I've already set this up because I've run through the decki installed before uh enter in my existing password and then I'm going to type in the new password that I want to sell it to so my password's been set so now what I can do is I can paste in that command that we copied from the deck Brew website you can see it's asked for the password that we just set if I type that in it's now going to install the steam deck plug-in loader so we're going to let this install and do its thing and then we'll head back over to gaming mode and I shall see you over there here we are rebooted back in gaming mode and you can see nothing really looks any different at the moment but if we click on the dot dot dot button to bring up the quick access menu you'll see at the bottom we've now got a new plug icon and this is decking so this is where we can download and access all of the plugins that we've installed what you're going to want to do at first launch is go to the little shop icon in the top right this is going to bring up the plug-in Marketplace from here you can install a bunch of plugins have a look through see which ones take your interest the customization there's two that are really key CSS loader will allow you to download and install themes and tweaks to customize the appearance and then there is an audio loader which is kind of goes hand in hand with the CSS loader and installs audio packs which completes the customization with the theme so we're going to go back out to deki and go to CSS loader and you can see here I've already installed a bunch of themes that I'm going to go through in a little bit you can click on manage themes and from here this will bring up a theme manager you can browse and sort through the most popular or the last updated and there's a whole wide variety of themes in here they're system-wide themes like Phantom or the Wii theme and there's also a bunch of tweaks which will hide up the Edge Edge fade allow you to round out specific elements or hide elements such as the play time or if you wanted to hide say for example some of the the elements that steam includes like the game shine on box Arts if you want it to be a little bit cleaner so going back out to decking we'll turn on the obsidian theme which allows us to set the Base main color to black or or a variety of other colors so there's a bunch of options in here but I'm going to send it to be black and this will look really nice on if you're using something like an iron EO you'll be able to really take advantage of the OLED display and I'm going to also turn on the Phantom theme now again we have a bunch of color choices I'm going to choose the traditional red color which is the The Joker color and you can see this makes it styled up to be like a Persona 5 theme which is really really cool now alongside this there are some audio packs that we can install um also from uh decking so to get there we're gonna go we're gonna back out of the CSS loader by tapping the back button and I'm going to go to the audio loader now from here I'm going to go to manage packs and then browse packs and you can see there's a whole bunch in here we can have the original Xbox pack PS4 soundtracks uh if we want to go back to the original Big Picture Mode um but I'm going to scroll down and we're going to find the Persona ones uh the undertale ones are quite cool as well um and I also really love the Wii Shop music which we've got installed here um I'm gonna search for Persona and you can see we've got a we've got the Persona 5 track uh soundtrack here join the Phantom thieves uh of hearts with this Sam Pack based on the UI from Persona 5 complete your style with the Phantom theme on CSS loader so we've already installed the phantom phantom theme so now I can go back out of here to audio loader so we'll open this up and we've got two options from the audio loader there's the sounds which are like the boot Boop single here as you click around the interface and there's also music so music uh I haven't got any theme music for Persona I've installed the Wii music here so I'm going to play this and um we'll capture it and you can hear what it sounds like laughs so if you missed that kind of Whimsy that you used to get with consoles you can install music and have that play whenever you're on the menus and then the sound packs we've got Persona 5 sound packs here and this will um use sounds from the uh the game so whenever I move around you get that menu sound that you got within Persona 5 and it's really really cool to be able to customize it exactly how you want here uh personally um I I don't change any of the sounds out so I'm going to change these back um and the same with the CSS I'm not using any of these uh these themes but there are some really cool ones like the outrun theme is is kind of like uh cyberpunky style theme or vapor wavy theme but the ones I like are just the tweaks really so like centered home which will bring down the the game box art sort of Center on the games you can Center on games or Center on all I like the no deck badge and I'll show you why in just a second I like the uh rounded uh theme and here you can set the intensity of the round I like five pixels and I'll show you what these do here so now you can see our games a little more centered in the screen uh they've got a nice rounded border around them and we don't have any of the the when we hover on it we don't have any of the compatibility uh badges the steam deck adds and the reason is I actually use use the badges from proton DB and this is another plugin that I've got installed that will allow us to pull up the proton DB Badges and you can see if I click onto this it'll load up the the page for papers please in the proton DB and it'll it just gives us a lot more information I find than the official program badges this was just another plugin I've got installed um so if we go back out to to decki you can see I've got proton DB badges installed and it allows you to set the badge size so we can have regular small or minimalist and this just controls where it is and we can set the badge and position either in the top left or the top right minimalist allows you also to expand to the label when you hover on it so you see it's just in the top top right now it says Platinum if you hover on it which is quite nice it's a little bit more subtle a little bit more out of the way um there's also a couple of other tweaks that I want to touch on pause games is really cool so um by default when you tap home it doesn't pause the game this sends an Escape key to the game so it will pause the game um before you end up going back to the home screen I can imagine the valve will incorporate this into Steam OS at some point but for now it's not uh and vibrant deck is another one that I want to touch on so if you find uh coming from say the switch OLED for example the games aren't quite as Punchy as you would have liked or the the reverse might be true if there's some games like say you're emulating a gba and it's one of those earlier games where um the vibrancy was punched all the way up vibrant deck allows you to set the saturation and you can do this on a per game basis or you can do like a global saturation but it really does have an effect on certain games um and it's it's really great so if you find for example the uh you're missing some of that like vibrancy that you got from the the switch OLED or if you're coming from another OLED device doesn't quite get any of the same Punchy look because you don't have those infinite blacks those true Rich deep blacks that you would get with an OLED screen but you can get a little bit closer with vibrant deck and it's one of those um extensions that I really really like thank you so much for watching I hope this video was useful if you did find it interesting or useful please hit that like button down below it really helps us out and give us a subscription we're going to be posting a lot more videos like this but we also have our podcast the steam deck podcast where we talk all about valve's hot handheld the steam deck it's well worth checking out um and if you haven't already check out our tutorials on getting PlayStation 5 and Xbox Remote Play setup on your steam deck really really useful stuff uh and I shall see you all on the next one bye for now foreign [Applause] [Music]

Channel: FlipScreen Games

Views: 45,859

Keywords: custom themes steam deck, How To Install Custom Themes On The Steam Deck, steam deck tutorial, steam deck tips, custom theme steam deck tutorial, How do I change the theme on my steam deck, how to install themes on steam deck, Custom UI Themes on Steam Deck, Steam Deck Themes, steam deck plugins, best steam deck plugins, steam deck themes reddit, steam deck themes step by step guide, Decky Loader tutorial, Decky Loader, Enabling Developer Mode steam deck

Id: 3kBsjJKTidU

Length: 11min 41sec (701 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 08 2022