Hello @rlach, this is not specific to SteamOS or the Steam Deck.
Personally, I don't think that this behavior should be changed. You explicitly told Steam to start installing a game while playing, and it's doing exactly what you told it to do. This can be useful in general when you want to cherry pick a game update or play a game with what resources are available while waiting on a long download.
this is not specific to SteamOS or the Steam Deck.
Yes, I agree.
Personally, I don't think that this behaviour should be changed. You explicitly told Steam to start installing a game while playing, and it's doing exactly what you told it to do. This can be useful in general when you want to cherry pick a game update or play a game with what resources are available while waiting on a long download.
Currently there is no way to explicitly tell Steam to queue the game, as the only button that can be pressed is "Install".
I think the current behaviour is inconsistent. If you start a download, then start the game, the download will pause. You explicitly told Steam to start the game while the download is running, and yet Steam paused it. Doing the same in opposite order has a different outcome.
I can see though how that can be desirable to some users, under some situations. I have two alternate proposals, that might be a bit more generic. Both could be a good resolution to the issue.
Proposal 1:
Have a small dropdown triangle next to install button, similar to when there's an update waiting. By default it says "Install", but you can open dropdown to reveal "Queue until game is closed".
Proposal 2:
If the setting "Allow downloads during gameplay" is set to "off" when user clicks "Install" during gameplay show a pop-up asking:
"There is currently a game running. Do you want to start the download instantly or queue it until gameplay session is over?"
With both of those proposals the current behaviour is unaffected, but there is possibility to defer the download.
I've noticed another unwanted behaviour with "Allow downloads during gameplay", and gathered more info about the issue. The issue persisted trough all stable versions since September 2022, and today I've tested in on the newest update.
I went into sleep by pressing power button. Few hours later I pressed power button to come back from the sleep. I noticed the game was stuttering the sound, very laggy, loading times were taking minutes instead of seconds. I thought my Deck broke, but I looked into downloads and noticed the SD started downloading cache updates for all my installed games. I checked my Settings -> Downloads and I have "Allow downloads during gameplay" to off.
Pausing the cache downloads fixes loading times for the running game (back to seconds instead of minutes). But it doesn't fix sound stutter if it happened(only game restart does).
This didn't happen once, it happens each time SD notices cache update on wake from sleep while a game is running.
Sometimes when waking from sleep, because of heavy downloads, the deck would be unresponsive for minutes. It would take few minutes before I would see the spinner, then few more minutes before I would see the game, then the SD UI would be very slow, each screen loading for tens of seconds, so even pausing downloads would be very hard. Sometimes I had to resort to holding power button to force restart.
The only way I know how to stop it is to set "Restrict updates to between" and choose 1 hour range that you never use SD within, as that stops SD from checking for cache updates. When this option is enabled I never got sound stutter, or slow loading, or unresponsive SD when waking up the consoles (tested for over 2 months).
When I wake up the console it quickly comes back to game and doesn't even check if there are pre-cache updates or any other updates until I turn off the game. Moreover, even if there would be downloads scheduled "for Thursday" and I wake up my console on Thursday it shouldn't install the downloads until I turn off the game(the games get scheduled "for some future day" automatically by SD when it checks for game data updates).
Unfortunately I don't know of any consistent method to make sure SD would start downloading precache on 5. Sometimes it happens even after I put SD into sleep for 15 minutes, sometimes it doesn't happen after hours. Sometimes it won't happen for many sleep/wake cycles.
I explicitly told SD NOT to download things during gameplay and it started downloading stuff anyway, killing stability and performance.
Furthermore with option "Schedule auto-updates" turned to on, if you try to install a game outside of selected hours Steam will only reserve space for the game, and then instantly pause the download until the allowed time. Even though I explicitly "told SD" to start downloading now. "Allow downloads during gameplay: off" should follow the same logic as scheduled updates but it should check if game is running, instead of a hour range.
It's very likely that the common issue people have with stuttering sound after waking up the console is related to unnecessary network activity when waking up Steam Deck.
Nothing extracted yet.
Your system information
Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:
When "Allow downloads during gameplay" is turned off Steam Deck won't download scheduled games and also will pause download when you launch game.
But if you have a game launched and during gameplay press "Install" for another game that game will start downloading immediately. This can severely impact game performance on Steam Deck, so much that it is sometimes hard to even pause such download. User can expect that with setting "Allow downloads during gameplay" turned off the game will only schedule to be downloaded as soon as gameplay session is over.
Steps for reproducing this issue: