In steamos, you have what is called an immutable file system. This means if you try to install anything outside of a flat pack in the user directory it gets wiped on updates and maybe reboots. This is probably because the VPN is trying to install something lower than the user level and so it breaks, and so it’s only working temporarily. Idk though.

You have basically two options. You can hack steamOS a bit, mount the system as rewritable, and install an overlay file system, and write a system D script to do this at boot, but a better way would be to download bazzite and install it on your steam deck. It has a ostree file system which is annoying in its own way but it’s relatively easy to install software and modify the system with. All you really have to do is follow a guide on the internet to download the ISO, copying it to a thumb drive, and boot using the power+volume down key to install it.

This will solve most of your issues, but you have to learn to use the fedora system which is a bit different mainly that you use rpm-ostree to install software rpm files if you don’t have a flat pack.

Flatpacks are great for many things, but for installing lower level stuff you might need to install it to the actual system with rpm-ostree in fedora or pacman or whatever in arch which is what the native steam deck is built on if you have the hack in place.

You can also try another VPN which might work better. It may or may not work.

I would just install bazzite until steamdeck catches up a bit. Get KDE if you want a steam deck like experience.

Also after bazzite, id get protonup-qt, to install proton-GE versions which make some games run work much better due to it’s better .net implementation and shader code. Bazzite also has a better flat pack repository out of the box. The steamdeck repositories have a lot of common software missing.

You should also overclock the CPU to 4.0 ghz which should be stable on most decks. I wouldn’t mess with the voltages because this causes issues in many games. Don’t do this before you install an operating system, do it and rest for a few days with a known working config to make sure it’s not crashing more often. This overclock will help many games run much better, especially sim and strategy games. The option to change this is (fClockMaxOverride), and the value that you would set is 4000 you have to patch the bios, maybe downgrade it, and download a tool called smokeless_UMAF to do this. I downgraded my bios using steam deck bios manager to 106, and used some script I forget to patch it to unlock the debug options. Bios 106 which gives the best compatibility with overclocking in my experience. This won’t make the GPU any better which is the main bottleneck in most games, and overclocking the GPU in my experience caused thermal throttling and stuttering, but overclocking the CPU is a nice boost in many games and also improves the feel of the device. If you combine this with smokeless_UMAF you can add 2 w to the tdp, 2w in my experience is about all you can add before getting your SoC in the 90+ range, but you also have to write a systemD script to use ryzenadj to set this on boot, or use a desktop script to set the TDP in the desktop. Every time you open the bios however without snoklessUMAF, if sets the max TDP back to 15.

I also disabled performance limitations reason, which allows the GPU and CPU to draw the full 17w. If you need help with any of this feel free to message me and I’ll get back to you when I can.

For right now, if that seems like too much, you should just try to get bazzite on a USB.

Personally what I do is I use a windows PC to format it into fat or fat32 or whatever the thumb drive needs. You can do this in Linux but I always have issues trying to format drives into fat on linux, I use a program off the flat pack store or whatever to copy the ISO.

Then I go into the bios and disable TPM, and if available on some systems, disable uefi, and go back to legacy boot, and install bazzite. (UEFI and TPM are trash) Disabling either of these will likely break whatever OS you are currently running.

Then in the setup after you boot from the USB, you need to set it up to delete everything on the drive, and then let it auto install on the drive. After you install, let it sit for a while and you can install some of your stuff like firefox and log into your stuff. Then shut the machine down fully and repower it if you decide to do any updates. This really helps.

Install proton-GE, maybe think downgrading your bios or overclocking. Set up your extra drives on steam. Ask chatGPT to help you understand how to add your drives to auto mount with the fstab file lol, oh Linux. You don’t have to do that immediately. Maybe a project one day.

Anyways like I said, hmu if you need help.

How did you install it?

One thing you could look into is your router, some of them let you run a VPN directly on the router and you can choose which devices go through the VPN based on MAC address (at least that’s how mine works) so that way I get my Steam Deck going through Mullvad without installing it on the Deck.

Of course that only works when you’re on your home network though, so it’s a bit limited.

I’m not recommending this as a solution, but as last option, you could try installing bazzite instead