Tailscale on the Steam Deck

This process is derived from the official guide, but lightly tweaked to make the process smoother and produce an installation that both (1) comes up automatically on boot and (2) survives system updates.

Installing Tailscale

1. Download the attached tailscale.sh and tailscaled.service files to your Deck.
2. Copy the tailscaled.service file to /etc/systemd/system/.
3. Run sudo bash tailscale.sh to install Tailscale (or update the existing installation).
4. Run sudo tailscale up --qr --operator=deck --ssh to have Tailscale generate a login QR code. Scan the code with your phone and authenticate with Tailscale to bring your Deck onto your network.

How it works

It uses the same system extension method as the official guide, but we put the tailscaled.service file directly in /etc/systemd/system/ because it's actually safe to put things there. Changes in /etc/ are preserved in /lib/overlays/etc/upper/ via an overlayfs, meaning that they survive updates.