Tailscale on the Steam Deck

This process is derived from the official guide, but has been tweaked to make the process smoother and produce an installation that comes up automatically on boot (no need to enter desktop mode).

Installing Tailscale

Clone this repo to your Deck.
Run sudo bash tailscale.sh to install Tailscale (or update the existing installation).
Run source /etc/profile.d/tailscale.sh to put the binaries in your path
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.

Updating Tailscale

Tailscale should be able to update itself now! Try running sudo tailscale update, and if that works, sudo tailscale set --auto-update. If it doesn't, keep reading.

⚠️ This process will most likely fail if you are accessing the terminal over Tailscale SSH, as it seems to be locked in a chroot jail. You should start and connect through the standard SSH server instead, but remember to stop it when you're done. Suggestions for how to fix this are welcomed.

Git fetch and pull to make sure you're up to date.
Run sudo bash tailscale.sh again.

This process overwrites the existing binaries and service file, so it's not recommended to tweak those files directly. The configuration file at /etc/default/tailscaled is left alone. The configuration file at /etc/systemd/system/tailscaled.service.d/override.conf is reset every time this script is run to ensure the path to the binary is correct, but the preexisting file will be backed up in that directory as override.conf.bak. If something goes wrong, copy those files somewhere else and re-run the install script to get back to a working state.

Common issues

Broken config file

Symptom: invalid value "" for flag -port: can't be the empty string

Resolution: Delete /etc/default/tailscaled and re-run installer script.

How it works

The Tailscale binaries tailscale and tailscaled are installed in /opt/tailscale/. The Tailscale systemd unit file is installed at /etc/systemd/system/tailscale.service. The override file to reconfigure the services Exec commands is installed at /etc/systemd/system/tailscaled.service.d/override.conf. The defaults file for the variables PORT and FLAGS is installed at /etc/default/tailscaled

The service is then started and enabled via systemctl.