Open VPN on the Steam Deck

VPN
1

To start off, my apologies if there is already a guide out there. I could not find one… so here we are.

Now, I know my way around RHEL and am a network engineer by trade but this was my first experience with SteamOS and ArchLinux and flatpaks. For someone in IT, this was (embarrassingly?) difficult to figure out.

So, I thought I’d make a guide in hopes it could help someone else.

At first, I was just using AnyDesk over to my Windows PC to continue my downloading shenanigans using MozillaVPN. I wanted a VPN on my Deck though and couldn’t find any in the Discovery store or whatever it’s called. Google search for VPN on the Deck took me here but some of that was over my head and left me with more questions.

Couple days later of browsing around on my spare time, I found this guide from ProtonVPN. Scroll down a bit and you will find the manual setup instructions. Looked good, so I switched from Mozilla to Proton. Here are the steps I did to get it working…

Signed up for the 12 month plan, logged in, went to downloads. Picked a server and clicked on download.

Can’t remember if this is viewable with the free account…sorry.

Open your System Settings, under Network select Connections and click on the + icon near the bottom to add a new connection.

Scroll to the bottom, select Import VPN connection… and click Create.

Select the file you downloaded and click Open.

I just hit yes…

Select your new VPN and connection and this is what you are left with.

This part took me some time to figure out. Not sure if certain things are needed but this is just what I did and what got it to work eventually.

Keep the connection type to password.

Gateway: pre-populated, I changed mine to have the port after the IP though (138.199.35.97:1194)

CA Cert: left it alone, it’s pre-populated after adding the new connection.

Username & Password: not your ProtonVPN login info…see below

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On your proton website under Account and OpenVPN/IKEv2, scroll down a bit and use the information provided, some random string of characters

After that, click Apply on the bottom right. Right click on your VPN and click Connect.

Hopefully it worked… if not, and you need troubleshooting assistance, perhaps the more knowledgeable people of reddit could help. I’ll do what I can though.

Cheers!

2

This is the guide I made:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/wsvyfw/how_i_set_up_a_vpn_connection/

3

too bad protonvpn doesn’t work in any country that actually needs one.

4

Isn’t OpenVPN going to destroy your CPU and thus battery life? I switched over to Wireguard a few years ago and never looked back. Finally gigabit line speed instead of a couple dozen megabits of throughput.

5

Yeah lol I have my Synology NAS running a VPN which I connect to, then access the NFS share where I have games backed up on my NAS, as long as the connection is fast and the game is small, I can play over any wifi in the country without copying the game to my local storage, at home even moderate sized games work fine being played that way.

6

The challenge I’ve been seeing is the VPN plugin is not being recognised by the open VPN connection… is surprisingly hard, only had an hour looking at it…

7

Does the VPN connection work in game mode?

8

I have PpenVPN set up on my router, and it has a few different config files for clients. The “non-windows” one acted like it was working but wasn’t actually doing anything. The “smartphone” one seems to actually work. Hopefully, that’s useful for someone out there.