Correct.

With normal split tunneling you can normally do something like this anyways, but it can be finicky to configure, and easy for something like DNS, etc to access the internet without your VPN in the middle. And sometimes if your VPN fails to connect, you could be connecting without your VPN.

By using docker with gluetun + qbit (I believe docker images for this setup exist already) you can force it to use only your VPN, and if the connection fails then your bittorrent client can’t connect. With gluetun all your bittorrent traffic would flow through your VPN, but there’s a way it can be configured to allow only your webui port to be accessed locally on your network

And in this setup you can fairly easily use gluetun to force all its traffic through VPN

I’ll happily say I must have overlooked something, but I did try using update-alternatives. I don’t remember all the nuts and bolts from the start, but it involves python3 and distribution upgrades. I spent a good number of nights over the years trying to unmess it up, and am happy to never think about it ever again.

Installed python3 before it was made the native python on the dist. Half broke everything, including apt & python. So I uninstalled it, and then everything was broken. Finally got python3 reinstalled, and lived with it kindof working & awful distribution updates.

I have finally freed myself of that prison last month, by nuking everything and starting fresh.

Its a meme at this point, but I tried to install arch. Ran into display issues during install and couldn’t progress. Gave up and did Ubuntu instead.

I know there’s supposed to be some helper stuff out there now to make it go smoothly, but don’t think I am motivated enough to retry ever.

In fairness, I frequently forgot my steamdeck root password, because the need to use it was so few and far between. If you’re always in game mode, then there’s almost 0 reason that I’d need my password.

How does deck + phone work? Your phone uses the speakers on the deck for playback?