it won’t even show up in adb. seemingly has to be unlocked once. I think I have no choice but to fix the screen.

A few times I go to install mods for a game then realize it was running native without me realizing it

The first point of bazzite and other atomic/immutable distros is to prevent such breakages. updates aren’t applied over your existing installed packages, the base read only part is updated and your layered packages come after if you even have any. A kid’s computer won’t need it though. Most of my installed software is flatpak, appimage, or brew. I have maybe 3 packages installed via rpm-ostree. If I ever need anything not possible this way it’s not a job for my gaming pc.