> While the hardware is no longer being sold the software sort of lives on. In an android app among other things.

It is built-in on every Steam. You can basically press two buttons and stream from your desktop to laptop if both have Steam with same accounts logged in.

> Tangentially it almost feels like steam could make a stadia like thing work. They have most of the moving parts including crucially, the bit google didn't, an established base of customers. Tomorrow steam could introduce a "play your games anywhere on any hardware" feature and no one would be surprised.

Already possible. While not so optimized as Games-on-whales.

That's not the same thing at all. Stadia was never about streaming from your own dedicated pc, it was about cloud computing. Something Valve does not have. In order for Steam Link to become Stadia, Valve requires the same data center capacity to serve games.

Steam Link has saved my ass more times than I can count.

VPN having issues, can't connect to any of my stack? Atleast I have a desktop on my LAN I can remote into...from my phone...

Basically anytime I have network issues while I'm away, reliable Steam Link connects me back to my infra ~97% of the time.

They also have datacenters in most major cities, so latency would be minimal. They're one of the only services that allows me to actually saturate my home internet bandwidth. But hosting game data and actually running the games is a lot different.

Wouldnt they need racks of GPUs to do that at scale?

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Thanks to the comment above I discovered Games on Whales and just read up on the possibilities. Isn’t that exactly your usecase? It seems you can stream to multiple underpowered systems provided you have network, RAM, GPU and enough cores. It even streams to Apple TV, Chromecast etc.

Not sure if LXCs would help in that regard as I haven't used it for gaming but you can share a GPU between LXC guests and the host. I have an unprivileged LXC running in Proxmox that uses the GPU for transcoding video.

It's possible to run vgpu with modded drivers up to, I think, RTX 2xxx series.

intels gpu supports vgpu with no extra licence

But Sunshine _is_ headless, I would know if it weren't, I'm using it as such (albeit with a dummy plug, but that's just a hardware limitation).

I've been doing almost the same exact thing for a while, except on Arch and with a different EDID than my actual display drive my handheld that I stream to is 16:10 rather than 16:9 like my actual monitor. After a couple of months something changed (maybe a kernel update, although I never fully tracked it down) where the kernel no longer respects the parameter about which display to use for the initial LUKS decrypt and tries to use the fake display no matter that, which prevents me from unlocking it until after a timeout of a few minutes. I've made this somewhat less annoying by setting up unlocking via ssh on a local IP so that I can just initiate a reboot and then do other things around the house without having to wait around next to it until it times out and falls back to the real display, but it would be really nice to not need to wait in the times when I don't have any need to do anything else for a few minutes. Did you ever happen to run into this timeout issue, and if so, do you know how to fix it?

Most of these solutions work by directly forwarding the GPU-rendered image. On Linux, Moonshine uses Wayland for headless rendering, but that approach doesn't work on Windows.

Windows requires an active user session with a connected display(physical or virtual) in order to build a desktop to render something. RDP can create a backgorund session, but on non-Server editions of Windows, you can't have a background RDP session while you are using it. It only allows one active session unless you patched the RDP service.

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I've been running Sunshine on my Linux desktop for a while now and connecting to it with a SteamOS handheld and my laptop for mostly gaming for a while now. From what I can tell, the biggest difference with Sunshine and Moonshine when running on Linux is that Sunshine doesn't use a separate desktop instance per stream; by default, the streams will be mirrored to the clients, although there's a way to work around that somewhat by setting up a fake display output device with the boot parameters and a custom EDID with the specs you want (there's at least once repo where someone has a large set of them dumped from thousands of different monitor brands/models) and then setting up Sunshine to output when mirroring, which effectively means that only the remote client will actually have anything displayed.

It took a fair bit of iteration to get my setup to the point where it mostly works the way I like, but it's been pretty stable for months now. I game exclusively on my handheld streamed from my desktop, and on my local network the input lag is pretty consistently low enough that I don't notice any difference from when I had tried to play things locally on SteamOS, only I can easily max the graphics settings on most games I play (and on the rare ones that do struggle, there's often not a ton of downside to lowering the resolution a bit due to the handheld only being 1200p).

I sometimes ssh into my box with a port forward and starting wayvnc, then connect via tigervnc, I only played a few older/simpler games like this on Steam for a short test, but seemed to work. The server was Arch with Sway and client Fedora with Sway.

Games on Whales runs containers, it doesn’t stream your desktop or your steam installation for example. So use case is for those that use the PC directly but also want it available via moonlight without a display connected.

I've used Moonlight but didn't like having to unlock my Linux home PC to play. If I want to play remotely using my (idle) PC, what's a better solution? Games on Whales (which I'd never heard of before now, and I'm not sure if it works on Linux), or Moonshine?

I don't have the time to provide such a detailed answer, but there are a few options.

At least on Sway (and I imagine other wlroots-based compositors) it's very easy to do: create a virtual output and start a VNC server attached to it. Start your vnc client on windows. A comment I posted 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25892128

The comment linked above is on the topic of Deskreen, which is a tool that does that.

Funilly, I also commented something similar there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34010970 the article explains how to do it on a lower level (pretending a display is connected to the GPU), works under X11 too.

A few days ago, an update locked me out of my server. I used a cheap USB HDMI capture card to use my laptop as a screen, which worked very well: that could be another option.

Then I guess that there is this option, which is new to me. It feels like this could be a toogle in sunshine, somehow :)

Yes, I do this. Got used to my work laptop being my second monitor under my main but at home use a desktop. I do it with a Mac laptop but moonlight on the laptop in my experience is not the finicky part of the setup. I do it with basic sunshine connecting to a headless display, though. I think moonshine sets up the virtual monitor for you? Never used it.

My unhelpful answer is: It sounds like what you're describing is logical. Can you go ahead and set that up and report back?

Agreed. It's awesome.

Apollo solves many issues that Sunshine has on Windows. If your host is Windows, a correctly configured Apollo (i.e. where virtual monitor is enabled) will be a way less frustrating experience.

Sunshine is the stable, maintained one. That should work fine for most users.