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Moonshine: Lets you stream games from your PC to any device running Moonlight

374 points by wertyk 3mo ago

SpecialistK 3mo ago
Since this doesn't take over the desktop (per the FAQ) this sounds amazing for headless machines. Shame it needs such a modern GPU and $feature which isn't offered by my preferred Alpine Linux. But that shouldn't detract from what it's promising.
- Grombobulous 3mo ago
  That's not too bad, being able to go all the way back to an RTX20XX or RX 6000 series is pretty old for the kind of person looking to stream some games. If you go back much further your client device might just have enough horsepower to run the game you're trying to play without streaming at all!
  - ZekeSulastin 3mo ago
    As an added point of reference, Turing released in late 2018 and RDNA2 released in late 2020. I Googled a little to see if the GTX 1660/Ti supported Vulkan Video and found this page from Nvidia[1] that says Pascal or later, so I wonder what the blocker is in this program. 1: https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan/video/get-started https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan/video/get-started
  - Gigachad 3mo ago
    I've been streaming from an RX5700 XT which is something like 20x more powerful than my steam deck I'm trying to stream to.
    - Grombobulous 3mo ago
      20x is a huge exaggeration. It’s more like 5x in hypothetical flops. For example, in Elden Ring an optimized 800p with mixed low to medium settings will hit 45 FPS. On a 5700XT you’re looking at the high 90fps range for 1080p medium settings. So it’s really in all practical purposes 2-3 times better and your steam deck has a maximum refresh rate of 90Hz anyway. On a screen that size you’ll barely see the difference between medium and ultra settings. Something notable is that because of how math maths, 45FPS is a LOT better looking than 30FPS. Finally, I’ll point out that anyone with hardware this old still has the option of using normal sunshine. Or you can just get a 6000 series card, the difference in cost between a 6600XT and a 5700XT is less than $50.
      - Gigachad 3mo ago
        Running Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 on the deck gets around 30-45 fps with some lag spikes on low settings. Streaming from my 5700xt I can get 90fps ultra. It's massively better to stream from even this old GPU than to play locally.
        Grombobulous 3mo ago
        I agree with you, but that’s not 20x.
    - duskdozer 3mo ago
      Using moonshine? As in what they list isn't a hard requirement just possibly the oldest they cared to test?
tetrisgm 3mo ago
I’m not completely clear on how this differs from running Sunshine on a Linux box
- pipyakas 3mo ago
  This is perfect for someone who has a active desktop user and can still stream from that same PC to other clients in the house.
  - tetrisgm 3mo ago
    Thank you
- Grombobulous 3mo ago
  In the kindest way I can point this out, the README answered those questions in the Features and FAQ sections ("How does this compare to Sunshine?")
xingped 3mo ago
I don't remember whether it was this or "sunshine", but game streaming from your own PC hasn't been the same since it was simply "turn on the Nvidia feature". It was way too difficult to figure out how to make it work the last time I tried and I gave up and haven't tried again since. For all the good they do otherwise, FOSS devs just never seem to get usability right.
- Grombobulous 3mo ago
  I hope you do try again! It's actually become an incredibly wonderful experience ever since the "turn on the Nvidia (proprietary!) feature" days. Nvidia's implementation as far as the software experience was convenient but also bad in a lot of ways compared to what we have today. Perhaps the first thing I would recommend is Steam's built-in Remote Play feature along with their apps. This is the most dummy-proof method, though you can get better/more customizable results with Sunshine/Moonlight and of course you aren't tied down to Steam if you are using Sunshine/Moonlight. (Not that being tied down to Steam is particularly limiting since Steam can launch non-Steam applications and games) There are a lot of YouTube guides out there if you prefer that way, or another way to go is to have an AI help you. For example, I had some trouble recently getting my streaming setup to work and I just kept asking AI what to investigate, and it turned out my Linux distro software firewall was defaulted to blocking the streaming ports on my desktop system. I recommend trying local network only to get started and only worry about Internet streaming later as that process is a little more involved. Though, maybe it's not if you already have your own home VPN like Wireguard or Tailscale. It'll really work best if your desktop is wired. Clients being on WiFi is usually okay, especially if you have 6Ghz support...of course, wired everywhere is most ideal. Admittedly, none of this is anywhere near as convenient as the black magic that PS Remote Play does. That is a downright incredible user experience. But still, I encourage you to give it another go!
  - Gigachad 3mo ago
    I've been trying regularly for a few years now but it still doesn't work for me. Steam remote play often refuses to launch a game, it'll open on my desktop but the stream won't start. Then when it does, sometimes it's totally fine, sometimes it lags out incredibly bad despite being over ethernet. Sunshine/Moonlight kind of works and in the desktop it works fine but when I open a game the display scales wrong on my client device despite looking fine on the host.
NDlurker 3mo ago
This is how people play Switch games on Wii U and 3DS. Emulate on PC and stream on the older systems
- fishfasell 3mo ago
  Makes sense, I wrote something in Rust a few years ago to allow multi-player netplay on any emulator and it was surprisingly easy to write
- dizhn 3mo ago
  Also newer handhelds like Ayn Odin/Thor devices and similar. (They are Android)
hankbond 3mo ago
> Moonshine runs each streaming session in its own isolated environment, separate from your desktop. This means your host PC stays usable while you stream, and it works without an active desktop session. So does this create like a virtual desktop? How does that work? Is this just a separate "screen" or is this more like an entirely separate compositor instance (if thats the right term here)?
- jauntywundrkind 3mo ago
  From the features section: > Isolated streaming sessions: Each stream runs in its own compositor, completely separate from your desktop environment. So yes, a compositor per session. I love the idea of a gaming box that can host multiple instances; that would be very very good.
  - hankbond 3mo ago
    Thank you I can see why it only works on linux. I can see this being successful with the SteamOS variants. Would this be a simpler way to share a gaming box across two different clients simultaneously? Like if my kids only played lightweight titles.
jauntywundrkind 3mo ago
I'm down to try this new rust server. It seems to replace either Sunshine or the more recent fork Apollo. They both work fine Note that Moonlight also has a fork, Artemis. I'm genuinely not sure what difference Sunshine/Moonlight has vs somewhat newer Apollo/Artemis, but kind of just posting here to let folks know there are already some fairly active forks from Sunshine, the classic way to host a server for Moonlight clients.
- mapBasketWand 3mo ago
  Apollo has native support for virtualized displays, which is handy for a headless server… I just switched this weekend from Sunshine so I didn’t have to go buy a $10 dummy hdmi dongle to fake a display
  - krzyk 3mo ago
    The same for Game on Whales.
BrokenCogs 3mo ago
I don't quite understand the difference between this, sunshine, and apollo? Is this basically Apollo but for Linux?
- taikon 3mo ago
  I think Apollo is a moonshine fork
  - pyreko 3mo ago
    Apollo is a fork of Sunshine (it's on the repo). EDIT: maybe you're mixing up Sunshine and Moonshine (this project)?
    - taikon 3mo ago
      Good catch, I misread
BLKNSLVR 3mo ago
The Sunshine/Moonlight combo allowed me to stream emulated, upscaled SSX Tricky (PS2 game) from my desktop to an (at least 7 year-old) Android streaming box as smooth as silk. The only downside was that the game had to be running, visibly, on the screen of the desktop machine, meaning the desktop is unusable for anything else - ie. if someone else wanted to play the game while I was working on the desktop. This appears to solve that. Sunshine/Moonlight was already cake with a fair layer of icing. This is a sprinkling of glacé cherries on top. I love glacé cherries.
- jader201 3mo ago
  Side note: I miss SSX. Such a great franchise, and sad that EA Big shut down (and that no one else picked it up). Tricky was probably my favorite, but they were all great.
  - davkan 3mo ago
    Tricky and 3 were both great fun. The latter “SSX” was decent but was missing the more arcadey fun of the earlier ones. I tried Steep and it did not hit the spot that hitting uber combos in SSX did.
  - BLKNSLVR 3mo ago
    The singular reason I setup Sunshine/Moonlight is because some night as I was drifting off to sleep I remembered SSX Tricky from years (and years) ago and how much fun it was, and couldn't get the desire out until I had it all setup. On a big screen TV with the upscaled graphics made it feel a lot less like retro-gaming too.
  - gabriel666smith 3mo ago
    Word. In terms of game level design, I think SSX Tricky’s Tokyo Megaplex is one of the most interesting, complex, simple, comprehensible, fun, beautiful, and downright cool pieces of work of all time. I can’t have played it in fifteen or twenty years but I still think about Tokyo Megaplex every month or two. It tapped into something deep in my brain. Thanks for the reminder of it. I won’t know what heaven looks like until I’m at its gates, but when I die, I hope I get to ascend via that weird updraft tube, and ride those red and white candy cane rails for eternity. If not, God might have missed a trick. What an incredible piece of work that game is.
esperent 3mo ago
I spent quite a while trying to set up streaming from my laptop to my phone using Sunshine/Moonlight. I never got decent results despite following tutorials that were supposed to make it all very easy. Gaming is something I do to relax and I eventually decided it wasn't worth it since I had spent a week of my limited downtime messing around with codecs, latency, wifi settings, trying different apps, etc. and not gotten any kind of usable results. I guess it was about three years ago. Have things improved since then?
- Gigachad 3mo ago
  I've had it work occasionally. I had a few sessions which worked flawlessly which proves it's entirely possible for it to work, but 90% of the time I'm hit with endless weird issues, configuration problems, breaking changes in updates. There are some people who it seems to be working for, but I think it still needs a lot more work to iron out all of the issues.
- MostlyStable 3mo ago
  About a week ago, I set it up on my windows machine (host) to my ubuntu laptop (client) with the help of an LLM in about 30 minutes, with an additional 15 of troubleshooting the first time I tried using it away from the LAN. It was pretty painless and worked right off the bat. And then it turned out that A) the game my friend and I were trying to play had only local multiplayer (so my host machine couldn't connect) and B) despite protonDB claiming limited compatibility, the game launched immediately with no problems natively on my laptop, so the whole exercise ended up not being necessary. But it was relatively painless. In case it makes a difference, I was also using Tailscale.
  - esperent 3mo ago
    I guess it's easier when it's pc to pc although it's cool that you can do it from Windows to Ubuntu. But I always understood the main reason was to be able to do it to a portable device so that you'd use your phone as a mini steamdeck basically but via streaming from a pc. I was quite excited by that, I even got a controller that could clamp on to the phone. Just couldn't get it to work reliably.
nicman23 3mo ago
huh i think i can use that with a S7150 to make a cheap vdi server with the video encoding happenng in the host
aliasxneo 3mo ago
I use moonlight/apollo. 1. Connect my Dualsense controller to my macbook 2. Open moonlight on my macbook 3. Connect to my gaming desktop in full screen mode 3. Launch my AAA game on Steam 4. Profit Over Wifi 7 I get basically no discernable lag, which was crazy to me the first time I tried it. I also have a Minisforum attached to my large screen TV and the process is identical except I push a different combo on the Dualsense controller to connect to the Minisforum. Because apollo saves settings, I can pretty seamlessly switch between the two with basically no issues.
- hxii 3mo ago
  I have a question if you don’t mind – do you also have to kill AWDL to prevent lag spikes during a streaming session?
- SlightlyLeftPad 3mo ago
  Does this work better than steam link? Obviously I imagine it works with non-steam games is part of the point.
  - BatteryMountain 3mo ago
    Yes much better in my opinion.
  - t-3 3mo ago
    Yeah, steam link is basically unusable for me with games that need a real-time response even between two devices with wired connections. The only system I've found comparable to sunshine/moonlight in terms of performance is Sony's PS Link which is obviously proprietary and only for Playstation ecosystem.
- BatteryMountain 3mo ago
  Now try it on your phone. Playing Diablo 2 Remastered in bed on an android phone with controller attachment on 6.7" OLED 2340x1080 @ 120hz HDR is super amazing. Better than Steam Deck....phone stays cool and battery lasts forever, it's the same as watching a movie on it.
PalmPilotProMax 3mo ago
So, to sum up: First there was Nvidia Gamestream, which was proprietary and later deprecated by Nvidia themselves. Then came Sunshine and Moonlight, open source server and client implementations of the protocol to allow low latency streaming for all platforms. Along the way the Game on Whales project started, to allow multi seat streaming plus virtual displays so currently logged in user sessions aren't impacted. Basically this is a whole "host your own Stadia/Geforce Now" solution. But instead of running already setup applications as an existing user, you run these curated containers of Steam, Firefox, etc. Then someone forked Sunshine and Moonlight into Apollo and Artemis, to make streaming from a virtual display turnkey and OOTB easy. Sadly the virtual display feature of Apollo is in practice Windows only. And then there's this, Moonshine, in a way doing what Apollo brings to the table but for Linux servers. Oh, and along the way someone forked Apollo into Vibepollo, an almost fully vibecoded "enhancement". Personally not touching that. Did I miss anything?
- chocrates 3mo ago
  Why do we need these? I have sunshine streaming headless to my laptop without issues
- somat 3mo ago
  The steam link actual. While the hardware is no longer being sold the software sort of lives on. In an android app among other things. 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.
  - ekianjo 3mo ago
    Wouldnt they need racks of GPUs to do that at scale?
    - als0 3mo ago
      Have you heard about the cloud?
gadtfly 3mo ago
See also Games on Whales / wolf: https://games-on-whales.github.io/ https://games-on-whales.github.io/ https://github.com/games-on-whales/wolf https://github.com/games-on-whales/wolf
krzyk 3mo ago
I wonder how it compares to Games on Whales. GoW had that advantage over Sunshine, that it allowed selecting any resolution, it didn't require hdmi connector that simulated a monitor.
nbjhauuhdhh 3mo ago
[flagged]
Helmut10001 3mo ago
I am very happy with Moonlight/Sunshine combo. Runs neatly on my RTX 4000 Pro GPU Server. The only thing I miss is automated resolution adjustment to connected Clients, but I was able to script this with Home Assistent Windows client.
pprotas 3mo ago
I’ll try this out later. Mostly interested in the controller handling, will this pass-through my Steam Controller or emulate it to an Xbox controller like Sunshine does? If it’s pass-through like the README makes it seem, then I’m instantly sold.
alex7o 3mo ago
Last time I tires it I learned that the Intel meaa driver doesn't support video deckde and encoded on some older Intel ARC cards like the A770 which is a bummer
gambiting 3mo ago
I've tried several times to set this up on my Steam Deck from my PC, and I just can't get it to work reliably. 9/10 times it just opens to a black screen. I've followed 20 different guides on forums, on reddit, on facebook - nothing. The only way it works reliably is if I don't use the virtual screen option, but then it looks all wrong as my main monitor is an ultrawide.
hgaiser 3mo ago
Ah so this is where the influx of activity comes from.. Hi, creator of Moonshine here. I'll try to answer some common questions here instead of replying the same thing everywhere: What is it? At it's core it's similar to Sunshine but with one important difference: Moonshine creates its own compositor and does not rely on an existing desktop environment. The benefits: - You do not need a running desktop environment: it can run headless. - The compositor is created with any resolution and any refresh rate, without requiring a dummy plug. - Because Moonshine controls the compositor, it has HDR support out-of-the-box, even if your monitor does not support HDR (ongoing development, it works in the games I tested). - If you do have a running desktop environment, you can keep using it while streaming a game at the same time. On a more technical level: I like the narrow focus that Moonshine has. Only one encoder (Vulkan), only one OS supported (Linux), no GUI, no compatibility with old Moonlight clients. The codebase is intentionally "lean". Of course this also has disadvantages like requiring semi-recent GPUs & drivers, only working on Linux and newer Moonlight clients, but I can live with that. Why create it? The short answer: a lazy girlfriend and a stubborn Linux user. The long answer: Moonshine is a hobby project that I've been working on for a few years (first commit goes back to 2022). It was (and still is) a fun exercise and helped me learn a lot, which if it never became functional would have been a nice outcome already. In fact, in earlier README's I advise people not to use it because at the time it did what Sunshine does but worse. I removed that section when I started adding features that made it different from Sunshine. Should I use it? Today I would say to a new user: use Sunshine, there's tons of guides and online information and it will likely work fine for you. If you like tinkering and trying out new things: sure, why not :).
- sthuck 3mo ago
  I played with it for 10 minutes, very impressive. Couldn't get vscode to work, will try again later with different apps. (vscode is not that important anyway as it has a remote mode) I understand (well, "guess" more than understand when it comes to graphic stack in Linux) that it being it's own compositor probably means running a full desktop environment in it is infeasible, but a good way to run software remotely is painfully missing in Linux right now, even one app at a time. The built in servers in kde/gnome are problematic in general and require the monitor to be turned on.
tangsoupgallery 3mo ago
[flagged]
mrkanic 3mo ago
Life is really funny, I spent most of the last week scripting hyprland to run gamescoped steam on a headless monitor to achieve this via sunshine. Tried wolf/games on whales but since I sometimes play the same games directly on the same PC it makes it weird to share the game directories. Although I can't use my PC at the same time as streaming, I'm really happy with my janky setup for now, but kinda really want to try this!
supportm 3mo ago
[flagged]
rob74 3mo ago
I wonder if Moonlighting (which is the title of a 1980s TV series, but also refers to "having a second job, typically secretly and at night, in addition to one's regular employment", as in "my phone is moonlighting as a gaming PC") wouldn't be a better name? But yeah, that's probably the explanation for the name of the Moonlight client, and it would be too close to that name?
dncornholio 3mo ago
Moonlight is pretty popular on Chinese gaming handhelds. Was wondering what it was exactly. How is the Android performance vs Linux?
danofsteel32 3mo ago
I’m currently using sunshine and moonlight for remote access to ros2 development VMs with passed through GPUs. We needed an old version of Ubuntu hence the VM. And gpu pass through is needed for gazebo simulations. I started with RDP but the desktop was super laggy and unresponsive. Sunshine/moonlight has made it usable.
phreack 3mo ago
Has a anyone run this on Fedora or similar yet? From the readme it sounds like it could work but I've been surprised before and I can't find a discussion about it.
miladyincontrol 3mo ago
idk I'd rather run both sunshine and steam in a container nice and decently isolated rather than just have the compositor be a separate instance with moonshine scales nicer for multiple clients, keeps dependencies far away from my host and lets me use NvFBC for lower latency, which yes you can easily patch onto consumer nvidia gpus

374 points by wertyk 3mo ago

Since this doesn't take over the desktop (per the FAQ) this sounds amazing for headless machines. Shame it needs such a modern GPU and $feature which isn't offered by my preferred Alpine Linux. But that shouldn't detract from what it's promising.

Grombobulous 3mo ago
That's not too bad, being able to go all the way back to an RTX20XX or RX 6000 series is pretty old for the kind of person looking to stream some games. If you go back much further your client device might just have enough horsepower to run the game you're trying to play without streaming at all!
- ZekeSulastin 3mo ago
  As an added point of reference, Turing released in late 2018 and RDNA2 released in late 2020. I Googled a little to see if the GTX 1660/Ti supported Vulkan Video and found this page from Nvidia[1] that says Pascal or later, so I wonder what the blocker is in this program. 1: https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan/video/get-started https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan/video/get-started
- Gigachad 3mo ago
  I've been streaming from an RX5700 XT which is something like 20x more powerful than my steam deck I'm trying to stream to.
  - Grombobulous 3mo ago
    20x is a huge exaggeration. It’s more like 5x in hypothetical flops. For example, in Elden Ring an optimized 800p with mixed low to medium settings will hit 45 FPS. On a 5700XT you’re looking at the high 90fps range for 1080p medium settings. So it’s really in all practical purposes 2-3 times better and your steam deck has a maximum refresh rate of 90Hz anyway. On a screen that size you’ll barely see the difference between medium and ultra settings. Something notable is that because of how math maths, 45FPS is a LOT better looking than 30FPS. Finally, I’ll point out that anyone with hardware this old still has the option of using normal sunshine. Or you can just get a 6000 series card, the difference in cost between a 6600XT and a 5700XT is less than $50.
    - Gigachad 3mo ago
      Running Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 on the deck gets around 30-45 fps with some lag spikes on low settings. Streaming from my 5700xt I can get 90fps ultra. It's massively better to stream from even this old GPU than to play locally.
      - Grombobulous 3mo ago
        I agree with you, but that’s not 20x.
  - duskdozer 3mo ago
    Using moonshine? As in what they list isn't a hard requirement just possibly the oldest they cared to test?

tetrisgm 3mo ago

I’m not completely clear on how this differs from running Sunshine on a Linux box

pipyakas 3mo ago
This is perfect for someone who has a active desktop user and can still stream from that same PC to other clients in the house.
- tetrisgm 3mo ago
  Thank you
Grombobulous 3mo ago
In the kindest way I can point this out, the README answered those questions in the Features and FAQ sections ("How does this compare to Sunshine?")

xingped 3mo ago

I don't remember whether it was this or "sunshine", but game streaming from your own PC hasn't been the same since it was simply "turn on the Nvidia feature". It was way too difficult to figure out how to make it work the last time I tried and I gave up and haven't tried again since. For all the good they do otherwise, FOSS devs just never seem to get usability right.

Grombobulous 3mo ago
I hope you do try again! It's actually become an incredibly wonderful experience ever since the "turn on the Nvidia (proprietary!) feature" days. Nvidia's implementation as far as the software experience was convenient but also bad in a lot of ways compared to what we have today. Perhaps the first thing I would recommend is Steam's built-in Remote Play feature along with their apps. This is the most dummy-proof method, though you can get better/more customizable results with Sunshine/Moonlight and of course you aren't tied down to Steam if you are using Sunshine/Moonlight. (Not that being tied down to Steam is particularly limiting since Steam can launch non-Steam applications and games) There are a lot of YouTube guides out there if you prefer that way, or another way to go is to have an AI help you. For example, I had some trouble recently getting my streaming setup to work and I just kept asking AI what to investigate, and it turned out my Linux distro software firewall was defaulted to blocking the streaming ports on my desktop system. I recommend trying local network only to get started and only worry about Internet streaming later as that process is a little more involved. Though, maybe it's not if you already have your own home VPN like Wireguard or Tailscale. It'll really work best if your desktop is wired. Clients being on WiFi is usually okay, especially if you have 6Ghz support...of course, wired everywhere is most ideal. Admittedly, none of this is anywhere near as convenient as the black magic that PS Remote Play does. That is a downright incredible user experience. But still, I encourage you to give it another go!
- Gigachad 3mo ago
  I've been trying regularly for a few years now but it still doesn't work for me. Steam remote play often refuses to launch a game, it'll open on my desktop but the stream won't start. Then when it does, sometimes it's totally fine, sometimes it lags out incredibly bad despite being over ethernet. Sunshine/Moonlight kind of works and in the desktop it works fine but when I open a game the display scales wrong on my client device despite looking fine on the host.

NDlurker 3mo ago

This is how people play Switch games on Wii U and 3DS. Emulate on PC and stream on the older systems

fishfasell 3mo ago
Makes sense, I wrote something in Rust a few years ago to allow multi-player netplay on any emulator and it was surprisingly easy to write
dizhn 3mo ago
Also newer handhelds like Ayn Odin/Thor devices and similar. (They are Android)

hankbond 3mo ago

> Moonshine runs each streaming session in its own isolated environment, separate from your desktop. This means your host PC stays usable while you stream, and it works without an active desktop session. So does this create like a virtual desktop? How does that work? Is this just a separate "screen" or is this more like an entirely separate compositor instance (if thats the right term here)?

jauntywundrkind 3mo ago
From the features section: > Isolated streaming sessions: Each stream runs in its own compositor, completely separate from your desktop environment. So yes, a compositor per session. I love the idea of a gaming box that can host multiple instances; that would be very very good.
- hankbond 3mo ago
  Thank you I can see why it only works on linux. I can see this being successful with the SteamOS variants. Would this be a simpler way to share a gaming box across two different clients simultaneously? Like if my kids only played lightweight titles.

jauntywundrkind 3mo ago

I'm down to try this new rust server. It seems to replace either Sunshine or the more recent fork Apollo. They both work fine Note that Moonlight also has a fork, Artemis. I'm genuinely not sure what difference Sunshine/Moonlight has vs somewhat newer Apollo/Artemis, but kind of just posting here to let folks know there are already some fairly active forks from Sunshine, the classic way to host a server for Moonlight clients.

mapBasketWand 3mo ago
Apollo has native support for virtualized displays, which is handy for a headless server… I just switched this weekend from Sunshine so I didn’t have to go buy a $10 dummy hdmi dongle to fake a display
- krzyk 3mo ago
  The same for Game on Whales.

BrokenCogs 3mo ago

I don't quite understand the difference between this, sunshine, and apollo? Is this basically Apollo but for Linux?

taikon 3mo ago
I think Apollo is a moonshine fork
- pyreko 3mo ago
  Apollo is a fork of Sunshine (it's on the repo). EDIT: maybe you're mixing up Sunshine and Moonshine (this project)?
  - taikon 3mo ago
    Good catch, I misread

BLKNSLVR 3mo ago

The Sunshine/Moonlight combo allowed me to stream emulated, upscaled SSX Tricky (PS2 game) from my desktop to an (at least 7 year-old) Android streaming box as smooth as silk. The only downside was that the game had to be running, visibly, on the screen of the desktop machine, meaning the desktop is unusable for anything else - ie. if someone else wanted to play the game while I was working on the desktop. This appears to solve that. Sunshine/Moonlight was already cake with a fair layer of icing. This is a sprinkling of glacé cherries on top. I love glacé cherries.

jader201 3mo ago
Side note: I miss SSX. Such a great franchise, and sad that EA Big shut down (and that no one else picked it up). Tricky was probably my favorite, but they were all great.
- davkan 3mo ago
  Tricky and 3 were both great fun. The latter “SSX” was decent but was missing the more arcadey fun of the earlier ones. I tried Steep and it did not hit the spot that hitting uber combos in SSX did.
- BLKNSLVR 3mo ago
  The singular reason I setup Sunshine/Moonlight is because some night as I was drifting off to sleep I remembered SSX Tricky from years (and years) ago and how much fun it was, and couldn't get the desire out until I had it all setup. On a big screen TV with the upscaled graphics made it feel a lot less like retro-gaming too.
- gabriel666smith 3mo ago
  Word. In terms of game level design, I think SSX Tricky’s Tokyo Megaplex is one of the most interesting, complex, simple, comprehensible, fun, beautiful, and downright cool pieces of work of all time. I can’t have played it in fifteen or twenty years but I still think about Tokyo Megaplex every month or two. It tapped into something deep in my brain. Thanks for the reminder of it. I won’t know what heaven looks like until I’m at its gates, but when I die, I hope I get to ascend via that weird updraft tube, and ride those red and white candy cane rails for eternity. If not, God might have missed a trick. What an incredible piece of work that game is.

esperent 3mo ago

I spent quite a while trying to set up streaming from my laptop to my phone using Sunshine/Moonlight. I never got decent results despite following tutorials that were supposed to make it all very easy. Gaming is something I do to relax and I eventually decided it wasn't worth it since I had spent a week of my limited downtime messing around with codecs, latency, wifi settings, trying different apps, etc. and not gotten any kind of usable results. I guess it was about three years ago. Have things improved since then?

Gigachad 3mo ago
I've had it work occasionally. I had a few sessions which worked flawlessly which proves it's entirely possible for it to work, but 90% of the time I'm hit with endless weird issues, configuration problems, breaking changes in updates. There are some people who it seems to be working for, but I think it still needs a lot more work to iron out all of the issues.
MostlyStable 3mo ago
About a week ago, I set it up on my windows machine (host) to my ubuntu laptop (client) with the help of an LLM in about 30 minutes, with an additional 15 of troubleshooting the first time I tried using it away from the LAN. It was pretty painless and worked right off the bat. And then it turned out that A) the game my friend and I were trying to play had only local multiplayer (so my host machine couldn't connect) and B) despite protonDB claiming limited compatibility, the game launched immediately with no problems natively on my laptop, so the whole exercise ended up not being necessary. But it was relatively painless. In case it makes a difference, I was also using Tailscale.
- esperent 3mo ago
  I guess it's easier when it's pc to pc although it's cool that you can do it from Windows to Ubuntu. But I always understood the main reason was to be able to do it to a portable device so that you'd use your phone as a mini steamdeck basically but via streaming from a pc. I was quite excited by that, I even got a controller that could clamp on to the phone. Just couldn't get it to work reliably.

nicman23 3mo ago

huh i think i can use that with a S7150 to make a cheap vdi server with the video encoding happenng in the host

aliasxneo 3mo ago

I use moonlight/apollo. 1. Connect my Dualsense controller to my macbook 2. Open moonlight on my macbook 3. Connect to my gaming desktop in full screen mode 3. Launch my AAA game on Steam 4. Profit Over Wifi 7 I get basically no discernable lag, which was crazy to me the first time I tried it. I also have a Minisforum attached to my large screen TV and the process is identical except I push a different combo on the Dualsense controller to connect to the Minisforum. Because apollo saves settings, I can pretty seamlessly switch between the two with basically no issues.

hxii 3mo ago
I have a question if you don’t mind – do you also have to kill AWDL to prevent lag spikes during a streaming session?
SlightlyLeftPad 3mo ago
Does this work better than steam link? Obviously I imagine it works with non-steam games is part of the point.
- BatteryMountain 3mo ago
  Yes much better in my opinion.
- t-3 3mo ago
  Yeah, steam link is basically unusable for me with games that need a real-time response even between two devices with wired connections. The only system I've found comparable to sunshine/moonlight in terms of performance is Sony's PS Link which is obviously proprietary and only for Playstation ecosystem.
BatteryMountain 3mo ago
Now try it on your phone. Playing Diablo 2 Remastered in bed on an android phone with controller attachment on 6.7" OLED 2340x1080 @ 120hz HDR is super amazing. Better than Steam Deck....phone stays cool and battery lasts forever, it's the same as watching a movie on it.

PalmPilotProMax 3mo ago

So, to sum up: First there was Nvidia Gamestream, which was proprietary and later deprecated by Nvidia themselves. Then came Sunshine and Moonlight, open source server and client implementations of the protocol to allow low latency streaming for all platforms. Along the way the Game on Whales project started, to allow multi seat streaming plus virtual displays so currently logged in user sessions aren't impacted. Basically this is a whole "host your own Stadia/Geforce Now" solution. But instead of running already setup applications as an existing user, you run these curated containers of Steam, Firefox, etc. Then someone forked Sunshine and Moonlight into Apollo and Artemis, to make streaming from a virtual display turnkey and OOTB easy. Sadly the virtual display feature of Apollo is in practice Windows only. And then there's this, Moonshine, in a way doing what Apollo brings to the table but for Linux servers. Oh, and along the way someone forked Apollo into Vibepollo, an almost fully vibecoded "enhancement". Personally not touching that. Did I miss anything?

chocrates 3mo ago
Why do we need these? I have sunshine streaming headless to my laptop without issues
somat 3mo ago
The steam link actual. While the hardware is no longer being sold the software sort of lives on. In an android app among other things. 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.
- ekianjo 3mo ago
  Wouldnt they need racks of GPUs to do that at scale?
  - als0 3mo ago
    Have you heard about the cloud?

gadtfly 3mo ago

See also Games on Whales / wolf: https://games-on-whales.github.io/ https://games-on-whales.github.io/ https://github.com/games-on-whales/wolf https://github.com/games-on-whales/wolf

krzyk 3mo ago

I wonder how it compares to Games on Whales. GoW had that advantage over Sunshine, that it allowed selecting any resolution, it didn't require hdmi connector that simulated a monitor.

nbjhauuhdhh 3mo ago

[flagged]

Helmut10001 3mo ago

I am very happy with Moonlight/Sunshine combo. Runs neatly on my RTX 4000 Pro GPU Server. The only thing I miss is automated resolution adjustment to connected Clients, but I was able to script this with Home Assistent Windows client.

pprotas 3mo ago

I’ll try this out later. Mostly interested in the controller handling, will this pass-through my Steam Controller or emulate it to an Xbox controller like Sunshine does? If it’s pass-through like the README makes it seem, then I’m instantly sold.

alex7o 3mo ago

Last time I tires it I learned that the Intel meaa driver doesn't support video deckde and encoded on some older Intel ARC cards like the A770 which is a bummer

gambiting 3mo ago

I've tried several times to set this up on my Steam Deck from my PC, and I just can't get it to work reliably. 9/10 times it just opens to a black screen. I've followed 20 different guides on forums, on reddit, on facebook - nothing. The only way it works reliably is if I don't use the virtual screen option, but then it looks all wrong as my main monitor is an ultrawide.

hgaiser 3mo ago

Ah so this is where the influx of activity comes from.. Hi, creator of Moonshine here. I'll try to answer some common questions here instead of replying the same thing everywhere: What is it? At it's core it's similar to Sunshine but with one important difference: Moonshine creates its own compositor and does not rely on an existing desktop environment. The benefits: - You do not need a running desktop environment: it can run headless. - The compositor is created with any resolution and any refresh rate, without requiring a dummy plug. - Because Moonshine controls the compositor, it has HDR support out-of-the-box, even if your monitor does not support HDR (ongoing development, it works in the games I tested). - If you do have a running desktop environment, you can keep using it while streaming a game at the same time. On a more technical level: I like the narrow focus that Moonshine has. Only one encoder (Vulkan), only one OS supported (Linux), no GUI, no compatibility with old Moonlight clients. The codebase is intentionally "lean". Of course this also has disadvantages like requiring semi-recent GPUs & drivers, only working on Linux and newer Moonlight clients, but I can live with that. Why create it? The short answer: a lazy girlfriend and a stubborn Linux user. The long answer: Moonshine is a hobby project that I've been working on for a few years (first commit goes back to 2022). It was (and still is) a fun exercise and helped me learn a lot, which if it never became functional would have been a nice outcome already. In fact, in earlier README's I advise people not to use it because at the time it did what Sunshine does but worse. I removed that section when I started adding features that made it different from Sunshine. Should I use it? Today I would say to a new user: use Sunshine, there's tons of guides and online information and it will likely work fine for you. If you like tinkering and trying out new things: sure, why not :).

sthuck 3mo ago
I played with it for 10 minutes, very impressive. Couldn't get vscode to work, will try again later with different apps. (vscode is not that important anyway as it has a remote mode) I understand (well, "guess" more than understand when it comes to graphic stack in Linux) that it being it's own compositor probably means running a full desktop environment in it is infeasible, but a good way to run software remotely is painfully missing in Linux right now, even one app at a time. The built in servers in kde/gnome are problematic in general and require the monitor to be turned on.

tangsoupgallery 3mo ago

[flagged]

mrkanic 3mo ago

Life is really funny, I spent most of the last week scripting hyprland to run gamescoped steam on a headless monitor to achieve this via sunshine. Tried wolf/games on whales but since I sometimes play the same games directly on the same PC it makes it weird to share the game directories. Although I can't use my PC at the same time as streaming, I'm really happy with my janky setup for now, but kinda really want to try this!

supportm 3mo ago

[flagged]

rob74 3mo ago

I wonder if Moonlighting (which is the title of a 1980s TV series, but also refers to "having a second job, typically secretly and at night, in addition to one's regular employment", as in "my phone is moonlighting as a gaming PC") wouldn't be a better name? But yeah, that's probably the explanation for the name of the Moonlight client, and it would be too close to that name?

dncornholio 3mo ago

Moonlight is pretty popular on Chinese gaming handhelds. Was wondering what it was exactly. How is the Android performance vs Linux?

danofsteel32 3mo ago

I’m currently using sunshine and moonlight for remote access to ros2 development VMs with passed through GPUs. We needed an old version of Ubuntu hence the VM. And gpu pass through is needed for gazebo simulations. I started with RDP but the desktop was super laggy and unresponsive. Sunshine/moonlight has made it usable.

phreack 3mo ago

Has a anyone run this on Fedora or similar yet? From the readme it sounds like it could work but I've been surprised before and I can't find a discussion about it.

miladyincontrol 3mo ago

idk I'd rather run both sunshine and steam in a container nice and decently isolated rather than just have the compositor be a separate instance with moonshine scales nicer for multiple clients, keeps dependencies far away from my host and lets me use NvFBC for lower latency, which yes you can easily patch onto consumer nvidia gpus