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

by wertyk • 3 days ago

368 150 3 days 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.

Grombobulous4• 3 days 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• 3 days 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

Gigachad4• 3 days 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.

tetrisgm2• 3 days ago

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

pipyakas• 3 days 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.

tetrisgm2• 3 days ago

Thank you

Grombobulous4• 3 days 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• 3 days 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.

Grombobulous4• 3 days 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!

Gigachad4• 3 days 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.

willdr• 3 days ago

You should try it again. I had a similar experience to you about 5 years ago and completely gave up on game streaming.

However, I had a cold a month or so ago and wanted to play Oxygen Not Included from the couch from my old-ass Linux laptop which couldn't run it. I set up Sunshine and Moonlight in about... 5 minutes? And it "just worked". And worked well. I was able to play perfectly, and that is including my host machine being on WiFi even though all the documentation says use Ethernet if at all possible (which ofc would be better).

It was honestly the most magical thing I've done with technology in the past few years.

Disclaimer: this was only for local/wifi streaming.

NDlurker• 3 days ago

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

fishfasell• 3 days 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• 2 days ago

Also newer handhelds like Ayn Odin/Thor devices and similar. (They are Android)

hankbond2• 3 days 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)?

jauntywundrkind2• 3 days 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.

hankbond2• 2 days 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.

jauntywundrkind2• 3 days 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• 3 days 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

krzyk2• 3 days ago

The same for Game on Whales.

BrokenCogs3• 3 days ago

I don't quite understand the difference between this, sunshine, and apollo?

Is this basically Apollo but for Linux?

taikon2• 3 days ago

I think Apollo is a moonshine fork

pyreko• 3 days ago

Apollo is a fork of Sunshine (it's on the repo).

EDIT: maybe you're mixing up Sunshine and Moonshine (this project)?

BLKNSLVR3• 3 days 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• 3 days 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• 3 days 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.

BLKNSLVR3• 3 days 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• 3 days 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.

esperent2• 3 days 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?

Gigachad4• 3 days 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• 3 days 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.

esperent2• 2 days 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.

BatteryMountain6• 3 days ago

Host PC needs to be on a LAN cable and client device needs at least Wifi 6 for 1080p/60fps and up. Works perfectly in my home. Some routers are just garbage and drop packets, get or build a decent router.

t-32• 3 days ago

I use Sunshine/Moonlight between my desktop and PS Vita. The key is that your host at least needs to be wired and ideally with low latency to your wireless router, which is hopefully modern and appropriately placed and configured for optimal transmission with the least interference - even in ideal environments wireless connections have much higher error rates (packets needing retransmission), so you only want to use wifi on the client side.

nicman23• 3 days 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• 3 days 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• 3 days 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• 3 days ago

Does this work better than steam link? Obviously I imagine it works with non-steam games is part of the point.

BatteryMountain6• 3 days ago

Yes much better in my opinion.

t-32• 3 days 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.

BatteryMountain6• 3 days 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.

elxr2• 3 days ago

I'm sure that works fine, but playing on an 8 inch 16:10 screen (like the Legion Go S or the MSI) has to be a better experience than a significantly smaller 6.7 inch screen. Despite the obviously higher quality HDR on your phone.

Every time I've tried PC gaming on undersized screens, every single inch makes a big difference to the immersiveness and reduced eye-fatigue. It just ends up being something I have to put down early because of that. 8 inch is the smallest I can go where the compromise makes sense.

PalmPilotProMax3• 3 days 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?

somat• 3 days 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• 3 days ago

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

nicce4• 3 days ago

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.

ach9l• 3 days ago

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.

dpoloncsak3• 2 days ago

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.

tencentshill• 2 days ago

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.

kristofferR2• 3 days ago

Vibepollo is damn great, best solution on Windows by far. Totally painless and damn smooth, don't diss it because of its vibecoding.

atmanactive2• 3 days ago

Agreed. It's awesome.

gadtfly2• 3 days ago

I would love "normal linux user remote desktop session suitable for gaming using the host's GPU".

Nothing seems to do exactly that, though this (moonshine) seems like it might be the closest yet.

Can it run a desktop environment as the "Application" that it's streaming?

saghm3• 3 days ago

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).

anygivnthursday• 3 days ago

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.

ducktective• 3 days ago

Thanks for the summary!

Does anyone happen to know how to make a Windows machine, the extended display of a Linux machine? Both machines are on the same network.

I'm looking to use a Windows laptop as a mere HDMI monitor for the Linux laptop. I don't need gaming/streaming requirements. Like, can anyone list our options in 2026 as the parent comment did?

I assume one can use this Moonshine on the server (Linux laptop) and run Moonlight on the client (windows laptop)?

BLKNSLVR3• 3 days ago

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

silentkat• 3 days ago

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.

MayeulC• 3 days ago

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 :)

BatteryMountain6• 3 days ago

I setup a fake display on my fedora instance (inside proxmox) at boot time (boot/kernel args) that mimics the specs of my real display. Sunshine sees it as a real display so I can unplug everything from the box except power and lan cable. No hdmi dummy dongle or virtual display driver needed. Using linux as a gaming server works fine!

saghm3• 3 days ago

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?

klipklop• 3 days ago

Woof, so which one is the “good” one?

pprotas2• 3 days ago

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

anaisbetts• 3 days ago

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.

Mashimo• 3 days ago

It seems like Sunshine and Moonlight are now active again, and have a release more recent then Apollo and Artemis.

On windows, is it possible to use the server at the same time as someone is remote gaming? Most virtual display solutions I found just turn the server display off.

ammo1662• 3 days ago

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.

shepherdjerred4• 3 days ago

Unfortunate it is still essentially impossible to share consumer GPUs with multiple virtualized hosts, which limits the utility. My dream is to build one beefy server and play old games like COD via connected thin clients

bvcp• 3 days ago

intels gpu supports vgpu with no extra licence

felixfurtak• 3 days ago

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

wjnc• 2 days ago

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.

alimbada• 2 days ago

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.

Gizou• 3 days ago

The sum up is pretty good, I didn't know half of the history

About Apollo, someone started a fork of Sunshine to be the equivalent of Apollo (with virtual displays) for linux, it's called Polaris https://github.com/papi-ux/polaris (nb, it's not the apache polaris). It's very Alpha right now and the UI feels wonky but it's promising.

nicce4• 3 days ago

And then there's this, Moonshine, in a way doing what Apollo brings to the table but for Linux servers.

What was the motivation? Games on Whales seems to work perfectly in my experience.

stavros2• 3 days ago

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?

Zinu• 3 days ago

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.

mijoharas2• 3 days ago

OK, so to clarify, it's Sunshine (game streaming server) but headless for linux.

So if I used sunshine, and streamed a game, the display of the box running sunshine would be showing the game? and this moonshine allows us to do away with that, to be able to run headless, or to run multiple games at once or something?

Is that correct?

remix20004• 3 days ago

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).

Levitating• 3 days ago

Did I miss anything?

Steam has had good built-in streaming for a long time.

Bombthecat• 3 days ago

Yes, nothing will be as fast as the Nvidia implementation.

Those implementations don't have access to the low level encoding Nvidia has.

There is a rumour, that they did this because of GeForce now, because there never will an open source implementation/ service competition for GeForce now.

bbminner• 2 days ago

And there's also parsec.app but only for windows hosts through.

PufPufPuf• 2 days ago

Then there's Steam Link which actually works, even with non-Steam games and full desktop. My computer screen is 21:9, TV is 16:9 and that is too much to handle for the other streaming solutions.

chocrates• 2 days ago

Why do we need these? I have sunshine streaming headless to my laptop without issues

gadtfly2• 3 days ago

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

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