Streaming From Linux PC to Deck While Docked

Alatain@lemmy.world to Steam Deck@sopuli.xyz – 19 points –

(I am recreating this post from Reddit here as well in case anyone has any insight or if I solve the issue, so I can add my solution to the non-Reddit body of troubleshooting knowledge)

I am quite a happy Deck owner and have had no problems that I couldn't tackle with a bit of Linux knowhow and willingness to do a google search.

But... I am trying something new. I have the official dock and have used it for months to play games directly off the Deck just fine. I have also used the deck to stream games off my PC running Linux Mint (Cyberpunk worked nicely). What I am trying now is to stream a game from the Mint PC to the Deck while the Deck is docked to the official dock.

I dock the Deck (wired to the network), and it can see the PC (also wired). I can click to stream the game as normal and it even starts the game on the remote PC. But that is where it fails. It sits on the loading screen for a moment, and then aborts back to the Deck library. I have the option to "connect" to the now running game, but it only pulls up the generic loading screen again for a few moments before dumping back to the game page in my library.

Games I have tried: Cyberpunk, Outer Wilds, Fallout 4. All of these run just fine when streaming direct to the Deck, but fail when trying to do it docked to a TV.

Any ideas?

6

Moonlight on the deck (via flatpak), Sunshine on the PC

I had that issue with the built-in streaming recently too. Sunshine has been flawless for me (though I did have to patch my nvidia video driver to overcome the nvFbc limitations in consumer cards)

Ditto. I could not get the built in streaming for steam to work. Sunshine works amazing even over a vpn

Just checking, but you are running this on the deck while docked to a TV, right? I can stream just fine to the deck while undocked. It is while it is docked to the TV that is the problem.

I do have experience with using the moonlight/sunshine combo though, so if I have to go that route I can, I would just prefer a native steam solution.

Yep! Docked to the steam deck dock.

Awesome. That might have to be the work around if I don't get the normal steam streaming to work.

As much as I like to use steam streaming for how straightforward it is, this is one of the issues you'll get for seemingly no reason. The things I can recommend is trying the separate steam link software that should be in the discover store, or keep in mind that there might be issues with hardware acceleration or with the beta client. If tinkering with these doesn't fix it, I would also wholeheartedly recommend sunshine/moonlight. Takes some effort to set up (some extra effort if streaming from nvidia on Linux and want hardware acceleration for example) but when it works, it works wonders. Much smoother especially on WiFi.