Yeah Sunshine + Moonlight works great as long as you have a stable connection. It's a bit of setup especially to enable WOL so it's not on all the time but once you get it going it work very well. I've bought a 400 € laptop and 4 controller and I'm bringing it on vacation to play with family it's a lot of fun, also got gifted a steam deck and streaming Elden Ring works also well !
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2025
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I have installed sunshine and moonlight on every computer I own and I use it so often I barely remember what computer I'm actually on anymore.
During the free time of Geforce Cloud (forgot the name), I tried the free tier.
It was neat but unremarkable.
Also tried the offering from Microsoft to play Halo 5 on my phone with an xbox controller.
It was a bit laggy but still doable in the campaign.
Nowadays I'm not so sure. Not even sure if my tries were so laggy due to my home infrastructure or because the datacenters were more far away increasing lag.
As per Youtube videos: Should be pretty neat if you can stomach the minimal lag
As for local streaming:
I played on my Chromecast with Google TV through the steam link app to my TV.
There was quite some lag but I could tolerate it even when playing something like Yakuza 3. But it was a bit annoying during timed events.
For home LAN use on the Steam Deck, the built in Steam streaming is very usable now and much much better than it used to be.
There's still noticeable input lag depending on the game.
I still have two steam links...
Now a days I just get an android stick with the APK. Works pretty well.
Games on Whales has worked really well for me: https://games-on-whales.github.io/
Is it better than Sunshine?
They don't do the same thing: Sunshine is intended to stream a single physical desktop.
Games on Whales runs headlessly and creates virtual desktops for each session in a Docker environment.
For example, you can create an instance that runs at 800p so you can stream to your Steam Deck at its native resolution. You can even still use your desktop normally since the streams run in the background.
Both of them support connection via Moonlight.
Thanks. I might try it because I stream to either my phone or my tablet depending on the game, and they have different resolutions.
I setup moonlight+sunshine, I don't even remember anything about the setup because it was straight forward and worked without any tinkering. I even used a raspberry pi 4 as a client and it felt fine. I say just go for it, you'll be up and running in just a few minutes and you lose nothing if it doesn't meet your needs.
Its not "the Cloud" if its your own systems from top-to-bottom ... More like Remote Play? ... Seems Sony, Microsoft, and Valve all use that terminology for Streaming Gameplay from their consoles to another device.
Streaming to another location than where your Server is setup is tricky, mostly due to latency and establishing a connection that doesn't get throttled(or compromised) by the ISPs involved. Personally, when I tried to get into it, about 10 years ago, I didn't have the budget for a GPU that could be persuaded to support it at all.
Today, I'm more likely to keep such a server in my vehicle(on Battery/Solar), so its always just a local connection away, if I were to bother with the budget and hassle involved*. Around the house, I'll just slap a new desktop together where I want to play games, or game on my laptop, and call it done.
*Ideally, I could build this for less than my good laptop would cost to replace, and use something much closer to outright disposable to game outside of my car. In practice, I just bring my good laptop with me everywhere, risk be damned.
Well...The cloud is just another persons pc.
Exactly.
I know some people are using Sunshine + Moonlight for their Steamdecks, usually with their Gaming PC as the server. I guess running your fat rig with GPU 24/7 will use quite a bit power
I've been doing it since before the Steam Deck came out, and I just enabled WoL, so the computer sleeps until I open Moonlight and try to access it, then it wakes up. Same with local LLM processing.
How do you set up wol for this?
I'm using sunshine on my main Linux gaming rig with my own head scale instance running and use moonlight on my client PC and its very nice and smooth. I use it to access my main LAN gaming rig from another remote network. Not sure if that's your use case but I've also used sunshine and moonlight within my lan so I can remotely play on my bedroom TV.
For cloud gaming I have used Stadia, GeForce Now, Xbox Cloud Gaming, and now Boosteroid.
It has been great. No need to worry about installation and storage space. Simply click and launch the game.
You do need to have reliable internet, preferably wired LAN or a fast wifi network.
For self-hosted streaming I use Steam Link, Sunshine or Parsec. Mostly Sunshine these days because of the streaming quality.
I mostly play single player games and I don’t really notice any lag.