alt Hacker NewsSo, 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?
Replies
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
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?
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!
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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)?
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.
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.
And there's also parsec.app but only for windows hosts through.
Vibepollo is damn great, best solution on Windows by far. Totally painless and damn smooth, don't diss it because of its vibecoding.
Why do we need these? I have sunshine streaming headless to my laptop without issues
> Did I miss anything?
Steam has had good built-in streaming for a long time.
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.