I am running Arch Linux with KDE Plasma (wayland).
Today I discovered Steam Link. I enabled it and worked flawlessly with Steam games. But it showed a black screen for non-steam games (lutris shortcuts specifically) although the input did work. I thought it was a wayland issue and I was right as I immediately installed & switched to X11 session and I was able to see the game. I don’t know if it is an x11 issue but my Laptop’s (host) fans were running pretty fast and sometimes games were just crashing or refused to launch (which rarely happens on wayland). I doubt that just the addional overhead of steamlink is causing these issues (although I won’t reject that possibility) given I have pretty decent hardware — ryzen 9 8945h, rtx 4070 8gb laptop gpu, 32 gigs of ram.
Also on x11 a lot of display settings seem to be missing. I don’t want to keep x11 just for playing non steam games via steam link. So is there a way to play non-steam games via steam link on wayland session?
If you just discovered Steam Link and you’re not married to it, you could use Sunshine as your gamestreaming host and Moonlight as the client. you can set it up so that you can launch Steam Big Picture on your host and play any games that are listed under your steam, even if they are non-steam games.
Apparently the dev got banned. The reason is unclear and I would love to understand the other side but this is on their Github.
I got kicked from Moonlight and Sunshine’s Discord server and banned from Sunshine’s GitHub repo literally for helping people out.
This is what I got for finding a bug, opened an issue, getting no response, troubleshoot myself, fixed the issue myself, shared it by PR to the main repo hoping my efforts can help someone else during the maintenance gap.
Turns out the major difference is the thing I use most: virtual display in headless mode.
When I connect as a virtual display, I have Apollo set to treat the new virtual display (whose resolution is set by Moonlight’s settings, so I can control it on the client end). Headless mode means all apps open in the virtual display, so I never need to go to the PC itself. And finally, in the advanced settings I have it set up so the virtual display is treated as the only display, so existing applications move to the virtual display (in case I already had Steam or Battle.net or whatever open).
So I’ve been seeing some discussion online about how Apollo has solved some user’s problems with virtual display
Do you mind me asking what you’re running? I’m on Ubuntu 25.10 w/ Plasma 6.4 running wayland, and I’ve had issues forever setting up a virtual display. I’ve just accepted that I have to go with whatever modes the edid my monitor/dummy hdmi plug offers, which means I havent been able to stream 1260x800 or 2560x1600 to my steamdeck (so it is black-barred)
I guess Plasma 6.6 is going to add the ability to add custom modes via kscreen-doctor, but thats at least a few months out I think. I’d much rather use a native virtual display if apollo is magically able to do that.
Oh I’m still a Windows user, haven’t yet migrated over (though I do have a Nobara install I’ve played with a bit, I haven’t tried to get Apollo working on it). I stream 2560x1440 and just ignore the black bars, but I could request 2560x1600 and I think it would work just fine (I prefer the higher resolution for higher quality, rather than the native 1280x800, though I can confirm that requesting 1280x800 works when my bandwidth is limited).
That setting is handled within Moonlight, and Apollo respects that setting by default, so Apollo presents itself as a virtual display with the resolution requested by Moonlight. At least that’s my understanding.
You can run Moonlight on your Steam Link and stream anything you want. I haven’t used it in awhile, but I remember it being less laggy than streaming through Steam.
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If you just discovered Steam Link and you’re not married to it, you could use Sunshine as your gamestreaming host and Moonlight as the client. you can set it up so that you can launch Steam Big Picture on your host and play any games that are listed under your steam, even if they are non-steam games.
Thanks I will look into it. I didn’t know stuff like this even existed lol.
Try Apollo in place of Sunshine, it was recommended to me as having more options. (I don’t actually know though, I never used Sunshine.)
Apparently the dev got banned. The reason is unclear and I would love to understand the other side but this is on their Github.
Turns out the major difference is the thing I use most: virtual display in headless mode.
When I connect as a virtual display, I have Apollo set to treat the new virtual display (whose resolution is set by Moonlight’s settings, so I can control it on the client end). Headless mode means all apps open in the virtual display, so I never need to go to the PC itself. And finally, in the advanced settings I have it set up so the virtual display is treated as the only display, so existing applications move to the virtual display (in case I already had Steam or Battle.net or whatever open).
So I’ve been seeing some discussion online about how Apollo has solved some user’s problems with virtual display
Do you mind me asking what you’re running? I’m on Ubuntu 25.10 w/ Plasma 6.4 running wayland, and I’ve had issues forever setting up a virtual display. I’ve just accepted that I have to go with whatever modes the edid my monitor/dummy hdmi plug offers, which means I havent been able to stream 1260x800 or 2560x1600 to my steamdeck (so it is black-barred)
I guess Plasma 6.6 is going to add the ability to add custom modes via kscreen-doctor, but thats at least a few months out I think. I’d much rather use a native virtual display if apollo is magically able to do that.
Oh I’m still a Windows user, haven’t yet migrated over (though I do have a Nobara install I’ve played with a bit, I haven’t tried to get Apollo working on it). I stream 2560x1440 and just ignore the black bars, but I could request 2560x1600 and I think it would work just fine (I prefer the higher resolution for higher quality, rather than the native 1280x800, though I can confirm that requesting 1280x800 works when my bandwidth is limited).
That setting is handled within Moonlight, and Apollo respects that setting by default, so Apollo presents itself as a virtual display with the resolution requested by Moonlight. At least that’s my understanding.
You can run Moonlight on your Steam Link and stream anything you want. I haven’t used it in awhile, but I remember it being less laggy than streaming through Steam.
Are the games launching via xwayland when they’re not working? Are they displaying normally on your desktop monitor, but just not streaming correctly?