Subject

I noticed a feature in AMD’s software called AMD Link. This is their in-house equivalent to Steam Link or Nvidia’s offering. I have never bothered with any streaming software as I never had an ethernet connection to any of my computers up until yesterday. Because it was so easy to setup and included, I gave it a try! It works OK, there is a mobile app available on iOS. But there is no Linux/Desktop client available for AMD Link, it’s targeted primarily at phones.

This is where Sunshine comes in. Moonlight is an open source implementation of NVIDIA’s GameStream protocol, and Sunshine is a host software for it. So you install Sunshine on your beefy gaming PC and any Moonlight client you like on your phone/PC/whatever. This is what’s awesome - there are Moonlight clients for AppleTV, for Linux desktop and for iOS, for the WiiU and many other devices.

The setup for Sunshine is simple. On Windows, you need to add a firewall exception and enable the sunshine service. 4 total commands that you copy-paste into CMD. All the clients are very intuitive and should require little work to connect.

My experience so far is that it is OK for games, maybe as good as one could expect. The gaming PC is connected via ethernet and my thinkpad is connected over 5ghz Wifi in the same room as the router. The stream resolution is 720p, 60fps. It is not, and likely never will be, as comfortable as playing on the host machine, at least for FPS games, but would be completely acceptable for games that don’t require low latency.

This brings us to the title: Airplay for your Linux desktop. I see this technology as a perfect solution for a problem that has never been handled well by anyone except Apple - desktop streaming. Sure, Google has their Chromecast and there are a few opensource tools that work with it. Casting to Miracast devices was also added in the GNOME project recently (Miracast is usually included in Smart TVs…) but none of them are simple and as cross-platform as Sunshine/Moonlight are.

With Moonlight installed on my AppleTV and Sunshine on my computers I can wirelessly cast my screen to my TV. Sweet!

Background

I recently assembled a computer for playing games with my friends. I’ll tell you briefly about that.

I’ve known about the “Optiplex trick” for a while now. Basically, you purchase an old Dell Optiplex tower and install a graphics card in it. This nets you some serious performance for not much money. I scored an Optiplex 3020 with a quad-core i5 4570, 8GB RAM and a 2TB HDD for $60 shipped. Then I waited patiently and bid on an AMD RX470, which I won for $50 shipped.

There are some other expenses that weren’t totally neccesary. I purchased a better $30 CPU cooler (item title: “ID-COOLING SE-914-XT-Basic CPU Cooler 126mm Height CPU Air Cooler 4 Heatpipes CPU Air Cooler 92mm PWM Fan Air Cooling for Intel/AMD, LGA 1700 Compatible”) a $12 arctic 140mm fan, a 5pin to 4pin adapter to deal with Dell’s weird choice of fan header and a PWM fan splitter. So the cooling uses the original CPU cooler header on the motherboard which is then adapted to standard fan plug, then split to go to the cooler and the 140mm case fan.

It runs games very well.