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Comment by ekimekim | Hacker News Reader

This isn't all that different to how I use my gaming PC - it's off in another room, with a monitor that is plugged in but almost always off (I don't think Windows will boot without at least something plugged in?), Steam set to start on boot, and then I entirely use it via Steam Remote Play from my main PC.

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You could get a dummy HDMI plug for $3 on Amazon and free up that monitor if you need it. [1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/BKFK-HDMI-Dummy-Plug-3840x2160/dp/B0C...

I still don't understand why operating systems can't properly work without a screen.

I have a Linux "home server" and I haven't found a way to boot up a graphical session with everything working (there were bugs in some applications, like menus not showing up, you couldn't change resolution, etc.).

A dummy HDMI plug fixed it, but still. It's 2025, come on.

You can definitely run graphical environments without a screen in a virtual environment, e.g. https://github.com/selkies-project/docker-nvidia-egl-desktop which is even GPU accelerated

Parsec has a driver which adds virtual monitors so you should be able to use that instead of a dummy HDMI plug.

Another issue is not having a mouse plugged in will mean you have no mouse cursor when remoting in.

> not having a mouse plugged in will mean you have no mouse cursor when remoting in.

Parsec has a setting to fix that too. Look in the host options.

macOS has no issues with no monitor fwiw

Headless X11 machines were a thing then it was all abandoned.

Wayland. Solving the problems of yesterday, tomorrow.

You can run Windows server headless too, and run individual applications over the RDP protocol, exactly like using an X server on a machine with a screen to run Xeyes on a headless machine.

Anyone have a good tutorial or reference for doing that on a modern windows system? It would be very useful alternative to VM seamless style and allow Linux X11 system as the hypervisor with windows VM.

Well, i buried the lede. you need windows server to do it easily; once you have windows server set up, you need terminal services to be enabled and installed for that server. Then you can set up "single application mode" application. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-serve...

I didn't really need a guide, it's pretty straightforward; we ran firefox on a windows server VM in AWS and watched youtube videos, in 2009, just to prove it could be done. We offered thin client conversions to companies. never had any clients, too early, i guess, and everything went to cellphones instead. When i say we watched youtube videos, i mean on our test computer in front of us there was a firefox icon on the windows desktop local, and double clicking it, after a few seconds, would launch a firefox window, but instead of the firefox icon it would be the mstsc.exe icon, and you were not looking at an executable's output on your screen, you were looking at the output of the executable in the cloud.

anyhow the windows server software takes care of bundling/packaging/deploying of the the little "scripts" that let you have a desktop icon and everything else. I think there's a wizard.

edit: i buried another lede. The video quality of youtube over terminal services in 2009 with our crappy dsl was... "talking head" - or as i like to call it "peak apple quicktime video circa 1996" - approx. 15fps

Thank you for these details.

When I looked into doing it once on a modern system and stopped when window server entered the story. I’ve been hoping there might be a simple solution but that had me stumble upon Parallels RAS which I’ve been considering doing an evaluation of.

https://www.parallels.com/products/ras/remote-application-se...

My primary battlestation system (not gaming but for business) is 8X4k monitors on a custom Linux system driven by 2 high end GPUs. What I’d ideally like to have is many Win11 pro application windows managed by my X11 windows manager.

looks like microsoft has jumped into this area since i last looked (eesh, 16 years ago is what i was basing my info on!): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/... https://download.microsoft.com/documents/uk/technet/download...

so it looks like, in addition to the method i mentioned, you can also virtualize the applications within "App-V" which is like hyper-v for apps (is anyone catching all of this? is this thing on?).

Microsoft made a firecracker or whatever for windows apps and no one told me?

edit: i'm shocked there's not a kitsch-y name for this like "Windowless Office Suite" for on-prem office that's virtualized for app-v... Someone at microsoft should pay me if they use this.

Quick skim seems to suggest the client to that system is Windows only.

I’m hoping for a Linux client which apparently the commercial Parallels RAS provides.

I think MacOS is even more hopeless than Windows for a per window or seamless remote GUI application solution. For Linux I use Xpra which honestly with GPU server and client acceleration can feel like magic. The dream for me would be a Linux based system for display using an X11 window manager to manage remote GUI application windows from all 3 platforms from multiple systems, all GPU accelerated on both ends.

Apple seems to have a particular hatred for the idea of anyone using their OS remotely for whatever reason, though Parsec works quite well for me, though I’ve heard there is a sunshine+moonlight approach that does even better than Parsec …

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/guide-using-seamless-rd...

rdesktop has a "-A" flag for seamless mode which looks like it does what you want. I'm telling you we had that working 16 years ago via AWS - the AWS side was running windows but there wasn't any reason we had to be [running windows] on the client side. I merely mentioned that microsoft apparently didn't rest on their laurels with msts, they now support even more thin client mechanisms.

Back in days (around twenty years ago) I used NoMachine on Debian/SPARC to do exactly this: run GNOME remotely.

Waypipe nowadays allows the same, but I don't think it has resuming support.

There is also this: https://github.com/VirtualDisplay/Virtual-Display-Driver

Never used it, but I heard great things!

Ran into problems, but that's probably because of the proxmox pcie passthrough nvidia gpu torture chamber I went through, and not the driver.

I do use it occasionally - mostly when Windows has thrown up some issue stopping Steam from working properly.

eg. I need to dismiss a dialog that is invisible over remote play, or it won't finish logging in until I close a "finish setting up your windows install" screen.

Go to the gaming machine and upgrade it to > home or edu version if needed. Enable remote desktop with auth on your network for that machine. As long as Windows is booted and able to be logged in to on the gaming machine you can go on your other machine:

Win+R mstsc.exe and put in the gaming machine's name or IP and follow the instructions, checking all "remember this" boxes (there's 2, three if you count the certificate).

RDP won't let you play games but it is functionally identical to sitting at the machine itself.

I meant to come back and fix this but missed the window. I am unsure if the home/edu/N/P whatever versions of windows 7, 8, 10, and 11 support actually remote controlling the desktop as opposed to merely getting a "video feed" as it were. There's ways to upgrade to pro that are beyond my pay grade to discuss, but i think you can get a clean copy of windows that supports RDP for $130. If your alternative is "having a monitor plugged in 24/7" or "dummy cables but still have to plug a monitor in if something goes wrong with steam link {and it will. -ed.}" or other hacks/hardware, and you're already running windows at least the GPU/gaming side, RDP practically pays for itself even though it's $130 for that feature.

Someone else probably has alternatives (moonlight? bazzite? gopro and a soviet-era robotic arm (it only leaks a bit when it's hot outside.))

consider a different remote access option i.e. sunshine + moonlight instead of using steam remote play

Can confirm, Sunshine + Moonlight are a killer combination.

I run a Windows VM on one of my servers for some gaming because I don't run Window's otherwise, and with Sunshine on the VM, I can play with moonlight from my TV, laptop, desktop, phone, ROG Ally (Bazzite), tablet, basically anything that can support Moonlight.

Windows will boot without a monitor, or at least, it used to, not sure about Windows 11. But Steam Link mirrors your display, and so doesn’t work without one.

I built a NUC running Windows 11 into a tiny portable server for a project I was building and can confirm it boots and functions just fine without being plugged into a monitor.

I just plug it into a power source and it does what I need it to do, but I can plug a monitor and keyboard (and sometimes a mouse because keyboard-only navigation seems to be getting less and less supported/intuitive...) if I need to perform troubleshooting.

The issue is usually with the graphics card itself in my experience.

This is easily "fixed" on a DVI port by plugging a resistor of the correct value into two of the tiny pin sockets. The diagram is very easy to find online and you don't have to open the computer. That's become a thing of the past as far as I know.

NVIDIA GPUs still require "dummy" HDMI plugs. They won't be fully usable without something plugged in; it's not clear why.

This always seemed to be a very deliberate design choice by them to avoid you being able to use their consumer cards headless versus paying them a large amount on the Quadro or DG cards, since the big problem we saw at $OLDJOB was always that you couldn't use CUDA on them headless.

At said $OLDJOB, we ended up soldering dummy VGA plugs that had resistors across the right pins when we wanted to experiment with building a low-power cluster of NVIDIA Ion boards and seeing how it competed with big cards. Ah, memories.

Would bet that this is exactly why. I run Tesla GPUs in my server rack which don't even have display ports, but they run any OS just fine with the vGPU drivers, which Nvidia make an absolute pain to obtain.

The _very_ first gen of Tesla cards did have those headers on them, IIRC, and then successive ones had the headers on the board but not connected for another generation or so, IIRC.

You also used to be able to edit the PCI IDs for the drivers to get the Tesla ones to attach to consumer GPUs, but that stopped working at some point.

https://github.com/timminator/Enhanced-GPU-PV

Can confirm. I boot Windows 11 without screen, then connect via RDP without issue

https://github.com/timminator/Enhanced-GPU-PV or https://github.com/ClassicOldSong/Apollo (sunshine fork with auto virtual display)

note that RDP works without plugs/virtual displays.

Have you tried sunshine + moonlight? I've heard it has lower latency and better streaming quality.

Can confirm that. Using both to connect to the same windows box and sunshine+moonlight is better latency wise for fast paced games. And for games bought from GoG unless you want to configure Steam to launch them :)

Steam streaming is more convenient if the game is on steam and it's turn based or something like that. Also if the (mac) box you're streaming to has multiple monitors, Steam will continue to show the game if you cmd-tab out of it, while moonlight will minimize from the start.

A then you can use lossless scaling on moonlight for a real amazing distrubed gaming experience.

Okay this all sounds great, what specs do I need on the machine connected to the TV? Will a Raspberry Pi 3 work? Pine64? Atomic Pi? (That's x86_64, intel Celeron)

Anything more than that and the value proposition goes way down. For every 50 grams lighter I am willing to lose 1fps. For every fan removed I will drop an entire resolution (4k -> 2k -> FHD...) Change "lighter" to heavier if it makes sense. My comfort and aesthetic matters more than competition quality, pixel perfect yadda

I keep starring these remote display projects but none have convinced me to provision a client machine for the purpose yet.

It doesn't take too much compute, the networking is the key.

I've run Moonlight on a bunch of things from my TV, crappy old Android TV box, phone, tablet, laptop, desktop, ROG Ally; don't recall if I ever tried a Pi, but I might give it a go.

My advice is, whatever you use, make sure it has wired ethernet for a consistent experience. That said, a more powerful device on the receiving end (Moonlight) with good high-speed wifi should also work fine, but almost always try to keep the PC end (Sunshine) hard-wired.

Lossless scaling requires some horsepower though

the gaming machine can handle all that, as i currently use it with a steam link (mentioned elsewhere) which means it's scaled from 4k/2k to 1080p or 720p depending on what TV i'm on. I'm sure i can run 4k (with a dummy hdmi dongle as i don't have a 4k plugged in to this pc anymore) with moonlight/sunlight/etc because i can do it with remote desktop!

thanks, i have fiber and copper at the TVs. not in a pretty, or impressive way, i just have a switch next to the sets is all. fiber is impervious to most lightning strikes.

I got some hardware, someone else mentioned h264/265 hard requirements, but there were codecs before that for FHD that even a pi model B could handle (among them x264 i imagine). My main viewscreen is 720p60, DLP, it's real sensitive to artifacts in the visual output being literally glaring. doesn't take much horsepower to move 720p60 relative to fhd or 4k, imo; but here i am, hands out, begging for solutions!

I imagine it's related to what Sunshine/Moonlight is compatible with.

In terms of codecs, Pi4 is the best option (out of the Pi family) for hardware video decoders, Pi5 removed some hardware decoders which is unfortunate.

At a minimum anything with h264 hardware decoding. H265, and VC1 hardware decoding supported but optional. It depends on what your output is. Networking wise, cabled is the best latency and bandwidth wise but wireless also works but can be unpredictable depending on usage and environment.

I prefer indoor lighting myself.

Yep, I found that combination to be better when it comes to lag, stability and quality as well.

Especially now that they added a 4:4:4 chroma subsampling option which fixes things like text edges in some cases.

This is one of many reasons why I just don't let Windows touch bare metal. My old gaming rig was a Linux machine that would boot a Windows VM with GPU passthrough, and the control I had over the virtual hardware that Windows thought it was attached to was really helpful for working around a lot of Windows bullshit. Won't boot without a screen? Virtually attach a fake one. Recognizes a device and tries to auto-install the garbage manufacturer-provided driver? Run the better Linux driver (if one exists) and have qemu present Windows with a generic version of the device. Want to debug some issue that requires disconnecting a piece of hardware? Just take it out of the qemu command instead of needing to go physically disconnect it. Want some remote peripheral attached that Windows has no idea how to talk to? Proxy it over the network in Linux and just present it to the Windows VM as a USB device. Having full control over the world that Windows lives in makes it much more manageable.

Since a few years, I just play on Linux

Almost anything works with proton - unless you're playing competitive online games with anti cheats software

Same. My Steam Deck has completely replaced my old gaming VM.

Same. I only stopped because managing storage became a problem - three huge games came out that I wanted to play.

Were I to do this again I wouldn't do ryzen I'd do at minimum a threadripper, so that the guest can get a USB pcie card and a GPU, so literally every device windows sees and talks to is virtualized. Usb keyboard, mouse, soundcard, etc.

I think LTT did an epyc build where 1 epyc ran 3 full "Desktops" with GPUs, nvme, for each virtual machine dedicated. I just need the one!

Ditto I grabbed a few clearance steamlinks and have all the TVs remote play to my single high power desktop and use a normal browser for media.

I had it running on ASTER at one point, a multiseat windows software so I can be on main computer and others can use steamlink on alternate windows profile and few issues.

Performance was rarely issue, especially even on wireless, and it's nice to have everything happening in 1 box.

I find it rather funny some people are completely fine playing remotely while others are obsessing over milliseconds of input or output lag.

I did that for while, but recently switched to Bazzite. It's a much smoother experience.

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