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Comment by esperent | Hacker News Reader

I spent quite a while trying to set up streaming from my laptop to my phone using Sunshine/Moonlight. I never got decent results despite following tutorials that were supposed to make it all very easy.

Gaming is something I do to relax and I eventually decided it wasn't worth it since I had spent a week of my limited downtime messing around with codecs, latency, wifi settings, trying different apps, etc. and not gotten any kind of usable results.

I guess it was about three years ago. Have things improved since then?

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I've had it work occasionally. I had a few sessions which worked flawlessly which proves it's entirely possible for it to work, but 90% of the time I'm hit with endless weird issues, configuration problems, breaking changes in updates.

There are some people who it seems to be working for, but I think it still needs a lot more work to iron out all of the issues.

About a week ago, I set it up on my windows machine (host) to my ubuntu laptop (client) with the help of an LLM in about 30 minutes, with an additional 15 of troubleshooting the first time I tried using it away from the LAN. It was pretty painless and worked right off the bat. And then it turned out that A) the game my friend and I were trying to play had only local multiplayer (so my host machine couldn't connect) and B) despite protonDB claiming limited compatibility, the game launched immediately with no problems natively on my laptop, so the whole exercise ended up not being necessary. But it was relatively painless.

In case it makes a difference, I was also using Tailscale.

I guess it's easier when it's pc to pc although it's cool that you can do it from Windows to Ubuntu. But I always understood the main reason was to be able to do it to a portable device so that you'd use your phone as a mini steamdeck basically but via streaming from a pc.

I was quite excited by that, I even got a controller that could clamp on to the phone. Just couldn't get it to work reliably.

Host PC needs to be on a LAN cable and client device needs at least Wifi 6 for 1080p/60fps and up. Works perfectly in my home. Some routers are just garbage and drop packets, get or build a decent router.

I use Sunshine/Moonlight between my desktop and PS Vita. The key is that your host at least needs to be wired and ideally with low latency to your wireless router, which is hopefully modern and appropriately placed and configured for optimal transmission with the least interference - even in ideal environments wireless connections have much higher error rates (packets needing retransmission), so you only want to use wifi on the client side.

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