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?

Hi, creator of Moonshine here.

I'll try to answer some common questions here instead of replying the same thing everywhere:

What is it?

At it's core it's similar to Sunshine but with one important difference: Moonshine creates its own compositor and does not rely on an existing desktop environment. The benefits:

- You do not need a running desktop environment: it can run headless.

- The compositor is created with any resolution and any refresh rate, without requiring a dummy plug.

- Because Moonshine controls the compositor, it has HDR support out-of-the-box, even if your monitor does not support HDR (ongoing development, it works in the games I tested).

- If you do have a running desktop environment, you can keep using it while streaming a game at the same time.

On a more technical level: I like the narrow focus that Moonshine has. Only one encoder (Vulkan), only one OS supported (Linux), no GUI, no compatibility with old Moonlight clients. The codebase is intentionally "lean". Of course this also has disadvantages like requiring semi-recent GPUs & drivers, only working on Linux and newer Moonlight clients, but I can live with that.

Why create it?

The short answer: a lazy girlfriend and a stubborn Linux user.

The long answer: Moonshine is a hobby project that I've been working on for a few years (first commit goes back to 2022). It was (and still is) a fun exercise and helped me learn a lot, which if it never became functional would have been a nice outcome already. In fact, in earlier README's I advise people not to use it because at the time it did what Sunshine does but worse. I removed that section when I started adding features that made it different from Sunshine.

Should I use it?

Today I would say to a new user: use Sunshine, there's tons of guides and online information and it will likely work fine for you.

If you like tinkering and trying out new things: sure, why not :).

The only downside was that the game had to be running, visibly, on the screen of the desktop machine, meaning the desktop is unusable for anything else - ie. if someone else wanted to play the game while I was working on the desktop.

This appears to solve that. Sunshine/Moonlight was already cake with a fair layer of icing. This is a sprinkling of glacé cherries on top. I love glacé cherries.

1. Connect my Dualsense controller to my macbook

2. Open moonlight on my macbook

3. Connect to my gaming desktop in full screen mode

3. Launch my AAA game on Steam

4. Profit

Over Wifi 7 I get basically no discernable lag, which was crazy to me the first time I tried it. I also have a Minisforum attached to my large screen TV and the process is identical except I push a different combo on the Dualsense controller to connect to the Minisforum. Because apollo saves settings, I can pretty seamlessly switch between the two with basically no issues.

So does this create like a virtual desktop? How does that work? Is this just a separate "screen" or is this more like an entirely separate compositor instance (if thats the right term here)?

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?

We needed an old version of Ubuntu hence the VM. And gpu pass through is needed for gazebo simulations.

I started with RDP but the desktop was super laggy and unresponsive. Sunshine/moonlight has made it usable.

Shame it needs such a modern GPU and $feature which isn't offered by my preferred Alpine Linux. But that shouldn't detract from what it's promising.

Although I can't use my PC at the same time as streaming, I'm really happy with my janky setup for now, but kinda really want to try this!

GoW had that advantage over Sunshine, that it allowed selecting any resolution, it didn't require hdmi connector that simulated a monitor.

Note that Moonlight also has a fork, Artemis.

I'm genuinely not sure what difference Sunshine/Moonlight has vs somewhat newer Apollo/Artemis, but kind of just posting here to let folks know there are already some fairly active forks from Sunshine, the classic way to host a server for Moonlight clients.

Is this basically Apollo but for Linux?

If it’s pass-through like the README makes it seem, then I’m instantly sold.

https://games-on-whales.github.io/

https://github.com/games-on-whales/wolf

scales nicer for multiple clients, keeps dependencies far away from my host

and lets me use NvFBC for lower latency, which yes you can easily patch onto consumer nvidia gpus