Moonlight and Sunshine game and desktop streaming updates out now

Moonlight and Sunshine are projects that allow you to stream your entire PC over your network, useful if Steam Remote Play doesn't work well and as an alternative to NVIDIA GameStream. Both projects recently had major upgrades.

You would use Sunshine on the host machine, and then Moonlight on the device you wish to play on. Setup can be a little tricky depending on your Linux distro and how you're running Sunshine, so make sure you read the docs.

Moonlight PC v5.0.0 went out with these new features:

• Custom FPS values
• Streaming using the AV1 codec from Sunshine hosts
• Horizontal scrolling with Sunshine hosts
• Native multi-touch input with Sunshine hosts*
• Controller type information is passed to Sunshine for controller type autoselection*
• Extended features of PS4/PS5 controllers (touchpad, battery state, gyro/accelerometer motion, and RGB LED) are natively passed to Sunshine hosts*
• Support for up to 16 gamepads with Sunshine hosts
• Frame pacing support on Wayland
• Host-side processing latency is now displayed in the performance overlay with Sunshine hosts
• Window title now includes the PC name when streaming
• Alphabetical sorting of the PC list
• Dynamic decoder detection for improved support of custom FFmpeg builds
• Updated Play and Stop button design to improve contrast with app box art
• Older log files are automatically cleaned up
• The settings page automatically scrolls to the selected element when using keyboard or gamepad navigation
• Pressing Share+PS buttons on PS4/PS5 controllers can be used to emulate a clickpad press
• Improved audio quality when streaming with a high bitrate from remote hosts
• Increased mouse polling rate

*Notes only for Sunshine 0.21.0+

There's plenty of bug fixes, and a couple of tweaks to the Linux support too.

On top of that the Sunshine 0.21.0 release also went out a few days ago with these new features:

• (Input) Add support for automatically selecting the emulated controller type based on the physical controller connected to the client
• (Input/Windows) Add support for Applications (context menu) key
• (Input/Windows) Implement touchpad, motion sensors, battery state, and LED control for the emulated DualShock 4 controller
• (Input) Advertise support for new input features to clients
• (Linux/Debian) Added Debian Bookworm package
• (Prep-Commands) Expose connection environment variables
• (Input/Windows) Implement pen and touch support
• (Capture/Windows) Add standalone NVENC encoder
• (Capture) Implement AV1 encoding
• (Network) Implement IPv6 support
• (Capture/Windows) Add option to disable realtime hags
• (Graphics/NVIDIA) Add an option to decrease GPU scheduling priority to workaround HAGS video hang
• (Capture/Linux) Add FFmpeg powerpc64le architecture for self compiling Sunshine
• (Capture/Windows) Add support for capturing rotated displays
• (System Tray) Implement streaming event notifications
• (UI) Add port configuration table
• (Applications) Added option to automatically treat launcher type apps as detached commands
• (Input/Gamepad) Allow the Misc button to work as Guide on emulated Xbox 360 controllers

I've been testing it out today, and one annoying issue I've come across is that on KDE Plasma Wayland, the mouse cursor seems to be invisible which is quite a nuisance. This seems to be a known issue with a GitHub report giving some temporary workarounds. Hopefully a proper solution can be found and fixed. Wayland seems to add some extra complexity to many things on Linux.

Have you been using Moonlight / Sunshine? What are your thoughts on it? Any good tips to share?