Post 006 of #100DaysToOffload!

I have been running Bazzite on my desktop and Bluefin on my work laptop for a little over a year now. When I replaced my work laptop, I ended up installing Bazzite on it for consistency across my machines. It turns out that the developer experience is much better on Bluefin so a simple rebase was all I needed to swap out the system.

One sudo rpm-ostree rebase ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/bluefin later, I was happily chuffing along in Bluefin again. The next issue to tackle was screens and keyboards. My Thinkpad is really nice but the screen is only 1080p and I much prefer my 1440p monitors. Typically I use a KVM and plug in the laptop alongside my desktop but I wanted to try a remote desktop solution.

In the end I settled on GNOME RDP, but along the way I tried Sunshine and Moonlight since they are frequently used on Bazzite. There are ujust scripts for Sunshine and (I think) it’s already configured out of the box on Bazzite but it is not installed by default on Bluefin.

I first tried to use the Flatpak for Sunshine but its documentation required the use of some read-only resources so I couldn’t make the necessary changes. I also tried to set up the homebrew package and met similar challenges. My next option was to try the AppImage but Bluefin (or Fedora) wasn’t in the support matrix for it. That left me with adding a layer to my system.

Because Sunshine isn’t available in the Fedora repos, I had to enable the Copr repo for it and then install the package:

sudo dnf copr enable lizardbyte/beta
sudo rpm-ostree install Sunshine

After a reboot, the package was available. From there, I ran sunshine in my terminal and opened the web interface, which prompted me to create a username and password. Once that was done, I was able to log in and the service was running.

Back on my Bazzite desktop, I installed Moonlight from Flathub and fired it up. It immediately found my Sunshine server. I clicked connect and it asked me to enter a PIN on the laptop to validate the connection. Once that was done, I was presented with three options: a desktop connection, a low res desktop connection, and a steam connection.

Everything worked fine with the normal desktop connection, though the latency was a little higher than it was with GNOME RDP. Overall this was a fun experiment and I see why people like Sunshine/Moonlight for game streaming!

My next hurdles are to figure out how to get Remmina to capture all of my inputs so I can Alt-Tab on the RDP session and how to get the GNOME session to dynamically resize its resolution via RDP like I can when I connect to Windows servers.