Steam Streaming Speakers and Microphone Drivers
I've been playing with bazzite the last few days. I noticed today that steam link didn't install the steam streaming speakers and microphone drivers witch sometimes I must install manually on windows, but I cant seam to find a Linux version of the drivers. My use case for these drivers are when I'm streaming to my steam deck I use these virtual sound devices to A not play sound from the host PC speakers and B to use the steam decks mic for game voice chat on the host. are these a windows specific drivers with no Linux equivalent? I could honestly live with it playing sound from the host and steam deck because I often am in a different room but using the decks mic is a big priority and something I've really enjoyed when using a windows host because I often use steam link to turn my steam deck into a Wi-Fi controller. If im SOL dose anyone have any suggestions for routing the steam decks mic to the host in game mode using steam link?
7 Replies
There are no drivers like that on Linux because the sound system supports all that crap the steam streaming audio drives do in windows by default.
Should just work by default (however steam link has a bunch of other issues on Linux valve has to fix, unsure if they affect gamemode though)
We recommend using sunshine on the host and moonlight on the client you want to stream to, it is better supported and in most cases performs better.
OK so I wasn't seeing that the steam decks mic was coming through to bazzite itself so I'll see if I can find a game that I can properly test the mic directly. I hadn't looked into sunlight or moonlight because I thought those had been discontinued it was also my understanding that that's what the steam link app was built on. Thank you for giving me some further avenues to explore
no no, layering sunshine is going to be discontinued because we are going to provide it pre-installed as they now have their own fedora repository for it.
sunshine is reverse engineered from nvidia gamestream (not geforce now, but uses the same tech in the backend just reverse engineered) which nvidia killed because local gamestreaming eats into their geforce now subscription.
steam link is its own thing built on the in home streaming protocol in steam itself (which has its own issues)
neither solution is perfect, but we have found the least issues and best performance with sunshine 🙂
plus you can control sunshines settings remotely with https://iptoyoursunshinehost:47990 and also approve new first time connections through that
I'm not sure what you mean by layering sunshine. I may have opted out of pre-installing sunshine when installing bazzite but I went ahead and installed it from the included GitHub repository in discover store and I'm setting that up now to see what I think
Just to chip in here. Some users use Sunshine and connect to their home gaming rigs remotely using the tailscale vpn. If you have ethernet on both sides and stable fiber on both sides it works really well apparently.
layering is installing it on the system using rpm-ostree after install
if anything is pre-installed its on the image and you have it wether you like it or not
Everything I'm trying to do is over my local area network with the host on ethernet and the steam deck on ethernet if I'm just trying to use it as a controller but of course the steam deck would be on Wi-Fi if I'm actually trying to stream video to it as well