Yes — you can stream your gaming PC to any laptop, tablet, or TV in the house for free with two open-source tools: Sunshine on the PC and Moonlight on everything else. No subscription, no NVIDIA lock-in, no cloud. Your gaming rig does the rendering; the laptop on the couch just plays a video stream and sends your inputs back. On a wired or good Wi-Fi network the latency is low enough for most single-player games, and the whole setup takes about half an hour. Here’s how it works and how to set it up, including on Arch-based systems like Omarchy.
What Sunshine and Moonlight actually are
Moonlight started life as an open-source client for NVIDIA’s GameStream protocol. When NVIDIA killed GameStream, the community built Sunshine — an open-source host, maintained by LizardByte, that speaks the same protocol from your own PC. The pair now has a life of its own:
- Sunshine runs on the PC with the GPU and the games. It captures the screen, encodes video in real time with your GPU’s hardware encoder, and streams it. Unlike GameStream, it’s GPU-agnostic: NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel all work, on Windows, Linux, or macOS.
- Moonlight is the client. It runs on nearly anything — Windows, Mac, Linux laptops, Android, iOS, Steam Deck, Apple TV, even a Raspberry Pi plugged into the living-room TV.
Both are free and actively maintained — Sunshine’s current stable release shipped in May 2026, with a newer pre-release in August. This is not abandonware.
Step 1: Install Sunshine on the gaming PC
Windows: download the installer from the official LizardByte GitHub releases page (only from there — verified, unmodified builds). Run it, let it install the virtual display driver if prompted.
Omarchy / Arch: Sunshine lives in the AUR, so yay -S sunshine (or paru -S sunshine) builds it; LizardByte also publishes a Flatpak and AppImage if you’d rather skip the AUR. Then enable it as a user service: systemctl --user enable --now sunshine.
Once running, Sunshine serves a local web UI at https://localhost:47990. Open it, accept the self-signed-certificate warning (it’s your own machine), and set a username and password. This web UI is where everything happens: adding apps, pairing clients, tuning encoder settings.
Step 2: Install Moonlight on the client
On the laptop you’ll play from, install Moonlight. On Omarchy or any Arch system it’s in the official repos: sudo pacman -S moonlight-qt. On Windows and macOS, grab moonlight-qt from the Moonlight website; on phones and tablets it’s in the app stores as “Moonlight Game Streaming.”
Step 3: Pair them
- With both machines on the same network, open Moonlight — your PC should appear automatically.
- Click it. Moonlight shows a 4-digit PIN.
- Enter that PIN in Sunshine’s web UI under the PIN tab. Done — the pairing is permanent.
By default you get a “Desktop” app that streams your whole screen, plus Steam if detected. Add specific games or launchers as apps in the web UI so they start directly.
Settings that actually matter
- Wire what you can. Ethernet to the host is near-mandatory; a wired client is ideal. If the client must be wireless, 5 GHz Wi-Fi in the same room as the router makes the difference between “feels local” and “feels like syrup.”
- Match resolution and refresh rate in Moonlight’s settings to the client’s screen (e.g. 1080p/60 for most laptops). Streaming 4K to a 1080p panel wastes bandwidth and adds latency.
- Bitrate: Moonlight’s default ~20 Mbps is fine at 1080p; give it 40–80 for 1440p or 4K if your network can take it.
- Codec: prefer HEVC or AV1 if both ends support it — better quality per megabit than H.264.
Honest caveats
- Latency is physics. Even a great setup adds a frame or two. Single-player, strategy, and RPGs feel native; competitive shooters and fighting games are where you’ll notice it.
- Your PC must be on. The electricity and the fan noise happen in the office even while you play on the couch. Wake-on-LAN helps; Moonlight can send the magic packet.
- Linux hosts take more fiddling than Windows hosts. Wayland capture, virtual displays for headless streaming, and permissions can each cost you a search. Hosting from Windows and playing on a Linux laptop is the easy direction.
- Streaming outside your house means either careful port forwarding (Sunshine uses ports in the 47984–48010 range) or, much more safely, a mesh VPN like Tailscale that makes the remote laptop look local.
The bottom line
Sunshine and Moonlight turn one gaming PC into every screen in the house, free. It’s the local, private counterpart to renting a cloud GPU — we covered that side in our guide to Xbox Cloud Gaming and GeForce NOW on Linux and Omarchy: if you already own a capable PC, Sunshine beats a subscription; if you don’t, the cloud services beat buying one. And if the laptop you’re streaming to runs Omarchy, this slots neatly into an already keyboard-fast setup — see our Omarchy productivity guide for the rest of that workflow.
Related reading: Can you play Xbox Cloud Gaming and GeForce NOW on Linux? · Omarchy productivity guide: one setup, eight kinds of work · Six levels to a mouseless Omarchy
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