Low resource use bigscreen launcher with Steam RemotePlay support?
Julius Jan 26, 2023
So I finally got this old Intel BayTrail J2900 mini-pc running on Fedora to work with Steam RemotePlay (disable hardware accelerated decoding in advanced settings and start Steam with the "-pipewire" option; Switching to the Crocus OpenGL driver also helps with native games a bit) and it is really great to stream games in 1080p to my livingroom TV.

Just to realize that the new SteamDeck derived big-picture mode is dog slow and almost unusable on this hardware

Really odd that the new big-picture mode of Steam is so unoptimized. This mini-pc plays many nice looking native Linux games without problems, but running this new big-picture mode brings it to it's knees

There are other gamepad controlled launchers that support Steam like Pegasus and ES-Desktop and those work relatively well for games installed locally, but I can't seem to find a way to launch RemotePlay titles with them.

Anyone has an suggestion what might work? Maybe there is a work-around with a special .desktop file that ES-Desktop might understand?

Thanks!


Edit: I forgot that the official Steamlink app is available for x86-64. https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.valvesoftware.SteamLink So I will try that. But a nice combined launcher would be still great to have.

Last edited by Julius on 26 January 2023 at 8:42 pm UTC
This topic has an answer marked - jump to answer.
whizse Jan 26, 2023
I can't really help with suggesting launchers, but there's a similar issue described here:
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/8918

So it's probably a bug on some systems and not a sudden jump in minimal system requirements: Unfortunately no-one from Valve have responded yet.
whizse Jan 26, 2023
Looks like you can still enable the old BPM with this argument: -oldbigpicture
Julius Jan 26, 2023
Thanks for the replies so far. Indeed it might be a bug then. Maybe it uses Vulkan? That is only partially supported on the BayTrail system.

I don't really want to go back to the old BPM either 😅

Anyways, the SteamLink app via Flatpak works and just transfers the new BPM from my main Desktop it seems.

I think I will add the Steamlink app as a custom "game" to ES-Desktop or Pegasus and launch it from there as a temporary workaround.

Last edited by Julius on 26 January 2023 at 10:29 pm UTC
mr-victory Jan 29, 2023
Quoting: JuliusMaybe it uses Vulkan?
New big picture indeed uses Vulkan.
Julius Feb 4, 2023
Small update: placing a custom .desktop file for the SteamLink app into the steam folder of Emulation Station works perfect. Since the list is sorted alphabetically in ES, I just named it "!SteamLink" so that it is at the top of the list for easy access.

It starts normally and if you quit you get back into ES seamlessly.

Now I just need to get my Steam Controller to work better without having Steam running in the background... it actually works fine once you are in SteamLink as well. I guess SC-Controller would help, but that is a bit annoying to install these days.
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