How to Create a Virtual Display for Sunshine on Arch Linux - Anton Ždanov
I wanted to create a virtual display for Sunshine and came across this article. It looks like no one has linked it here before 🙂
https://www.azdanov.dev/articles/2025/how-to-create-a-virtual-display-for-sunshine-on-arch-linuxOpen linkView original on discuss.tchncs.de
You need virtual dislay so that meat that you don't connect video card to TV. Maybe best choice - use wolf? No DE, no display. Just GPU and podman.
Interesting tech! But my use case was to stream my desktop 🙂
Wolf is really cool. It allowed my low powered laptop to stream from my main PC, while the main PC is being used for other tasks.
Without display? Ok. But wolf can stream xfce inside podman.
Yeah I understand that it can install a DE into the container and stream it, but I wanted to stream my existing DE with the same configuration.
Oh interesting. I've been doing this with a dummy HDMI plug for ages, and sure don't fix what isn't broken, but it'd be nice to set it up entirely virtually.
I've done both ways and the dummy plug is much less hassle in my opinion. Not a universal solution though. My GPU has only one HDMI port.
Hmmm.
I have an issue with my media PC where if it's turned on before the HDMI connected TV, then we can't see the display... I wonder if this will fix that issue too by pretending the TV is always connected...
Something I noticed recently is that Sunshine has added support for XDG Portal Screenshare access, meaning on KDE you can actually screen share a virtual display without needing anything configured on the hardware. You need to use the xdg-portal capture method, but I've tried it out with my phone before
I found this article nearly a year ago and have been using this method since, it works great. I use it to play games at my phone's weird native resolution, and my wife uses it to play games at her macbook's weird native resolution.
I also have multiple systemd-boot configs to boot with or without it.
Pretty dope idea! Might try this out soon!
Hey this sounds pretty great! I'm going to give this a shot.