Investigate Shaodw.tech

Gaming
1

https://shadow.tech

Indipedent game streaming service. They basically support having a gaming PC in the cloud that you can connect to from GNU/Linux using a proprietary client.

Having a kind of off site Windows 10 box compartmentalized from my home, that I can use only for gaming without it touching the rest of my computing has some appeal. Also disconnecting PC gaming from PC gaming hardware upgrades is kind of interesting.

Looks pricey though, not sure if the price would be worth the frequency of use.

Not sure what the whole carbon footprint implications of such a setup would be.

2

some alternatives seem to be
liquidsky
simplay
vortex
nvidia geforce now (obv less “independent”)

then theres also parsec, which lets you host streaming games off a good enough card and network yourself

3

Ive played around with a prior incarnation of NVidia Geforce Now. It has impressed me, but simultaneously theyve changed their model enough times I would discourage anyone from evaluating it until its out of beta.

ParsSec im aware of, though at a glance I didn;t think it had a whole lot of advantages over Steam RemotePlay or setting up the FLOSS Moonlight stuff with an Nvidia Gamestreaming. (Which ive done a few years back).

Do liquidsky, simplay and vortex all have GNU/Linux clients?

4
  • Looks like simplay got out of the consumer game streaming business.
  • Vortex does not appear to have a GNU/Linux client listed on their website.
  • Liquid Sky’s webpage only lists products for enterprise right now with " Something Big Is Coming…" for gamers. gaming.liquidsky.com redirects to Google’s chrome page for me.
    • This one is particularly confusing to me as I thought I had heard chatter about liquidsky somewhat recently. r/liquidsky seems to have started pointing everyone to community.liquidsky.tv a year ago, but that community portal no longer seems to exist.
5

On the fact that it is running Windows

On Carbon Footprint

  • There is no apparent consensus on my corner of the Fediverse on if any energy efficiencies gained by centralizing GPUs and rapidly spinning them down when not in use outweighs the additional energies needed in both network transmission of the data and running the client.
  • The carbon foorprint of network transmission of the data is a real concern especially at scale.
  • Best case scenario your moving your carbon consumption around, worst case is that is that your doing worse. The only way this could be better is if the data center was striving to offset their carbon; and Shadow does not seem to be advertising this fact. Which heavily suggests they are not doing it.

On Price

  • It is pricey. But probably less so if the alternate is to build a gaming PC. After looking into it I remain tempted to try it for a a limited time and see what I think of it.

Other Notes

  • Independent french company not associated with any of the usual megacorps from what I can tell.
  • Extremely laisez fair in how you manage your cloud machine. It’s strangely a bit like a Windows VPS thats never supposed to be a server.
  • Few to no other GNU/Linux friendly services exist.
  • Shadow has no software marketplace. Their is no expectation to purchase games from Shadow, their simply renting customers gaming PCs for their existing software libraries.

Conclusion:

  • Current talkgroup interest in this is low. And this is most of the research I was interested in. So this alone might complete the quest.
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6

Ooh, love the comparison to shabbos goy Maybe I’ll write a #words post about it :slight_smile:

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