I did this a few months ago, Bazzite makes it extremely easy. Just install Bazzite, and during the initial setup, there is a toggle to enable “Sunshine”, and it will automatically install everything necessary. Afterwards install the Moonlight client on any other device, and connect to your Bazzite PC from within Moonlight. Official docs for Sunshine are here.

To uninstall, you can just re-launch the Bazzite setup wizard, look for “Bazzite Portal” in the desktop menu. If you want, you can also install/uninstall Sunshine from the terminal, run sudo ujust setup-sunshine.

Note that for Sunshine to work you will need to either have a monitor plugged in, or a dummy HDMI dummy adapter.

I remember at some point I had some issue getting Sunshine to auto-start after booting the PC. I think what I did was enable auto-login, so that once the PC booted it automatically logged into the default user, without asking for password or anything. This is pretty insecure so only do this if you can’t find another way. You can also manually start the Sunshine service by ssh-ing into the PC and doing systemctl --user start sunshine.

It’s a little hard to decipher what you mean. I think I understood that you basically want to have a headless gaming rig so you can stream your games in the rest of your network. The closest you would get is probably Bazzite, and configure it to directly boot into steam big picture mode so you can use steam link on your connecting devices. If you would like a platform agnostic setup you could look into sunshine. That will involve more tinkering tho.

Even “heavy” linux distros are easy to run for a pc capable of running and streaming modern games. Lightweight distros are mostly relevant for older or underpowered hardware.

Maybe Bazzite because it’s geared towards working well with gaming out of the box.

I’d recommend CachyOS if you’re trying to squeeze the best gaming performance out of the hardware

Linux uses less resources than windows by default, any is better performance and lighter, cachyos might be easier to tinker with, I got sunshine working on it fairly easy.

should be fairly simple with any distro. personally, id recommend mint or something for ease of use. install steam, and you can use steam link for android (chromecast, roku, firestick, mobile), or steam link for linux (raspberry pi etc). steam has built in compatibility for windows games running on linux, and a built in streaming setup. a bit of an all-in-one solution.

you can try a steamdeck-like distro as others have suggested, but they may be less easy to learn on if youre not too familiar with linux already.

keep in mind nvidia drivers are a sore spot in linux, so if possible try to use an amd graphics card.

OK so a lot of people are recommending bazzite. I have been using it for a while and I do not recommend it. Mainly due to the fact you more or less can’t install any program other than through the software centre unless you use a vm with the included “box buddy” program which for me has been very hit and miss for which programs work.

Go ahead and try bazzite for yourself but I would recommend either fedora or Linux mint both with the xfce desktop since a lightweight desktop seams to be what your looking for.

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You mean as a file server? I’d probably use a minimal Debian installation. But almost any distro should have a minimal flavour.