With GeForceNow now being available for Linux we can now use the service with optimal performance.
Unfortunately Nvidia only officially supports SteamDeck and during getting this to work on my systems I had to get through some hoops that i want to share here.
First of all the app Nvidia provided is just a normal Flatpak app so the installation is relatively straight forward.
We will not use the official binary that Nvidia proved here, we can install the Flatpak app ourselves.
Just for reference im on PopOs 22.04 but since this is a flatpak it should work the same for everyone.
The guide assumes you have a working flatpak installation.
First install the runtime that GeForceNow uses, high chance that this is already installed.
The official installer installs this with the --system flag but I find this unnecessary so we install it as user like everything else.
flatpak install --user flathub org.freedesktop.Sdk//24.08flatpak remote-add --user --if-not-exists GeForceNOW https://international.download.nvidia.com/GFNLinux/flatpak/geforcenow.flatpakrepoflatpak install --user GeForceNOW com.nvidia.geforcenowThat's it you should now be able to launch the app.
Some issues I encountered and how I worked around them.
I encountered while testing this in a VM. The application failed because some GPU features where not available. On real hardware I had no issues. However, if you encounter that check these log files.
cat ~/.var/app/com.nvidia.geforcenow/.local/state/NVIDIA/GeForceNOW/geronimo.log
cat ~/.var/app/com.nvidia.geforcenow/.local/state/NVIDIA/GeForceNOW/GeForceNOW.logI'm on a full AMD system, I could imagine Nvidia GPUs might make some trouble since the SteamDeck uses AMD.
This is because GeForceNow is failing to open the hosts browser. Luckily Nvidia writes the oauth url it wants to open into a logfile.
You can extract the line with this command.
tac ~/.var/app/com.nvidia.geforcenow/.local/state/NVIDIA/GeForceNOW/console.log | grep starfleet/o-auth | head -n 1Then paste it into your browser and continue as you would normally.
For me the Network Test always failed and claimed there was no connection to Nvidia servers. Even though the app was clearly online. I'm usure why this happens. What I ended up doing is:
- Click the Burger Menu on the Left Top Corner
- Go to Settings
- Gameplay
- Change Streaming Quality Mode to Custom
This will skip the network check.
When the GeForceNow App is not opening and you are under wayland try removing the wayland permission from the flatpak to force it thorough XWayland.
flatpak override --user --nosocket=wayland com.nvidia.geforcenow Thats it, for me it worked flawlessly afterwards. If you have any additional issues and fixes write them in the comments so we can update the Gist.
Since the latest NVIDIA GeForce Now update (the commit
95ca9950ebbc764e5a28d7b3af85aeed902d546fcff5fcd4dc7e84faa5c7e686), spoofing theos-releasefile is no longer sufficient to get thetvModeUI along with its exclusive streaming options.I hope someone more knowledgeable than me who has found the solution can chime in, because I am no longer able to use the following workaround,
in order to temporarily regain the ability to use my mouse wheel.
For the same reason, I am also unable to re-enable the system clipboard support from within the GeForce Now overlay to get it back to work if the client fails to synchronize with the clipboard, which is another issue that made me depend on that UI.
Reverting to the commit
7c743ebd1635b2c2b9ba6fdb0fb9de5c7758f0195e88d4867da17a377223f2c1by runningflatpak update --user --commit=7c743ebd1635b2c2b9ba6fdb0fb9de5c7758f0195e88d4867da17a377223f2c1 com.nvidia.geforcenowis how I currently work around this newly introduced limitation, but I suspect this workaround will not work forever so it is not sustainable in the long term.