I am curious if anyone has had success using Box86 to get the Steam client working on the Librem 5. The obvious next step there after would be a game running. No, obviously, I’m not looking for triple A gaming titles here, but I would be very interested if Nuclear Throne, Faster than light, Into the Breach, etc. could run.
I feel like this would be one of the last hurdles for me to see the L5 as a true convergence device. I know it is possible, becuase on the MNT Reform I have I have moderate success with it. I think the SoC being used in the L5 has enough juice to make this worth a shot.
What should be possible is launching Moonlight (open source streaming client) on the Librem5. As I don’t have it yet I cannot tell you the status. On my Pinephone I could install Moonlight.
Even without a Nvidia-graphics card (sunshine server) you could then stream games from your gaming pc wherever in the world to your phone which might be docked to a monitor and peripherals.
Specifically the Librem 5 is aarch64. Box86 and Box64 are translation layers that let you run native x86 and x64 binaries. People are able to run Steam on Rasp Pi, for example. I know it can work, I just don’t know if anyone has done it yet.
I know this isn’t what @2disbetter is asking but I’ve done that (the Sunshine and Moonlight) and it works well. I was able to plug in an X-Box game pad and play some of my Steam games. BUT not too useful in my case because my ISP seems to block inbound connections so I can only use it when I’m home a few metres from my game laptop (and now it won’t work at all because my Wi-Fi is broken).
Did you also get the message of moonlight on the librem5 that the graphics card is not recognized? Or how did you get around this? Did you do anything else than just installing moonlight (from flatpak?)?
Yes I get that one but it was working fine, smoothly and with good reaction times. I wasn’t playing demanding games though, and anyway now the phone’s Wi Fi broke so I can’t use that anymore.
All I know is, whenever I get my Librem 5 back from repair, I’ll be throwing this on there. No chance of using it without convergence, but still I think it would be a cool accomplishment.
Many Steam games are optimised to run on the Steam Deck and its small screen so I expect (assuming performance and lag are ok) they should work fine on the Librem5 if you plug in a game controller. No need for an external screen…
Maybe, but I am doubtful about that just because of my other experiences with it. The client really adds a bunch of overhead, and I think it is tasking the system a bit too much to really expect decent performance.
