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PC game streaming on the Steam Deck, native through Decky

Stop wrestling Moonlight into Game Mode as a non-Steam game. punktfunk's Decky plugin puts PC streaming right in the Deck's UI — controller-native, suspend/resume aware.

The Steam Deck is a near-perfect remote-play handheld — when the software cooperates. Today that usually means dropping to Desktop Mode, installing Moonlight, and bolting it on as a non-Steam shortcut. punktfunk ships a Decky plugin instead, so streaming your PC lives right inside the Deck's native interface.

The usual Steam Deck remote-play friction

  • Installing Moonlight as a non-Steam game — switch to Desktop Mode, install via Discover/Flatpak, add a shortcut, then fiddle with launch options.
  • Game Mode quirks — the on-screen keyboard, window focus, and controller handling don't always behave for a non-Steam app.
  • Steam Link is smooth but Steam-tied — non-Steam launchers and arbitrary hosts are second-class.
  • Suspend/resume — sleeping the Deck mid-stream often drops the session ungracefully.

How the punktfunk Decky plugin works

punktfunk installs as a Decky Loader plugin, so remote play lives in the Quick Access menu — no Desktop Mode round-trip and no non-Steam shortcut juggling. You stay in Game Mode the whole time.

  • Native Game Mode experience — discover hosts, pair, and launch sessions straight from the Deck UI.
  • Controller-native — the Deck's inputs map to the host out of the box, with the gamepad, gyro, and haptics passthrough punktfunk does across its native clients.
  • Suspend/resume aware — put the Deck to sleep and pick the session back up.

Under the hood — the same Rust core

The Deck client rides punktfunk's shared Rust core: hardware-accelerated decode, the QUIC + FEC transport that keeps video resilient on flaky Wi-Fi, and client-native resolution — so you stream at the Deck's own 1280×800, or your dock's 1440p/4K, without resolution roulette.

A perfect match for a headless Linux host

If your gaming PC is a headless Linux box, the Deck is the ideal client for it: the host spins up a virtual display at the Deck's exact resolution and refresh on demand — no dummy plug, no modelines (see our post on virtual displays and headless streaming on Linux).

Try it

Install the punktfunk plugin through Decky Loader, pair with your host from Quick Access, and you've got the smoothest PC-streaming story on the Deck — no Desktop Mode required.