Sunshine on Steam Deck as AppImage: Got it working with this method (don't know why it's working)

[mgrumpeli]

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Previously I got an error when running Sunshine on my Steam Deck as a host with an AppImage-installation. The stream was black and then shut donw after a few seconds. The method below seems to be working. If someone has the same problem.

Extracting the AppImage and Installing Without the Read-Only Error.
If the issue persists, you can manually extract the AppImage and perform the installation without encountering the mount error.

Extract the AppImage:
./sunshine.AppImage --appimage-extract

Navigate to the extracted directory:
cd squashfs-root

Install the app from there:
In the extracted directory, you can run the program directly:
sudo ./usr/bin/sunshine-v2025.513.202702

I don't know why this is working now, but I have no more issues when streaming from steamdeck to windows-laptop. 🙂

[ReenigneArcher]

AppImage doesn't really work with KMS because it's sandboxed and doesn't have the correct access. Sunshine needs setcap set on the binary file, which cannot work when the binary is in the AppImage. But once you extract the appimage, the sandboxing is removed and now it's just a normal file system that you can do whatever you want to it, e.g. setcap.

I tried to get around all this with the custom AppRun file (https://github.com/LizardByte/Sunshine/blob/master/packaging/linux/AppImage/AppRun) which I believed worked at one point, but perhaps the sandboxing got tighter in newer versions... Probably, the only way to get around manually extracting the AppImage is to make the AppRun file do it for the user. Not really the best approach and defeats the whole purpose of the AppImage.