One Computer, Two players - Remote Style

[Arokan]

I usually play in a group of 4 people, one of which only has a weak laptop, so a friend let's him stream from his 2nd computer.

 

Now I want to play with this friend alone some steam games and I wondered how I would go about that.

 

Main problems are that I would have to run games twice, including steam, for which I thought flatpak would suffice (one sandbox, one bare) with the second problem being that most screen sharing means mirroring and that wouldn't work either, as I obviously have to be able to play the game as well!

 

So what my crazy mind developed is that I'd make a second user account on my debian system, use x11-forwarding for streaming and using flatpak on this user account.

 

Question 1: Would that work? Has anybody ever tried to do that?
Question 2: If not, do you guys have any alternative in mind?

Thanks a lot in advance!

[Ralphred]

I've done it using multiseat; two users logged into the same machine, each running their own steam instance, but have 2 GPU's (one that does the work for both game instances, and one ancient one that just gives output for the 2nd player)

A bit of cgroup tweaking for resource control and we do double team Elden Ring Colosseum.

The biggest issue i had was the bluetooth game controller and "steam input" making its virtual xbox controller available to both games at the same time, but some strict udev persmission rules and i was all good.

 

For remote play, would steam remote thingy work with his steam instance running in a backgrounded tty?