If there was something that I miss when I'm working in Linux, was, in fact, Nvidia's GeForce Now. I love it.

Until a while, it was almost impossible to get the gaming streaming service to work over Linux, even when trying to use Wine. I don't know exactly why, but presumably, it is likely that GeForce Now is using certain APIs that aren't currently implemented on Wine. Of course, there were workarounds like using virtual machines, but it implied to use Windows.

Thankfully, this is no more the case. Last month, Nvidia announced support for Chrome OS using the browser. And that's it, just Chrome; the only requirement it's to manually set up your user agent to one that matches Chrome OS machines.

However, yesterday I discovered something that I quite didn't expect. There are some good games on sale in Steam right now, so I was thinking of buying one with GeForce Now support. Therefore, I entered to the web app to see what games are currently listed, until I realised that I was using my Chrome installation without the Chrome OS user agent. But what it is impressive, is that it didn't behave like that when the web app was first launched. Why all of suddenly they change their opinion and let their Linux customers use the web app as well? I'm don't know, but surprisingly (and silently) they did it. Now you don't even need to change the user agent!

And it just works.

Bugfixes (Improvements)

You can do certain improvements/bugfixes that will make your experience with GeForce Now in the browser more pleasant.

1. [ Video is laggy / Video slutters ] Right now Chrome doesn't have hardware acceleration under Linux, however, there is a marvellous repository of Chromium with vaapi support that you can install. Read Linux Uprising for specific instructions or just:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:saiarcot895/chromium-dev
sudo nano /etc/apt/preferences.d/saiarcot895-chromium-dev-pin-1001

Paste this configurations:

Package: *
Pin: release o=LP-PPA-saiarcot895-chromium-dev
Pin-Priority: 1001

and

sudo apt update
sudo apt install i965-va-driver  (or vdpau-va-driver for Nvidia)
sudo apt install chromium-browser

Then enable Hardware-accelerated video in chrome://flags

2. [ Mouse slutters / Mouse behaves weirdly / Input lag ] Enable Pointer Lock Options in chrome://flags and run Chromium with

chromium-browser --ignore-gpu-blacklist --disable-gpu-vsync

And that's all. You can also create and "standalone" app with the Chrome/Chromium tools and use an extension to force windowed mode if you want.