Debian host to Steam Link Issues

Hello all,

Was recently introduced to this forum via the Level1Linux youtube channel. I have been hearing a lot about the Proton project from steam and thought I would give gaming on Linux a go. After only a little bit of troubles getting steam installed on Debian Stretch I wanted to test out how everything compared to a Windows experience. The games seemed to install and run fine on my host machine, but I tend to play games more through the streaming service provided by a Steam Link. Unfortunately, it does not seem to be very functional.

When opening Big Picture mode, the Steam interface and audio seems to stream fine from the host. The first thing I noticed was that the audio played from both the host machine and the television connected to the Steam Link. This is not a huge issue as the monitor can be turned off while streaming, but it does require intervention to accomplish and is not as plug-and-play as the Windows 10 counter part. The real issue I am having, though, is only some games actually have a video feed when using the Steam Link. I get audio just fine, but on the TV side, the game appears as a black screen or a frozen loading screen. The only game I have tried thus far that has showed up on the TV was Brawlhalla, but even that game only streamed its menus to the Steam Link. Whenever I joined a match, I was again greeted with a black screen and audio, making it unplayable through a Steam Link. I am wondering if anyone has experience getting such a setup working with Debian Stretch.

I have a nVidia GTX 1050ti graphics card with the 390 version drivers. I know there are newer drivers available, but I am not sure how to acquire and install them or if that would even solve my issue. I have been using Debian for quite some time now on my laptop and recently installed it on my desktop to give this a shot, but I am wondering if maybe I should instead use Ubuntu as that is the distro suggested by Valve. I would like to stay on Debian if possible, but I don’t have much invested in this install yet, so I would like to get this resolved before I really get settled in. Another distro I am considering is Arch, but I was planning to use that for work and software development.

Any thoughts or suggestions to get this working properly would be much appreciated. Maybe the technology isn’t quite ripe enough to accomplish this in Linux. This is the first time I have put gaming on Linux to the test and I would love to see it work.