Requirements

Supported setups

A Punktfunk host runs primarily on a Linux machine with a dedicated GPU — NVIDIA (NVENC) is the most-exercised path, and AMD/Intel GPUs work via Vulkan Video or VAAPI. A native Windows host is also available. Setup splits along two axes: you install the package per distro, then configure the host — and learn its quirks — per desktop/compositor.

New here? Read Security & Safe Use first — a streaming host is remote control of the machine, so keep it on a trusted LAN or VPN and require pairing.

The floor for a working host

On apt distros that means Ubuntu 26.04 or newer, or Debian 13 or newer. Both are supported targets and both install from the same repository.

This floor is about the desktop, not the package. A host needs a compositor that can create a virtual display, and those have version floors of their own (below). Older releases will happily install punktfunk-host and then have nothing that can produce a stream — so read this as the real requirement, not the package's:

Ubuntu 24.04 is called out because the package does install there — it is built on 24.04 precisely so one package spans the range — which makes the gap easy to mistake for a bug. It is not: 24.04 ships no compositor new enough, and no gamescope (the patched punktfunk-gamescope cannot run there either — 24.04 is too old on wayland, libinput, libavif and pixman). The same gap is why Linux Mint 22.x cannot host.

Cinnamon, Linux Mint and LMDE

A Cinnamon desktop cannot host a virtual display, and no setting changes that. Punktfunk gives each client its own screen at that device's exact resolution by asking the compositor to create a virtual output. Cinnamon's compositor, Muffin, has no such API: it forked from Mutter 3.36, and its org.cinnamon.Muffin.ScreenCast interface offers only RecordMonitor and RecordWindow — never the RecordVirtual that Mutter gained in 42. Its portal backend (xdg-desktop-portal-xapp) implements no ScreenCast either, so the route that serves Sway and Hyprland is closed too. This is upstream's to fix, not a Punktfunk setting.

Which Mint you run decides whether there is any route at all:

On LMDE 7 what works is gamescope: the host starts its own headless gamescope for each connecting client and runs the game inside it, so it needs no desktop compositor at all. Your Cinnamon session keeps running untouched; the stream is the game, not the desktop. Install punktfunk-gamescope (Debian ships no gamescope of its own; the patched build is what gives the stream HDR, a visible cursor and the client's real refresh rate) and pin PUNKTFUNK_COMPOSITOR=gamescope — auto-detection reads the live session, finds Cinnamon, and stops with an error rather than guessing. To stream the desktop from an LMDE box, log into a GNOME or Sway session instead — Debian 13 ships GNOME 48.7 and sway 1.10, both above the floors (its KDE is KWin 6.3.6, below the 6.5.6 floor, so Plasma is not an option there yet).

Linux Mint 22.x cannot host. punktfunk-host installs, which makes this easy to miss, but nothing on the box can produce a stream: Cinnamon can't (above); gamescope isn't packaged for Ubuntu 24.04 and the patched punktfunk-gamescope can't run there either (24.04 is short on wayland ≥ 1.23.1, libinput ≥ 1.26, libavif ≥ 1.2.1, pixman ≥ 0.44, and has no libdisplay-info2 or libxcb-errors0); and switching desktop doesn't rescue it — 24.04's KWin 5.27 and GNOME Shell 46 are below the floors, leaving only sway 1.9 as a candidate. Use LMDE 7 on Mint hardware today, or wait for Mint 23.

Distros — install the package:

• Ubuntu — 26.04 or newer for a working host
• Debian — 13 or newer, including LMDE
• Fedora
• Arch
• Bazzite
• SteamOS
• NixOS

Desktops — configure and quirks:

• KDE Plasma (KWin)
• GNOME (Mutter)
• Steam / gamescope
• Hyprland
• Sway / wlroots

Pick your distro to install, then your desktop to configure — the two are independent. The host needs one of these compositor backends to create a virtual display.

Support is deliberately non-uniform: each compositor and each GPU vendor gets its own capture, display and input backend, and they are not equally capable. The Support matrix has a row for every host desktop, GPU and client app, with each cell taken from the code that makes the decision — read it before assuming a feature is available on your combination.

Windows host: Punktfunk also runs as a native host on Windows 11 22H2 or newer (x64) — a signed installer that registers a service and bundles a virtual-display driver whose driver framework (IddCx 1.10) makes 22H2 the hard floor — Windows 10 is not supported. It encodes on NVIDIA (NVENC), AMD (AMF), or Intel (QSV), with a software fallback, and is newer than the Linux host; see Windows Host.

GPU and driver

• An NVIDIA GPU with NVENC — effectively any GeForce RTX or workstation card. NVENC is what encodes the video in hardware.
• NVIDIA driver 535 or newer (550+ recommended). The driver must include the GL/EGL userspace, not just nvidia-utils — without it the compositor can't initialise the GPU and capture fails. Each install guide installs the right package (e.g. libnvidia-gl-<version> on Ubuntu).
• nvidia-drm modeset=1 must be enabled (Wayland on NVIDIA needs it). The install guides cover this.
• AMD / Intel GPUs encode without any of the NVIDIA pieces above. For HEVC and AV1 the host goes through Vulkan Video by default, so you want an up-to-date Mesa and the matching Vulkan driver — mesa-vulkan-drivers on Ubuntu, vulkan-radeon / vulkan-intel on Arch. VAAPI (mesa-va-drivers or intel-media-driver) is the H.264 path and the fallback for everything else: a machine with only the VAAPI driver still streams, it just gives up the Vulkan path's cleaner recovery from packet loss. PUNKTFUNK_VULKAN_ENCODE=0 pins VAAPI. Validated live on AMD RDNA3. On modern Intel (Gen12/Tiger Lake and newer, including Arc) the VAAPI driver only offers the low-power (VDEnc) encode entrypoint — the host detects this and falls back automatically (PUNKTFUNK_VAAPI_LOW_POWER=1|0 pins it) — and low-power encode needs the HuC firmware loaded (the kernel default on those platforms; check dmesg | grep -i huc if encoding fails). A GPU-less software H.264 encoder also exists (PUNKTFUNK_ENCODER=software), meant as a fallback rather than a daily driver.

Consumer GeForce cards historically cap the number of concurrent NVENC sessions (a few at once); workstation cards don't. This only matters if you stream to many devices simultaneously.

HDR and 10-bit

HDR (10-bit BT.2020 PQ) is on by default, and what a Linux box needs for it is a gamescope session running the patched punktfunk-gamescope build, or GNOME 50 or newer mirroring a real HDR monitor on the GameStream plane — the ordinary KWin, Mutter and wlroots virtual displays are 8-bit upstream and stream SDR. HDR has the full chain, per host and per client, and how to find the link that is missing.

Desktop session

The host attaches to a Wayland desktop session and creates virtual displays in it, so either a session is running for the user the host runs as, or the host brings one up itself. This can be:

• a normal logged-in desktop (you're sitting at the machine, or it auto-logs-in),
• a headless session that comes up at boot with no monitor or login — see Running as a Service, or
• no session at all — on the gamescope backend the host spawns its own headless gamescope per client connect (on a Steam appliance it can bring up the whole Steam session), so nothing has to be running beforehand. Auto-detection reads the live session, so on a box that boots to nothing, set PUNKTFUNK_COMPOSITOR=gamescope in host.env — with a gamescope session already running the host finds it by itself. See Steam / gamescope.

Minimum compositor versions (newer is fine):

• KWin ≥ 6.5.6 (KDE Plasma) — headless virtual outputs.
• GNOME ≥ 48 (Mutter) — virtual-monitor screen-cast.
• Hyprland — no version floor (Hyprland): the hyprctl path is version-independent, and both config eras (hyprlang and the newer Lua one) are handled. Contracts are verified against 0.55.4 and 0.56.2. What Hyprland does need is xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland — capture goes through it, and Hyprland does not pull it in. On 0.49+, if you have turned ecosystem.enforce_permissions on (off by default), grant the host screencopy and virtual input: a denial is silent black frames and dropped input, never an error.
• Omarchy ≥ 4.0 (Omarchy) — not a compositor floor but an integration one: 4.0 replaced the shell, the menu format and the Hyprland config language at once, so every point punktfunk-omarchy touches is different below it.
• gamescope ≥ 3.16.22 (Bazzite/Steam) — below this, headless capture deadlocks against PipeWire ≥ 1.6.
• gamescope ≥ 3.16.23 for the Steam overlay (Shift+Tab / Quick Access Menu) to reach the stream at all — older builds never paint it into the node the host captures, so no host setting can bring it back.

For HDR on gamescope you additionally need the patched punktfunk-gamescope build — see HDR and 10-bit above.

The same floors, with what each one gates, are in Version floors worth knowing; where the two disagree, the matrix is the one checked against the code.

Network

• Host and client on the same network — a LAN, or a VPN that puts them on one subnet. Punktfunk assumes a trusted local network; it's not built to be exposed to the public internet — don't port-forward it. To stream from outside your home, use a VPN so the remote client is on the same private subnet.
• For best results, a wired or fast Wi-Fi link. The host can run a built-in speed test to pick a bitrate for your link (see Configuration).

A client

You also need something to stream to — see Connect a Client. There are native Punktfunk clients for Apple (macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS), Linux, Windows, and Android, and any Moonlight client works too. All of them can discover the host on your network automatically.