GeForce Now

GeForce Now is a cloud gaming services that lets users play video games in the browser (including on Arch Linux) and on dedicated apps available on other platforms.

Related articles

Unlike other cloud gaming platforms, GeForce Now connects to video game digital distribution services such as Steam and the Epic game store, where games have to be bought separately from the GeForce Now subscription. Given the nature of Cloud Gaming, you will not need to install the client from these services on your computer.

Usage

GeForce Now supports Chromium-based browsers out of the box, it should work for most people on Chromium.

Note: While it is possible to change the User-Agent string to have your favorite browser appear as Chromium, it may not work correctly (some user have reported that the mouse cursor would not appear in games when running Firefox).

Non-qwerty keyboard layout

As of October 2021, the setting to change keyboard layout may not be visible when accessing GeForce Now on Linux.

In some cases, the following steps allow to access this setting by making Chromium appear to run on Windows.

Launch Chromium with disabled User-Agent Client Hint

User-Agent Client Hint is a new feature on Chromium-based browser designed to improve over User-Agent strings. Unfortunately, because it is new, there is not yet an extension that let users change it. To disable this feature, launch Chrome or Chromium this way :

$ chromium --disable-features=UserAgentClientHint
Note: Using this command, the website can only rely on a User-Agent string to determine your OS, which will be dealt with in the next step.

Change your User-Agent string to make your OS appears as Windows
Warning: Web extensions can access your browsing data, please check extension permissions before installing them. On Chromium, always use the Chrome Webstore, but be aware that not all extensions in the Chrome Webstore are reviewed by Google.

Multiple extensions exist to switch the User-Agent string, they can be installed using the Chrome Webstore. While Google provides one of these, it seems to not reliably alter the User-Agent string, notably on GeForce Now. User-Agent Switcher and Manager is another extension with this feature. The Firefox version being recommended by Mozilla, it seems trustworthy enough.

This later extension provides a list of common User-Agent strings to choose from. Selecting the first "Chrome on Windows" one will work. If you are using another extension, a User-Agent string such as this one will work :

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/99.0.7113.93 Safari/537.36
Tip: User-Agent strings contain the version of the web browser. If you read this article in the future, you may have to find a newer one to have your browser appear up to date.

Access the keyboard layout setting

With these steps applied, the keyboard layout settings will be available in the main settings panel, below the Network settings.

gollark: My servers run Linux too, so having a common environment and native SSH (plus other tools like mosh and scp) is nice.
gollark: At least, most games I'm interested in.
gollark: I can play *most* games.
gollark: They're actually moving to ARM soon, which is ewwww.
gollark: I don't really like Mac OS, partly because they try and make you use shiny bad expensive hardware and partly because it's becoming increasingly locked down.
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