My steam machine is a steam link and a cat6 cable. It’s cheaper than the HDMI, and I can use whatever controller i want, which is always a mouse and keyboard.

I’m doing the exact same, steam streaming always was slightly too bad for Latency and in some of my games that wouldn’t feel well (Kingdom Hearts, Expedition 33, Furi,…)

So I got an optical HDMI cable, and back when I was on windows there was a script to switch the video output when bigscreen is ON.

However when I switched to Linux, the performance was horrible If I was using screen mirroring for some reason (probably a Nvidia GPU issue?). So I got a script running that uses KDE screen doctor to disable the HDMI output and when bigscreen runs it enables the HDMI and disable the Display Port. This also had the advantage of changing audio automatically :)

Now my next step will be to get a CEC injector and do TV wake and input swap when in big picture.

Folks encountering issues with streaming often don’t have the host PC connected via ethernet while the client should be on WiFi