Parsec deprecated Raspberry Pi, so there are a few issues with the setup that need some attention when setting it up. If you don’t yet have a Raspberry Pi 3, I recommend you avoid getting one because it’s hard to know when Parsec will fully break on the Pi.

Setup instructions

These are no longer on the website given the deprecation, but are archived if you’re determined to get Parsec working on the Pi. Set up Raspbian on the Buster version, as it won’t work on newer versions.

“No such file or directory” errors

If you get something like cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory complaining about missing libopenmaxil.so, libstdc++.so.6 or other stuff, and you have the Bullseye version of Pi OS, you must downgrade to Buster to use Parsec.

Error -800 on login

New installations on the Pi are currently stuck at version 150-22 with borked login and won’t update further, even though there is a functional newer version for the Pi. To work around the issue, follow the official instructions to get into the login screen, then use these commands (thanks to TadDancer):

cd ~/.parsec
wget -O appdata.json <https://builds.parsec.app/channel/release/appdata/rpi/latest>
wget <https://builds.parsec.app/channel/release/binary/rpi/gz/$>(grep so_name appdata.json | cut -d '"' -f4)

If the last wget fails, enter manually the version shown in “so_name” in appdata.json. For 150-47:

wget <https://builds.parsecgaming.com/channel/release/binary/rpi/gz/parsecd-150-47.so>