It is! Heads up on a known bug tho, which will already be fixed in the next release. GOG games can show up as “not installable” for seemingly no reason preventing them from being installed.
KDE offers full screen zoom out of the box with Windows Key+ and Windows Key-
It also lets you choose a huge green cursor.
Gnome doesn’t have either of this, and don’t even bother looking at any other DEs. In general, accessibility on Linux is really, really, really not great.
Well, actually both Gnome and KDE include screen readers.
In Ubuntu, activation of the screen reader is the very first step in the installation.
But they only really work for the English language.
I know they do, the app accessibility support is just unacceptably bad. Orca is also known for crashing - not that hardcore Linux users aren’t used to losing their interface all of a sudden, hehe.
Back in the old days I fixed an error by editing Xorg.conf blindly, because the error caused a black screen after booting.
Some config errors could actually damage or destroy your hardware.
I don’t miss those days.
Hahaha. I find that kinda thing incredibly fun. I once had to fix my soft-bricked Android phone in a hotel in a foreign country with no other connected devices around. That’ll teach me to run nightly builds!
In addition to what others are saying, there is a lemmy for people that moved from r/blind: rblind.comIt has a small number of active users, but perhaps you might get some help there. You could perhaps ask in their main community, !main.
As an r/blind mod and RBlind.com adminI am, in fact, aware of it. Hehehe.
Seriously though, the blind community Linux desktop install base is small and virtually nonexistent for gaming, and I have very simple accessibility requirements, so I figured I’d get better feedback here.
It’s great to know there’s some awareness of the instance around the broader Fediverse!
As someone who recently switched to Linux and doesn’t like to tinker much and doesn’t have very deep knowledge of Linux, I’ll share my experience. Whether you ultimately try or not is up to you.
Your requirements for accessibility suggests you should look into a distro with KDE Plasma as many said already. It is an extremely flexible and customizable DE.
I personally started with Mint and ended up somewhat wedging KDE in it because I didn’t like how cinnamon was handling multiple monitors. It worked but was a little rough around the edges in that setup, as it should be expected with a distro running a DE it wasn’t meant to. If you don’t mess with the DE however I’ve found Mint to be super easy and approachable. But ultimately it might not be what you need.
After doing a lot of research and comparisons I then switched to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with native KDE plasma. A few things took a little extra tinkering and learning to get them to work but after that it became the setup I am happy to stick with for a long while.
I have no experience with them but KUbuntu and Fedora Plasma Spin might be also good alternatives to look for.
Running games is very easy through stream and still relatively easy with Bottles, which is rather easy and straightforward to lean to use. As long as you have the right video drivers installed. I have an NVidia card which made it a little more complicated but I made it work still. My understanding is that this shouldn’t be any issues with AMD cards right out of the box.
Ultimately it will require you to learn a little here and there whenever you come across something you don’t know. But as someone who only has an extremely shallow understanding of how the OS works and basic common console commands I have found no problem so complicated that I couldn’t handle with a quick web search.
… What exactly do you need the Elgato for? All the Elgato does is capture external HDMI signals.
If you had 2 PCs, you would use the Elgato to send the gaming PC’s screen to the streaming PC. If you had an Xbox, you would use it to capture the Xbox’s screen on your PC for streaming.
If you have 1 PC, you don’t need an Elgato, KDE already knows what your PC screen looks like, it is laying it out.
What you should be doing is just “open OBS and set up your scenes and start streaming.” The only thing you might want to do is go into the video settings and set it to use NVENC (I think you can do that on Linux) to offload the encoding to your GPU (which has dedicated encoding hardware) instead of your CPU.
Everything else should just work the same as it does on Windows.
To be clear: The Elgato HD60 X does not do any streaming… it is a video capture device. OBS does all the streaming, and it already has access to all the things it needs to capture by nature of being on the PC. You can just capture your desktop in OBS without the Elgato.
They can. But Elgato also makes a “Camlink” in addition to the “HD60” series. And the Camlink dongles create a UVC device, which can be used as a webcam with no further tweaking necessary. Using a full desktop capture card for a webcam is slightly overkill, but absolutely works.
… I thought that … nevermind, this is why I’m here.
The Elgato has a USB coming out of it and I thought that passing everything through it would allow the USB to feed/write the video stream without any other processing, I guess what I’ve really been after this whole time is more OBS tweaking.
The only thing you might want to do is go into the video settings and set it to use NVENC (I think you can do that on Linux) to offload the encoding to your GPU (which has dedicated encoding hardware) instead of your CPU.
I think this was a big missing piece for me.
For all my years in IT, I’ve never been an A/V nerd.>
You are correct that the Elgato does video encoding. And that if you use your GPU it’s putting a little bit of extra load on the GPU. But it’s negligible since the video encoding is a separate part of the chip. Maybe you’ll lose a percentage of FPS due to power usage snd bandwidth, but honestly the same is probably true for the CPU load caused by USB bandwidth.
Even with the elgato doing “video encoding”, how does it get to Twitch/Youtube? It doesn’t do THAT kind of encoding. It’s encodes the HDMI capture into a local format that is basically a webcam stream. It has to be broadcast from OBS. and even if you are using the Elgato as a video source, OBS is going to re-encode it into what it wants to broadcast. There isn’t really getting around the video encoding cost of OBS, unless you have a device that streams to the internet directly from the capture card (which it doesn’t seem like Elgato makes one. Someone else might, but that’s not really what they are for)
Ah I did some more research and what I said only applies to the older Elgato devices. They did use h264 as the format over usb and you could use that directly without recoding. But they moved to a custom format due to delay and decoding overhead. And ofc you’d want stream ovelays and such which also requires reencoding.
I thought that passing everything through it would allow the USB to feed/write the video stream without any other processing
Unfortunately no. It captures the signal and turns it into something that the computer can digest, but the signal isn’t something that just proxies straight through to twitch. OBS is always going to do some re-rendering.
A few tips:
If you open OBS settings, there is a “Output” section. You can change the output mode to “Advanced”, and then select a “Video Encoder” … this is where you would find NVENC (there might be a way to do it in the simple output mode too, but I dont have an nvidia GPU to confirm.
You’ll most likely want to change the Output resolution on the “Video” section of the settings down to 1280x720. Twitch limits your bandwidth anyway, and people tend to find that 1080p at low bandwidth doesn’t look any better than 720p at the same bandwidth (less compression artifacts because it doesnt have to compress as much, if at all)
Twitch has an option for bandwidth tests (or at least used to). This will make their servers accept the stream, but you don’t actually go live on the site. You can use this to see how your computer handles the streaming. On the main OBS dashboard, you’ll see a 30.00 / 30.00 FPS in the bottom right corner (or whatever your resolution you’ve selected). There’s also a CPU meter down there.
In the Docks menu there’s also a Stats dock. It will tell you how many Frames are missed due to rendering or encoding lag. If you have 0 missed frames, then your PC is handling the encoding just fine. It will also list how many dropped frames due to NETWORK you’ve had. This would indicate that there is a problem between you and Twitch/Youtube on the internet. Your computer is rendering the frames just fine, but Twitch isn’t receiving them.
Use the stats dashboard to figure out where you are losing frames and then fix that (if its rendering/encoding, then its NVENC or your CPU struggling. if its Network, then its your ISP struggling). And if you aren’t losing frames, then you have nothing to worry about. This dashboard will also show you CPU and memory usage, but realistically, if youre using a 3080 with nvenc, those usages will probably be very low.
some streamers use a capture device to stream on a second device with an extra internet connection, so the stream doesn’t interfere with their gaming internet connection
Streamers use a capture device to stream on a second computer, with an extra GPU so the stream doesn’t interfere with their gaming performance. Don’t want stream encoding to hurt your framerate.
I’ve never heard of anyone using a multiple device setup for internet bandwidth reasons (im sure its happened, but I would have to believe it’s generally not the reason people use multiple devices)
Despite many people in this thread saying KDE, GNOME has been recently been financed to work on accessibility with the STF fund contract work, so major advancements in accessibility are likely to hit them first. They are also looking into getting more contract financing for it. KDE might be fairly equal right now, but I foresee GNOME getting more stuff sooner. Especially in regards to screen readers and just general app accessibility with changes to Libadwaita.
If you really are using your PC exclusively for gaming and do everything else on your Mac, I wouldn’t bother.
I’m a fairly big Linux advocate, but when it comes to accessibility, there’s still a way to go in Linux. And some form of customization still requires some tinkering. Linux gaming specially isn’t yet as seamless and easy as in Windows just yet. But, I really hope this changes one day.
It creates an arborescence that contains the necessary library for you application to work with a thick layer of magic on top of that to make it all work. This is were my understanding is at at least
There’s another comment that explains it in more details than me but it’s a hierarchy of files your C://user/you/appdata...etc and since it branches into multiple choices you can call it an arborescence if you will.
WINE lets you create isolated (well, semi-isolated…it’s not a sandbox, but separate Windows registries and most drive letters and such) directories. That directory is called a “WINE prefix”. Contains symlinks to Windows drive letter locations, a copy of that WINE environment’s registries, the WINE settings being used. I believe that the “Z:” drive defaults to being shared and mapping to “/” on your Linux box.
I believe that the default WINE prefix is ~/.wine.
But you can create others. Like, maybe you want a 32-bit and a 64-bit Windows environment.
You can run a given executable in a given WINE environment by just setting the WINEPREFIX environment variable, like:
It’s become somewhat common to create a separate WINE prefix for each application, especially games, which don’t need to interact with each other. That way, installing software in one prefix or whatever doesn’t dick up the others.
I don’t use Lutris, but if it works anything like PlayOnLinux, it might create a per-game WINE prefix. I don’t know where it’s located, though. Can probably search online.
Steam creates a per-game WINE prefix for Steam games that use Proton, their version of WINE; it uses ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/<steam-application-id> for each.
Careful deleting the prefix, as it will delete game save data. I’d suggest backing up the data, and the prefix, before creating a new one. Just rename the prefix by adding --old to the end and move the save game out of the prefix
You do the entire process with OBS studio. Is case of gaming there might be some limitations such as graphics or Internet.
Graphics would need hardware acceleration to not take CPU usage. But to avoid using up GPU I would recommend using the embedded graphics if you’re able to set it up so the game uses GPU and OBS the embedded GPU.
I don’t think you’ll have any issues, none that you didn’t already anyway. If you use archinstall it installs the drivers for you. Not sure about freesync as I can’t really tell the difference, but there’s a setting and it seems to do something.
Not sure if xwayland flicker (including on some games) is a thing on gnome, but on kde you’ll need the nvidia 555 beta driver to get it mostly fixed. It’s on aur but you need the flag -Syud (on paru) since the dependencies can’t seem to be resolved automatically.
About the mount points, I can only think of backing up fstab and swapping the uuids.
Highly recommend kde, although don’t get your hopes too high with hdr. It’s still not finalized so most programs don’t support it. You can run games inside gamescope to make them see the hdr support but since gamesope doesn’t support multiple windows any game with a launcher makes it crash. And when hdr is enabled the color profile is set to the built in color profile of the monitor, which for my monitor makes all the colors extremely dull and boring in comparison to no color profile.
What’s the deal with the flicker? The screen flickers when playing a game? That’s definitely not an issue I’ve encountered with Pop and Gnome. I’ll definitely use the 555 driver. Thanks for that warning. That probably saved me a bunch of time.
Oh good idea about fstab. That’ll simplify the setup since I have like 7 hard drives.
Damn, that’s disappointing about HDR. I was pretty excited about getting it working. Hopefully they get it dialed in soon. I suppose I’ll still benefit being on Arch since I’ll be able to use the fix whenever it comes out rather than waiting for the next LTS version.
In some xwayland programs on Wayland with nvidia gpu it looks like the last couple frames alternating instead of being shown in order once. Steam completely glitches out on first launch until you resize the window (still on 555).
Not sure if the hdr color profile issue is fixable since windows 10 also does the same thing, but that might not be an issue for you either way.
Yes, using X-server. You can toggle it on just like with the Nvidia control panel in Windows. You said nevermind, but there’s the answer in case someone else comes along and sees this later wondering the same thing.
Edit: you said most things don’t have it to begin with. Do you mean that the flicker issue is only present on a few games?
Holy hell! The first time I installed Arch for my laptop it took me like 40 minutes, but I forgot to install a DE and had to go back to the live USB mount every, chroot in, and install Gnome. All in all it took about an hour. This time it took me literally the entire night and part of the afternoon too!
I installed grub and ran the command to install it on the EFI, but I forgot to make the config file. So I spent hours trying to figure out why the hell it wouldn’t boot into Arch. I ended up completely reinstalling Arch 3 times in case I had borked the install since I have another EFI partition, another OS on this drive, and 7 partitions total. When I finally figured out that I skipped the config file I wasn’t even mad. I was so freaking relieved to figure out what I had done wrong that I was happy.
Then I installed Plasma, but it needs a bunch of other packages that either aren’t in the man page, or I missed them since I was pretty tired by that point. Got that all installed finally and set up, restarted, and realized that I can’t even log into KDE with a root account! Haha. I had to go back to the live CD and install sudo, and set up the sudoers file.
Holy shit man, that was the hardest time I’ve had with an install in over a decade. I’ve been doing this a long time and it usually goes pretty smoothly, but I guess my brain was in my pocket or something today. But it’s done!
KDE Plasma seems pretty slick. I still need to install my Nvidia drivers, steam, and all that jazz, but it’s way past bedtime now. I’ll do it after work tomorrow.
Oh, I installed yay too and wow, what a time saver! On my laptop I’ve been manually making packages for stuff like Firefox and whatever the whole time I’ve used it. I don’t have a lot of software on that laptop since it’s old and mainly just an Internet portal, but I’m definitely going to be using yay for that from now on.
If you’re still reading, I’m so exited to have finally made the switch and have it done. None of my friends are into this kind of stuff and my wife has no idea about any of it, so I just had to tell someone, and you seemed kind of invested earlier. Thanks for listening! Lol.
I guess I felt like that would kind of eliminate one of the benefits of Arch, being able to manually select every package that gets installed. I totally should have though, because in my frustration I installed the kde-applications package, which includes like 50 packages, including a bunch of games and stuff, instead of kde-desktop. Now I need to go through and uninstall all the ones I don’t want. Oh well! Next time.
Hey, have you ever run into an issue where the Nvidia driver is installed, and listed as working, but the Nvidia control panel doesn’t have any options? The graphics information section is completely blank. I’ve done a bunch of troubleshooting, and I’m pretty sure that I’ve completed every single requirement. I even tried a different Nvidia driver in case that was the issue, but with that one it was really clear that it is the wrong driver since it threw a bunch of errors. I’m confident that I’m running the right driver, I have grub set up to load it early, I have all of the modules listed in the intramfs config, I ran Nvidia options config and all the other stuff, but I am still seeing blank options.
If you’re on Wayland, nvidia settings doesn’t support it. Although I just checked X too and nvidia settings doesn’t have an options tab there neither. Is there a separate nvidia control panel than the nvidia x server settings?
I don’t see a different UI app for Nvidia options, just X Server Settings. So, if I can’t use that, how do I control the more advanced features of my GFX card? Command line only?
I remember searching about setting a fan curve on Wayland and iirc the ‘solution’ I had found was running the thing on an x server on a different tty. Didn’t look into overclocking
I’m replying here at the top of the thread again because it’s getting pretty crowded down there. I got steam installed and it’s working. I ran Baldur’s Gate 3, which worked flawlessly on my Pop install with Gnome, but in KDE Plasma on Arch the screen is going black for about 10 seconds at a time, then the game shows for about 5 seconds, and it goes black again. Is that the flicker issue you were talking about? It’s a pretty bad issue. I’ve been unable to resolve it so far. I’m pretty burned out working on it for now, so I’m going to take a break. But I wanted to see if that describes the flicker you were talking about or if I’m experiencing something different.
Edit: I disabled screen tearing in the KDE options and it stopped. I also made some changes to my config files, so I probably should have tested without disabling screen tearing first, but at least it’s fixed! Sweet! I have a working Arch Linux gaming setup now.
That’s not the flicker I was talking about but I do remember the screen intermittently going black in games for like half a second when the 550 driver first came out. Had to downgrade the driver to get rid of it. Eventually upgraded again and it didn’t happen so I thought it was fixed. Maybe those two or three bugs are related
Ah okay. I think I did see the flicker too when I was playing the game. It happens when changing views, like going to a loading screen, or opening a menu. That’s at least tolerable for a game like Baldur’s Gate. You said if I just resize the window it will stop?
I remember when they were the “go-to” MB manufacturers. Why is every good thing from yesteryear getting eshitified so fast? It’s a sad world we’re living in.
If you don’t mind spending the extra money, I can recommend the Steelseries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless. I went with these because they can do high quality audio over 2.4GHz wireless, which was a must for me in a wireless headset.
I’ve used it on Pop!_OS and Mint Debian Edition and had to do no setup, the system recognized it as a sound device out of the box. My only issue was in Pop!, where the microphone would output garbage unless I switched audio devices back and forth when I connected to a discord voice room. I’m not entirely sure that was an issue with the device or with discord on that distro, but on Mint I’ve yet to have issues. The software from Steelseries doesn’t have a Linux version, so maybe I’m missing out on some fine tuning, but for my purposes it works great.
I use it on Fedora, never got that issue. But you are right, it lacks some fine tunning, but overall it is a great headset for Linux.
My only criticism would be about the cushions, which broke apart quite early. Fortunately they are easily replaceable.
Interesting, my ear cushions are still in decent shape (I’ve only had them about a year now). I bought a replacement set early on just to have in storage, but I’ve yet to need them.
linux_gaming
Oldest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.