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.
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
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.
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.
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)
… 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.
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.
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!
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!
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 has a good zoom feature built in, however it keeps the mouse centered which is good for doing precise graphical thing, but maybe not the best for gaming. It’s good for reading if you hold your mouse still. You can absolutely find or make a green cursor. Some guy here said gaming on Linux is janky but honestly I’ve been super impressed for the past year I’ve used it. I only had one game that wouldn’t run out of the box so far and got it running by installing some Microsoft VC runtime or something. Everything else just starts runs without issue. Edit: runs without issue in steam.
Honestly, if you don’t have the time to tinker and learn the system you’d probably have a pretty bad time with Linux.
Pretty much regardless of distro or DE, you are going to find games that either outright will fail to run or will require some tinkering and additional troubleshooting on your part to get them to run. Nvidia GPU support, while improving, is still pretty lackluster. Especially if you want things like raytracing or DLSS.
Also, it’ll be an entirely new OS, with its own learning curve just to figure out how to do basic things.
If you only have two hours a week to game and you want to be able to just jump into a game, know that it’s going to work, and not worry about it, I wouldn’t even say stick with Windows. I’d say stick with game consoles. All of the current gen consoles have some pretty good accessibility features for people who visually impaired.
All of that said, if you still wanted to try out a Linux distro, since your main focus is gaming, I’d recommend Bazzite. It’s generally pretty stable, is very easy to rollback if an update breaks something, and has a version that is preconfigured for nvidia gpus. In its installer you can choose your DE, I’d say go with KDE, since it has all of the accessibility features you listed, you’d just need to enable them in settings.
I haven’t tried any RT stuff on linux since the 30 series launched and then it was very hit or miss, a cursory google search makes it sound like things have improved substantially though.
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