Video Games Tutorials and News - This Is Not Going Well. Linux Gaming Challenge Pt. 2
Intro
death to Microsoft The open source community is ready to send you to your grave. Your tyrannical reign over PC gamers is coming to an end. So far, the one-month Linux gaming challenge has been as advertised a challenge, and in part two. Luke and I are going to be taking it to the next level by not just gaming on Linux but by recording and streaming our gameplay to viewers on Twitch.
Now I'd be lying if I said I'm not expecting some speed bumps, like the small one here to tell you about our sponsor. Are you running into poor quality article meetings? Use glassware to instantly see what apps are wasting your bandwidth during your meeting and block them.
Today's challenge
With our desktop environment set up. Luke and I have a deceptively short pre-flight checklist of tasks to complete to be stream ready. We'll need comms to chat and collaborate with our fellow creators and software that's capable of capturing our gameplay audio and facecams, and obviously we'll need the aforementioned audio interfaces and cameras to work.
We both use Elgato key lights, which we've always controlled using Windows software, so we'll both need to find a workaround for that and no points will be awarded for having an ugly or bad sounding stream. It's got to look every bit as legit from a viewer perspective as it did on Windows immediately.
Linus' tries obs
I start overthinking things sometimes. That's the problem with knowing just enough to be dangerous. I tried to apt-get OBS, the industry standard for desktop capture and streaming in the terminal, only to discover that Manjaro, the Linux distribution that I'm using, doesn't come with apt because apt is for managing packages on Debian and related os's.
Oh, making life more difficult The message that comes up when you try to execute the command doesn't say, Hey, you should probably be using Pac -Man, you dunce. It tries to install some kind of dependency for apt, then just quietly fails and prompts you to do the same thing again when you try to use it.
Infinite Baby, Loop. Speaking of which. I had a panic moment when I checked OBS compatibility and found out that it was actually unsupported in Arch by the way and its derivatives, but the good news is that upon launch I was immediately relieved to find that it worked exactly as expected with some exceptions.
For example, the envank new encoder doesn't show up as an option, which appears to be down to Nvidia's pooptastic drivers on the Linux side. I always kind of assumed that the Linux community was grousing about Nvidia's locked down proprietary approach to things and that it had less to do with the actual quality of the product.
Now I properly understand that it is definitely both. As mentioned, core product functionality from like a couple of years ago is missing, the control panel looks like it's from 10 years ago, and the interface is kind of confusing. Thankfully, I was able to enable g-sync on my display, but for whatever reason, you have to allow it in order to actually turn it on, which you then verify in a completely different tab.
This kind of confusion is not a deal breaker; it's just obvious that the Linux software has never gotten the kind of TLC from the ux team that the Windows software does for me. Acquiring OBS was no problem for me.
Luke tries obs
I just got it from the package manager and it was all okay once it was installed, though we noticed window capture on Linux can be a little problematic. We couldn't seem to get it working at all at the start. I had an option for it but it didn't work and Linus didn't even have that, but a few days later I tried it again for a different project and it worked just fine.
I checked in with Linus and he did too. Neither of us know what might have fixed it. I guess that's cool.
Issues with software that doesn't exist
The bigger issue for me ended up being the software that just doesn't exist. There are third-party tools, for example, that allow key remapping and keyboarding. The Master is evidently a popular one, but if your peripherals have a manufacturer-provided tool that is used to reconfigure RGB, lighting, or the liftoff distance of your mouse, or the sensitivity steps of your DPI button, then get ready to install Windows in a virtual machine, pass those devices through configure, and then hand them back over to Linux.
It's extremely easy and tedious and doesn't even remotely restore full functionality. For example, don't expect to get a low battery warning for your gpro wireless mouse and. It's even worse for my audio interface. Then go The XLR has a handful of unique features, including decent preamps, reprogrammable screen labels, a built-in soundboard function, and the infamous beep button that I am so fond of using during my live streams.
By the way, the bad news about it is that, as far as I can tell, TC Helicon has given exactly zero. I never thought of Linux whatsoever, but wait, there's the solution. All I have to do is follow these simple instructions too. I downloaded a random script off of GitHub and ran it with no indication given whatsoever for how exactly to run a script.
Even the process of downloading it was unintuitive, and I know GitHub is for developers and not for end users, but it's. It's really hard to hide behind that shield when it took me less than two days to run into a situation where I had to use it. I mean, at that point, if GitHub is only for developers, then desktop Linux is only for developers.
You can't have it both ways, unlike in the LTT store where you can find great merchandise at fair prices. Our mouse mats are rated 5 stars with literally thousands of reviews. I found a guide on how to run a script. I'm grateful for that, but I'm frustrated by the condescending tone. I mean, my assumption that a file with a DOT sh extension would behave as I would expect it to and launch in some kind of script-running application doesn't seem that unreasonable.
Flash random You can also change a file extension in Windows and it will attempt to launch the default program for that file type. It actually serves exactly the same fundamental purpose as hinting. For the contents of the file, the only difference is that these hints for the user are also used as hints for the operating system.
It's actually a lot more convenient than digging into the properties of the file to find out what it does. Anyway, pompous tone aside, that contributor did help me figure out my GitHub download. It turns out that right-clicking save Target as gets you an HTML file in dot sh clothing because I don't know some borderline arbitrary reason, and, in order to get it to be an actual dot sh file.
