death to Microsoft the opensource community is ready to send you to your
grave your tyrannical Reign Over PC
Gamers is at an end
freom is what I would say if I lived
with lonus Wallace III over here in fantasy land where any of that was true
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
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with our desktop environment set up Luke and I have a deceptively short
pre-flight checklist of tasks to complete to be streaming ready we'll
need comms to chat and collaborate with our fellow creators and software that's
capable of capturing our gameplay audio and face cams and obviously we'll need
the aformentioned audio interfaces and cameras both working 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 I started 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 manaro the Linux
distribution that I'm using doesn't come with apt because apt is from managing
packages on Debian and related os's oops
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 duns 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 Loop
baby speaking of which I had a panic moment when I checked OBS compatibility
and found out that it is actually unsupported in art by the way and its
derivatives but the good news is that upon launch I was immediately relieved
to find that it works exactly as expected with some exceptions for
example the nank new encoder doesn't show up as an option which appears to be
down to NVIDIA's poop tastic drivers on Linux side note here I always kind of
assumed that the Linux Community was grousing about NVIDIA primarily for
their 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 allow it in order to actually turn
it on which you then verify in a completely different Tab and 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 I just got it from the package manager and it
was all okay once installed though we noticed something 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 lonus and his did too neither of us know what
might have fixed it but that's cool I guess 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 keyboarding 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 or the sensitivity steps of
your DPI button then get ready to
install Windows in a virtual machine pass those devices through configure
them and then hand them back over to Linux it's extremely tedious and doesn't
even remotely restore full functionality for example don't expect to get a low
battery warning for your grpro wireless mouse and it's even worse for my audio
interface the go XLR has a handful of unique features including decent preamps
reprogramming screen labels a built-in soundboard function and the infamous
beep button that I am so fond of using during my live streams about the kind of
that NVIDIA puts them through I'll have it in the affiliate link down
below by the way the bad news about it is that as far as I can tell TC Helicon
has given exactly zero thought to Linux
whatsoever but wait there's the solution
all I have to do is follow these simple instructions to download a random script
off GitHub and run 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 really hard to hide behind that
Shield when it took me less than 2 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 on LT store where you
can find great merch at fair prices our Mouse mats are rated five stars with
literally thousands of reviews go see what all the fuss is about at the link below anyway 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
sh extension would behave as I would expect it to and launch in some kind of
script running application doesn't seem that unreasonable news flash random
contributor you can also change a file extension in Windows and it will attempt
to launch in the default program for that file type it actually serves
exactly the same fundamental purpose hinting at 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 pompus tone aside that
contributor did helped me figure out my GitHub download so it turns out that
rightclick save Target as gets you an H HML file insh clothing because I don't
know some borderline arbitrary reason probably and in order to get it to be an
actual sh file I had to copy it into a text editor Kate and then save that as a
script and execute it in the terminal it spat out a bunch of errors and as I
expected most of the buttons don't work but all the inputs and outputs that I
had already configured in Windows did show up my faders work I even have my
button until my go XLR loses power for
any reason at which point I will have to pass it through to Windows reconfigure
it in Windows and then pass it back over to Linux without losing power compared
to that all the other stuff is minor I hope the most notable issue I had was
that my audio devices were just kind of screwy in OBS my voice came across very
unnaturally deep and it sounded like my mic input had been duplicated my voice
just feels deep right now I don't know if I've got something lodged or what
yeah chat was pretty convinced that I had set something up incorrectly and if
I was a viewer of my stream I probably would have said the same thing but I've
been using OBS for like six or seven years now so I had my doubts I even
streamed my OBS settings panel to prove it but eventually feeling out of options
I just restarted OBS and yeah that solved pretty much everything which was
kind of frustrating because I've heard time and time again that you don't have
to turn things off and on again to get them working in Linux but hey maybe
that's just cuz I'm not really great at Linux yet maybe there's something else I
could have done not sure on the good side of things though my mixer has
worked flawlessly from the start though it is pretty simple as far as mixers go
I didn't have to change any settings I didn't have to install anything for it I
just set it as my default input device and was good to go once I got pamac
figured out getting comms going was surprisingly simple pamac is a program
with a graphical user interface that functions similarly to the Pac-Man
package manager that you operate in the terminal at least it does once you find
the hidden button in pamac to search snap flat pack and Arch user repository
entries it's basically like the pop shop
from popos except it didn't try to Brick my system the first time I used it the
only really difficult thing was choosing the right package to install for Discord
there's regular Discord and then there's Canary Discord whatever that is I chose
the most official looking package and I was up and running almost immediately
once I found the super convenient per application volume mixer in the bottom
right corner the interface is kind of cludy like scrolling with your mouse
wheel Scrolls through both the audio devices and the levels of the individual
devices which is not great but other than that it works really well and my
first voice call to Luke went completely without a hitch or it would have if I'd
known that it was starting unfortunately I actually still have not figured out
how to get desktop notifications working I found a guide but the instructions
fell apart almost immediately when my Discord package didn't show up in the
list where it's supposed to be for me to fix it I think that's probably a project
for another day Discord was an easy install for me again it was just
automatically available in package manager that being said there was
certain missing features screen sharing
across slack teams and Discord are kind of sketchy at best they feel less stable
or they're even missing some features here and there outside of that there's
even really simple stuff missing every now and then like if I download a file
and slack and then try to click the open containing folder button just nothing
happens and speaking of missing features
I used the phone app for the Elgato control center just like Linus did I had
found another solution through a script on GitHub but I thought that way would
potentially be problematic in the long term so I just avoided it unfortun for
my camera however Canon EOS utilities doesn't work on Linux I'd been using
that software on Windows for quite a while now to get a live feed from my
Canon 70D over USB to my computer it was
Flawless and didn't require a capture card I do have an Avio 4K capture card
which does work on Linux but I don't have the micro HDMI cable that it would
need to connect to my camera I could pick one up but just for this challenge
I decided to go with my old Logitech C 920 which while it doesn't remotely look
as good it works just fine and when you make the window for it really small no
one can really tell I think overall the easiest part for me was getting my cam
link 4K up and running it was garbled when I selected one of the duplicate
sources in OBS but immediately after trying the second one it cleared up and
has been Picture Perfect ever since so it works but there's a much larger
upfront investment in getting it working the question is just whether it feels
worth it in in the end it worked if you
connected to the stream after we were done about 15 minutes of troubleshooting
while we were just in the thick of trying not to starve I'm sure any random
viewer wouldn't have been able to tell the difference between one of my old Windows streams and this one audio was
good capture was good that's where the good ends however literally everything I
used past this point was a lesser experience compared to its Windows
counterpart almost everything was missing at least one feature and some I
i' say most notably OBS and teams were just buggy requiring restarts for simple
settings to actually apply and had other various problems it definitely wasn't
impossible and it was actually easier than I expected but due to various bugs
missing features and incompatible software it wasn't as simple or clean as
doing it on Windows that I wouldn't say that was enough for it to be a deal
breaker for me the bottom line is what you're looking to get out of it if
you're daily driving Linux for game streaming out of a genuine passion for
learning more about it than have at it have fun but just know what you're
getting into PC gaming already requires a certain amount of tinkering I mean
there's a reason that more people game on consoles you know whether it's trying
to track down save files in some Vista era folder or forcing an aspect ratio in
an inii file but a Linux gaming PC it
requires all of that crap and then another mountain of crap on top of it
like when something doesn't work you can tell yourself you know well I never
wanted to use that functionality or I never wanted to play that game anyway
but honestly it just comes across as sour grapes it is not that easy to use
the good news though is that a shocking number of experiences don't start and
end with sorry you can't do this so stay
tuned for part three where Luke and I are going to be trying to get as many
games up and running as possible starting with twitch's top 20 and then
expanding into some of our personal favorites it's going to be a really good one just
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want to say hi to YouTube hi all right he wanted to be in the video okay off you go y if you guys are
looking for another video to watch check out part one of this series so you don't
miss any of the action or if you've already watched that maybe check out my I switched to Mac series from a little
while back okay it was quite a while back but it was definitely interesting