Considering a shift to Linux from windows

I’ve been a Windows user since the early days. As more of my interests arose, the more they needed Windows. But with the announcement that Valve has accomplished anti-cheat on Linux and the upcoming release of their SteamOS(or whatever) that runs on Linux and proves that the majority of their library will run on Linux, I’m considering shifting. I have one sticky issue though. Now if GamesPass would work on Linux … hmm considerations to be made to keep that or not if I do switch.

Video recording and broadcasting … specifically OBS. And of course that now entails video editing that content. Is this viable on Linux at this point or would I still need a seperate PC(or Apple) for editing?

What are your thoughts here?

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OBS from my understanding works well on Linux.

And for video editing I have heard positive things about kdenlive, but do not personally have experience…yet

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Thanks for that info. I hadn’t really rolled around on OBS’s site info on what they support or don’t. Sometimes it’s not the easiest to navigate.

Welcome to sharing free software :slight_smile:

First thing, you need to realise Linux is not Win-OS. Not by a long shot. It has a different code base, philosophy, architecture and above all, mindset. You can find countless sites dealing with explaining all this, in essence it comes down to “do your homework/due diligence and if you can’t figure it out on your own, feel free to ask and we’ll help”. Notice the entire sentence in quotes, unfortunately many newbees make the mistake of dealing with Linux help questions the way they’re accustomed to on Win-OS forums, where only the latter part seems important :roll_eyes:

Anyway, I digress.

By now you’d probably realise Linux does things differently. One major difference is the use of software repositories (akin to warehouses, libraries) to install stuff from. They also have package managers who deal with dependencies of whatever software package you want to install. Notice the plural here, there are several, some better then others. In short, choose a Linux distro that’s based on the apt package manager, i.e Debian or derivatives like Ubuntu, Mint and Devuan. It’s by far the best in conflict resolving for dependencies.

Assuming you’ve followed my advise and used for example Linux Mint, installing OBS is actually quite simple:

sudo apt-get install obs
Let’s break down this command (also known as a one-liner), there’s loads of detailed explanation on the web if you want to know the nitty-gritty of it, this is a quick summary:
sudo is a way to acquire administrator rights with your regular account.
apt-get this is the actual tool/package manager. It has scores of useful options, the man pages (text-based manuals, really) tell you all you need to know about it.
install this is one of the aforementioned options and seems self-explanatory, right? :wink:
obs this is the package you want to install. It’s a so-called meta-package, meaning by itself it doesn’t install anything, but its dependencies give you a fully fledged working setup. You can add multiple packages, separated by a space, so obs vlc will install both OBS as well as VLC (well-supported video player and multi-tool for video)

Learn about the (in)famous man pages in a terminal by typing:
man man

Bookmark this page:
https://ss64.com/bash/
(note: not mine!)

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You’re not the only one considering the shift to Linux. I’ve been a long time Windows user on the desktop, mostly for gaming. However most of my daily stuff is inside a Linux or FreeBSD shell. With the advent of EAC and BattleEye supporting Linux, I feel that it’s getting to the point I can cast away the shackles of Microsoft licensing and metrics collection.

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I have toyed with many Linux distros over the years, starting with RedHat, then Fedora when they got it, then Mint, and early Ubuntu and others. The support just wasn’t there for things I wanted to do, so I left it to mature and catch up with the rest of the OS’s for productivity stuff, gaming and compatibility. But the latest bits of M$ and Windows is just pushing me in the other direction again now that it seems to have matured quite a bit.

I dont really do a lot of video editing but from what I understand both obs and kden-live are more than useable.

Also a word of warning about the anti-cheat situation, they are adding support, yes but it’s up to the developers to enable it and that might not be a walk in the park.

If you dont play alot of multiplayer games then steam + proton works absolutely brilliantly. Otherwise I would keep a copy of windows as a backup for those few multiplayer games you have.

I dont really play alot of multiplayer games, even though i have windows installed on a separate drive, I haven’t booted into probably since around spring

Yeh, I don’t play alot of those like CoD, Valorant, Apex, etc. The only one I’ve been playing alot of lately has been Splitgate. Also, I don’t plan on completely ditching my windows pc, it still has it’s uses.

OBS on Linux works very well, and Davinci Resolve is freely available on Linux too

One word of advice on OBS that took some trial and error to work out: if you have an Nvidia graphics card you won’t be able to do use Game Capture like you can on Windows. This isn’t as bad as it seems at first, because Window Capture actually works extremely well. Just don’t use whole Display Capture because the performance hit and stutter will be horrible (as it is on Windows if you’re forced to use that)

I’ve been streaming and recording Assassin’s Creed Odyssey gameplay via OBS on Kubuntu and I am very pleased with how it’s been going.

Oh one thing i should mention: since moving to Linux I can no longer use my Elgato HD60S capture card. In fact most capture cards don’t seem to play nice with Linux. I’m going to buy a Blackmagic Design card soon that will work. I get the impression that some Elgato hardware works, but not all and they don’t advertise it as such.

Thanks. I do have a 2060 OC, so I need to pay attention to that.

There’s a channel Linux Gamer that I don’t watch. I think Wendell did some collabs with him? I could be misremembering though. You can check it out, maybe he has some content regarding that.

I heard many success stories on the internet regarding people switching full time to Linux due to Steam and Proton, making gaming accessible on Linux. Personally, I’d either get 2 machines or virtualize one of them. I’m more inclined with the former, because sometimes I may want to turn Windows off (and sometimes I may not want that, depends on my mood and what I’m playing). It’s even more recommended you do 2 PCs, you use one to play and you get a capture card in your main one to record stuff from your gaming rig, then edit stuff there.

OBS works on Linux. If you’re insane (or badass, depends on how you look at it) enough, you can use ffmpeg to record stuff. The nice part about having a separate PC, aside from not eating your gaming resources, is that you can have the same setup on multiple OSes that have a HDMI or DP output (so, basically, you can switch between PCs, consoles and phones with display output, or connect phones to a chromecast).

With the advent of Windows 11 and even more DRM shoved up people’s throats, I think it’s going to be even harder to not have 2 devices (haha, DRM literally = pollution). And I’m talking about TPM stuff. Unless developers stop using DRM, it will take a while before we will see games work in any form of WINE. It will probably be easier to emulate Xbox / Playstation stuff, than try to translate Windows APIs in WINE. And it will take a while for new consoles to come up and I doubt they will use TPM.

For video editing nothing beats DaVinci Resolve, they will charge you a hand for it though. But since Adobe charge an arm, your kidney and a leg, a hand is an ok compromise. :slightly_smiling_face: Not expensive if it makes you twice as productive.

But Resolve is free on the Windows side. Is it not free on the Linux side?

And I was thinking of the 2 PC thing, or does Windows still allow for multi-boot? I could just use 2 different SSD’s, but that would be a pain everytime I wanted to boot into Windows for some reason.

Absolutely, which is why I recommend 2 PCs. You can dual-boot, but then you’ll have to play and record stuff in Windows, then reboot to edit them or use your machine for something else, then reboot again to play. I can almost guarantee that you will still be using Windows most of the time by dual-booting.

Virtualizing is a thing, but you need more hardware resources, so it’s arguably better to have 2 mid-range PCs than 1 very high-end one, IMO.

Resolve has a free version on Linux however it lacks several important codec packs that come with the paid version.

KDEnlive is fine otherwise, a step above movie maker but not the best. Far from useless though.

You can always virtualize Windows. No need to dual-boot anymore. But depends on your hardware.

I switched to Linux like 6 weeks ago. I wanted to keep dual-boot (felt like an alcoholic not willing to give up the last bottle for bad times), but after using the live boot environment, I got rid of that idea rather quickly. Wanted to run Windows in a VM…did that. Only to figure out I don’t need to. Because everything I run runs on Linux, most of the time even better. I browse, I game, I write…You’ll be surprised.

Download the ISO from some “just works”-distro, play around in a VM or the Live version. No commitments. I haven’t touched my Windows VM in weeks and will never go back. I even merged all my like 5 RGB apps into one. And my distro ships with OBS, krita and kdenlive.

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which distro is that?

I settled on PoP!_OS for my laptop and Garuda Linux for my PC. I tried like 5 different ones but these two are the ones that work best for me. The latter is a rather big distro that requires some proper hardware (8+GB memory), but also comes with great software (arch AUR) support incl. proton-ge which is amazing for steam. As a rolling release distro and being arch-based, I wouldn’t consider it the best starter distro, but with BTRFS filesystem as a default, you can always reverse time with Timeshift if you mess up something.

I had 5 old thumb drives rotting in some drawers and filled them all with different distros (those USB 2.0 drives are the worst!). Installation is a matter of 20min and I always kept my NTFS HDD untouched which contains all my data and is usable in Linux. Look and feel is very important. I was familiar with most stuff within a week and already made my first shell scripts und compiled some exotic software.

Get: Pop!_OS,Garuda, Mint, Manjaro, Ubuntu and maybe Fedora. 30GB download, plenty of opportunity for “oh I really like that one the most”.

This is a good starting selection. Just want to add that your distro choice is only your starting point / anchoring point. All others distros can be made to behave like any other distro, save for package management.

So while it is convenient starting with a distro that is close to your ideal configuration, try out most of the set above. Once you have decided on a distro, stick to it for at least a year! It will save you so much time.

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