stuck at my moms friends house cuz our home flooded, so working on writing my webcomic while i have less distractions. chapter one is fully written!! the idea of starting the layouts for panels is so intimidating, since this has been my dream project for years and years now
i will preface this by saying that im not an it guy, i dont code or anything but i do love linux. after i found a distribution that i liked i found that finding open source alternatives and trouble shooting stuff etc became pretty satisfying. linux is like a puzzle that you can make into whatever you want if you have the right pieces. but i will apologize in advance to it peeps if i dont use the right technical term for something.
to start off with some technical stuff you have the linux kernel, then you have all the distributions based on said kernel that are customized to suit different needs.
"A kernel is a computer program at the core of a computer's operating system that always has complete control over everything in the system. The kernel is also responsible for preventing and mitigating conflicts between different processes. It is the portion of the operating system code that is always resident in memory and facilitates interactions between hardware and software components."
tbh i think of it like ice cream flavors. each distro is a different flavor but theyre all ice cream. so while anything that i say here is geared towards my distro of choice, cachyos, it would work on other distros, you would just want to find a tutorial to see the differences.
i have tried other linux distros, but cachy has blown me away by how well and fast everything works. i honestly think that if youre gaming or doing any kind of content creation its the way to go. for the sake of this post not getting stupid long im going to assume you have linux installed. if not here is a tutorial: "How to Install Linux."
starting out
thinking of content creators you would usually go to streamers, digital artists, photographers, gamers etc. so thats what this post (kind of guide?) is geared towards. so. if youre on your fresh cachyos install you can navigate to cachyos hello.
i have cachyos hello launch at start as its an easy way to update your computer.
go to apps/tweaks and click install gaming packages. thatll prompt it to download stuff that makes gaming easier on linux. also in cachyos hello go to install apps, which will open the gui (graphical user interface) of the package manager and you can install the heavy hitters, discord, obs and steam, pretty close to how you would on windows by clicking through the prompts. i also downloaded krita, libreoffice (awesome microsoft office alternative), and vlc (my preferred media player). theres also some cool stuff like opentoonz (2d animation), blender and darktable (RAW photo editing) in there.
when you download programs from your package manager (through the terminal or with the gui), youre installing them natively. there is something called a flatpak, which runs a sandboxed version of the program. its in the name of security so its sectioned off from the other stuff on your computer and so that a company can make one version, the flatpak, and it should work on all linux distros without issue. well get more into flatpaks later.
discord: finding json files
once you have all of that installed these are some tweaks that i did. sometimes the cachyos update of discord is a little behind the official discord update (usually less than a day tbh but if youre planning to log into a call not being able to before a collab stream would be bad) so you can navigate to the json of discord (basically just the settings txt file) and turn off that discord checks for updates before launching.
you will want to go here: ~/.config/discord/settings.json
and add this line somewhere in the file: "SKIP_HOST_UPDATE": true
it should look something like this. you can still update whenever its rolled out but youll be able to use discord uninterrupted while youre waiting.
obs: git, the aur and yay
obs almost works the same as on windows. the plugin structure is a little different but its not too bad once you know what to look for. you have the easy ones like this closed captions plugin. where all you have to do is download the linux zip, extract it and put it in this folder in your file directory: ~/.config/obs-studio/plugins.
then there are the harder ones like the move plugin. where you have to clone and build the plugin yourself from github. or the aitum multistream plugin where cloning and building it myself resulted in a cmake error so the best bet is to navigate to the aur and download it that way.
which sounds like A LOT. so let me explain.
something that makes linux so cool is how easy it is to just grab cool shit from github. but to do that well need to start talking about the terminal which seems to scare people.
so background, cachyos is based on another flavor of linux, arch. its super lightweight and customizable! but when you dont know what youre doing it can be scary. since cachyos is based on arch it used the same package manager and the same commands to navigate through the terminal.
you can follow this tutorial here: "How to Install Git on Arch," and just follow to first steps to install and verify that you installed it. ill be honest i havent actually needed to configure it as it works just fine without doing so.
after youve done that you can install all the cool stuff youve seen on github. going back to the obs move plugin you would type the following in the terminal to clone (download all the necessary files from github): git clone <repository link>
which is https://github.com/exeldro/obs-move-transition
still in the terminal, you want to navigate to where it downloaded by typing: cd <folder name in file directory>
which is usually the name of the program obs-move-transition
most github pages have instructions on how to actually build the thing. for the move plugin you would type: cmake -S . -B build -DBUILD_OUT_OF_TREE=On && cmake --build build
(i realized that i already had cmake installed when i wrote this but if you dont youll want to before try to set up the move plugin. you can install it with the command “sudo pacman -S cmake” then check that it’s installed with “cmake —version”)
youll see a bunch of stuff pop up in the terminal and once its done, you should be able to see the folder for it in your file directory.
youll navigate to /home/*your username*/obs-move-transition/build/ and there should be the actual plugin move-transition.so. thats what youll put in your obs plugin folder from earlier. youll might have to make a few new folders but it should be nested like this: /home/*your username*/.config/obs-studio/plugins/move-transition/bin/64bit/
git is cool but theres another really cool thing that cachy has because of being based on arch. and thats the aur, the arch user repository. it hosts packages made by the community. in order to install these packages i personally use yay. and heres a tutorial for how to install it here, i followed option 1: "How to Install yay on Arch Linux."
but going back up to the obs plugin example, its similar to what we did earlier. first youd have to find the aur version of the aitum multistream plugin then you would type: git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/obs-aitum-multistream-bin
then: cd obs-aitum-multistream-bin
the difference is that someone already built the plugin for us so you just have to type: makepkg -si
it should once again appear in your home directory and you can go digging for the .so. for me it was in /home/*your username*/obs-aitum-multistream-bin/pkg/obs-aitum-multistream-bin/usr/lib/obs-plugins/. and youll nest it the same way we did earlier with the move plugin.
since i linked what we needed for the multistream plugin we didnt need to use yay very much but the tutorial i linked earlier shows the other ways that you can use it!
once youre done collecting all the plugins you want you can start obs, connect your twitch/youtube account and start streaming the same way you would on windows.
steam: proton, wine and flatpaks
moving onto steam... honestly... a lot of steam games should just work. steam comes with proton, which is basically a compatibility layer that lets window games run on linux. its something that we actually downloaded earlier when we installed the gaming packages. if you want to check before hand what games work you can visit ProtonDB. what is pretty much a guarantee NOT to work are games that use kernel level anticheat, like apex legends, sorry. i dont play any games like that anyways because that seems like an invasion of privacy. but you do you.
if theres something that you want to play that isnt on steam you can use wine instead, or the wine manager bottles to do so. wine is another compatibility layer, its actually partially what proton is based off of. if you want to check and see if something specific runs through wine you can check WineHQ.
if you want to use bottles (which is my preference it keeps everything neat), well be rounding back to flatpaks! to get flatpaks set up youll need to install it by typing in the terminal: sudo pacman -S flatpak
sudo means your acting as the "superuser," itll prompt you to type in your password to verify that you actually want to do what youre doing and that your authorized to do it. you wont see your password as your typing. it looks blank for security purposes but if you type your password and hit enter it will work as long as it was typed correctly. pacman is the name of the package manager for arch. heres some more about the commands you can use in pacman: "pacman."
now with flatpak installed you can install anything from the flathub! but were specifically looking for bottles right now. if you go to the bottles page on flathub the install button will give you what to put into the terminal: "Flathub- Bottles"
getting started with veadotube
veadotube is a good place to start if you want to try out streaming. its an easy to learn program for pngtubers specifically. mini is available for free and once the full version is released i can only imagine that it would be installed the same way.
honestly this is the easiest thing to install out of everything weve talked about. all you need to do is go to the veadotube website and download the zip file for mini. you extract it and inside is an exe file like youd be familiar with if you use windows.
i moved the extracted veadotube mini folder to my home folder for easy access. i will admit im not sure if theres a better place but this works for me. once you launch it, veadotube should work pretty much the same as how it does on windows. i havent run into an issues yet but just in case ill leave the docs for veadotube here: LINK
closing thoughts and links
those are honestly the biggest things that i can think of right now. just walking through how to setup/tweak discord, obs, steam and bottles walks you through everything that ive needed to learn in order to get streaming working comparably to how i used to stream and game with windows. everything that i use can be installed with once you know how to use pacman, git or yay.
something that might be helpful is wget... but honestly i wouldnt worry about it unless its needed for something you want. theres no need to have it if you dont use it.
some other useful things:
a general how to doc for streaming on linux, with a bunch of programs i didnt mention: LINK
streamer.bot for managing streams: LINK
what i used to get csp working. my fiance noticed lag while drawing, but its worth a try if you dont want to use krita or other drawing programs with linux versions: LINK
or you can set csp up in a bottle: LINK
opendeck, to use the elgato streamdeck: LINK
this is a plugin for opendeck to use the fifine steam deck, which is what i have: LINK
slime2 is just a neat chatbox for obs, it doesnt say anything about linux but because of how its built it works: LINK
the obspluginbuilding page for if you want to look more into how plugins work: LINK
prism launcher, to play minecraft, i just used pacman but theres other ways to install it listed on the downloads page: LINK
cachyos wiki: LINK
arch linux wiki, if you run into problems that you cant find in the cachyos wiki the solution is probably somewhere in here: LINK
ill sign this off by saying linux, especially distributions like cachyos, are constantly improving. make sure you update often (the easiest way to do so is using cachyos hello) and keep your files clean so you know where everything is if you run into problems!
pre-linux i didnt have a super extravagant streaming set up so theres not too too much here but i hope it at least gets you started and gives you resources to figure out the rest!
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