OBS on Linux: How to Stream on Twitch

(Versão em Português)
A GIF that displays the word LIVE with a purple circle. The text moves until it forms the word LIVE again.

Against all odds, you decided to stream using Linux.

“Do you like suffering?”

That’s probably what a layperson would say. The surprise is that setting everything up was way simpler than it looks, and keep in mind, I use Arch, btw.

I’ll walk you through a step-by-step on how to configure everything.

OBS

The program we’re going to use to stream is called OBS. It’s open source and, thankfully, it has packages for Linux. In the end, good always defeats evil.

To follow this tutorial, you should download the Flatpak version. If you’re not very familiar with Flatpak, the idea is simple: it works as a “universal” app packaging system. This way, we make sure we’re using the same OBS version regardless of the distro.

You can download and install it directly from the OBS page on Flathub.

After installing it, you should see something like this:

An image of the OBS software

Alright, now let’s separate the men from the boys.

Flatseal

OBS doesn’t work very well on Wayland, some features only work on Xorg.

If you’re not very familiar with what that means, think of it like this: Wayland and Xorg are graphical layers. They’re what turn the computer into something visual. Windows, buttons, screens, and so on.

First, let’s find out whether you’re on Xorg or Wayland. Run this in your favorite terminal:

echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE

If it’s Xorg, you don’t need to do anything, you can skip this section.

If you’re on Wayland, we need to install an app called Flatseal.

Flatseal allows you to review or modify permissions for Flatpak applications. Since our OBS is a Flatpak app, we can change one of its permissions: Wayland windowing system.

This option is enabled by default. You need to disable it.

It should look something like this:

An image of Flatseal with the Wayland windowing system option disabled

Good. Now let’s move on to audio configuration.

PipeWire Audio

There’s a feature in OBS on Windows and macOS that still isn’t natively available on Linux: the ability to separate audio per application. This gives you much more control over your stream’s sound.

Fortunately, a user named dimtpap created a plugin that implements this feature. The repository is called obs-pipewire-audio-capture and you just need to follow the installation tutorial in the repository itself.

After that, the option “Application Audio Capture” will be available in your OBS.

We’re almost done. There’s just one more step.

Next step

I lied. There is no next step.

At least not for OBS configuration. If you made it this far, you can already follow any OBS tutorial made for Windows or macOS.

Now it’s on you, my friend.

You got this. I believe in you.

And if you want (or can), follow me on Twitch.

My channel is called Jhocore.