Installing OBS on Zorin

Tutorials & Guides
1

Hi everyone.

I'm new to linux and Zorin. It's not been easy getting things set-up, but I thought I'd share here a solution to one particular obstacle I encountered and solved.

There are some problems with running OBS Studio on Zorin, to do with Wayland. The online advice tended to be incomplete, leading to the application failing to load at all.

I found that my Twitch chat dock (and the other docks Twitch provides) wouldn't show up. In Settings/Stream, too, the "Connect Account" button had disappeared.

I'm using the flatpak version of OBS. There was something in the research I did suggesting that this includes a part that facilitates browser sources.

The solution was to install "Flatseal" from the Software store. This lets you modify permissions for Flatpak applications. TWO changes here were needed:

  1. In the "Socket" section, switch OFF "Wayland windowing system"

  2. In the "Environment" section, ADD a Variable "QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb"

The online advice I found only mentioned the latter, but if step 1 is omitted, OBS fails to launch.

After having made those changes, the button to "Connect Account" within OBS/Settings/Stream reappeared. That let me reconnect my Twitch account and authenticate. After that, all the Twitch docks appeared.

Now, copying over my scenes and sources from my Windows installation — that's a whole other headache. My main Scenes JSON export causes OBS in Zorin to crash. Still working on that one...

1 Like
2

You could also try the .deb version to test if you have less problems there.

sudo apt install obs-studio

or, for a newer obs version, add the ppa as shown in the guide.

https://linuxcapable.com/how-to-install-obs-studio-on-ubuntu-linux/

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or why not by the application Software

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That works just as well, but explaining it takes longer, so I often give just the terminal commands.

5

About the scene collection that crashes OBS on import, does the crash happen as soon as you pick the JSON, or after OBS starts loading the sources one by one? OBS writes a log for each session, reachable from the Help menu inside OBS (Log Files > View Current Log, or the last crash log). The final entries usually name the source that failed to load, which makes it much easier to decide what to strip from the JSON before trying the import again, so you keep the scenes that already work.