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OBS Studio

The broadcast software almost every Linux stream is built on.

Partial Wayland supportGPL-2.0-or-later

Install

Any distro

flatpak install flathub com.obsproject.Studio

Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Pop!_OS

sudo apt install obs-studio

Debian and Ubuntu often ship a release or two behind. Use Flatpak if a plugin needs a newer ABI.

Fedora, RHEL, Nobara

sudo dnf install obs-studio

Arch, Manjaro, EndeavourOS

sudo pacman -S obs-studio

openSUSE

sudo zypper install obs-studio

NixOS, or Nix on any distro

nix profile install nixpkgs#obs-studio

OBS is the default answer, and on Linux it is close to the only answer for compositing a real stream. Everything else in the encoding and capture categories either plugs into it or feeds it.

The one thing worth deciding up front is Flatpak versus your distro package, because it determines which plugins you can install. Plugins are compiled against a specific OBS ABI: a Flatpak OBS loads plugins from Flathub extensions, and a system OBS loads plugins from your distro or from ~/.config/obs-studio/plugins. Mixing them does not work, and the failure mode is a plugin that silently never appears in the source list.

Under Wayland, screen and window capture go through the xdg-desktop-portal PipeWire path rather than OBS talking to the display server directly. That works, but it means capture sources prompt for permission and cannot be restored blindly across reboots on some compositors.