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Long-time Linux user, developer, and community builder Flake wrangler Maker Aspiring game developer Linux Matters podcast presenter

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Passing through a GPU to a kernel in a VM requires fiddling with SR-IOV and IOMMU, which also requires your hardware is compatible. Often hardware is not compatible, either by design because these features are artificially reserved for "enterprise" models or due to accidental IOMMU group conflicts on lower priced motherboards.

As containers share the host kernel, these issues do not arise and hardware acceleration is trivial.

This OBS Studio Portable container is built with Ubuntu, because Ubuntu is one of the supported Linux targets by upstream OBS. The OBS Studio Portable container is a ready-to-run, batteries included turn-key solution.

I am a NixOS user and nixpkgs maintainer. I've been working on adding more OBS plugins to nixpkgs and fixing OBS Studio in nixpkgs, but it needs more work:

- For me, it is missing some plugins I rely on and some of the OBS plugins in nixpkgs do not work. I am actively working on this.

- FDK ACC doesn't work in OBS in nixpkgs and the ffmpeg version is not fully API compatible with OBS, meaning some presets do not work. On my list to fix.

- CEF in nixpkgs is not ABI compatible with OBS and cause OBS to segfault when authenticating Twitch. Again, on my list of things to fix.

I have a long history of building a custom OBS Studio on Ubuntu, so decided to make this OBS Studio container with my friends in the Universal Blue project, to get myself a complete OBS setup I can use on NixOS while I continue to work on OBS related fixes in nixpkgs :-)

I've been streaming this way for a while now.

Yes, you can dual stream.

- I do this using livepush.io. So one stream out to livepush and they push to multiple services. - However you could run multiple instances of this container and have each stream to a different service. For example one container being the main streaming setup that streams to Twitch but also has NDI or Teleport output that can then be ingested via a second instance of this container that streams to YouTube.

Using this is KVM is technically possible but you'd lose a load of the benefits of running in a container, such as hardware acceleration and seamless integration with your host.

Can ChromeOS running Podman and Distrobox? If so, it should work fine.

I have an interest in Linux, so making a Windows build is not something I'm interested in but I see no reason why it couldn't be done.

But you raise a good point about compatibility, everything in this container is built from source so everything is API/ABI compatible since the same toolchain is used throughout.

Closing in on 20 years of existence doesn't really qualify for fad

I'm just starting a serious learning journey with Nix after flirting with the idea for a few years. Mostly because I find myself endlessly working on tooling to support the projects I work on that Nix already does extremely well.

The feature I am most sold on is the ability to invoke clean complex development environments, that bring themselves to existence automatically as I traverse directories. If you work in code or in DevOps, Nix is totally worth a look.

It provides a complete, familiar, desktop environment that can be used for basic desktop computing. I've been using Ubuntu MATE on the Pi to introduce my daughter to computing for several years now.

But, it is probably of more interest to makers and device hackers who want to target Ubuntu for their projects. You can prototype homebrew ARMv7 or ARMv8 based IoT devices in a comfortable desktop environment, including building and testing your apps as snaps (https://snapcraft.io). The full Ubuntu archive is available to you.

For hobbyist projects, you can stick with Ubuntu MATE for "deployment", even with the option to disable the X11 display server if it not an application requirement. But, if you have something more professional in mind then the applications and snaps you've prototyped with Ubuntu MATE can be used with Ubuntu server or Ubuntu Core (https://www.ubuntu.com/core) on one of the ARM-based reference platforms.