I used to distro hop frequently before Linux was almost supported by many things. I preferred Fedora derivatives but Ubuntu pushed those out in the dev space. I switched to Arch because it was funny then a few years ago switched to EndeavorOS because it was easy. I currently can’t get things like OBS to work smoothly (when my display sleeps, screen captures have to be deleted and rebuilt), sharing my screen with basically any tool is a nightmare, and I’m just kinda tired of compiling fixes and deeply configuring. I’m spoiled by the work experience on a Mac where all of this stuff works and it’s POSIX compliant.

What I’d like out of the box

• Solid support of OBS or other streaming tools
• Easy screensharing
• Decent audio experience
• Packages not Snaps (if I have to cave on this one I have to cave)

Linux is Linux so the rest of what I do will work almost anywhere. Godot, Rust, and a browser are basically all I need.

Literally anything. There is no functional difference between distros at almost any level but package management anymore. This honestly sounds like an environment and driver problem to me.

What's your hardware set look like?

LMDE Cinnamon. Boring. Rock solid.

OpenSUSE Aeon

Sounds like it might be more of a DE problem than a distro problem. I'd recommend trying KDE Plasma if you haven't already.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjABILVAz5Y

this dude twitch and yt streams from linux and everything you listed seems to work for him

It's just Aeon btw

I’d recommend cachyos because of cachy update which runs updates all your stuff regardless of where you got them. Flatpak, Pac-Man, appimage whatever

I’ve used it for 3 months or so and it’s great, just works.

This might be wrong but I think many of screen sharing related issues actually come from wayland. If you're on wayland and can switch to X11 on your current system I'd try that first before deciding on a new distro.

Decent audio experience?

You can tweak any distro but, pay attention to using Jack + PREEMPT_RT kernel + Xlibre (X11).

Avoid Wayland (especially with nvidia GPU), avoid Pipewire and avoid Gnome desktop.

I suggest starting out with Debian stable as the base. There are specialised AV Linux distros available but nothing beats knowing what you're doing from the outset.

If you need the very latest version of a particular app not available as a distro package, Flatpak is your friend. Again, Debian '.debs' and AppImage are most prevalent third party packages outside the proprietary app stores of Flathub & Snapcraft.

Thanks for correcting

I'm surprised this isn't the answer more often to these type of questions. If you take the time to understand what's really happening under the hood, it's all the same; package management and what comes pre-installed and configured is the only real difference.

Sounds like you're looking for Nobara.

• Stable Fedora base, optimized for games and creative work.
• WINE, OBS, codecs, and third-party repositories preconfigured.
• Less time in the terminal, more time playing and creating.

Wait, huh? Where'd you get this idea from?

Personal issues I've had and other questions I've seen online. It's not necessarily wayland itself, it might be how other programs treat screen sharing in it. In any case it's worth a try if it's an easy change.

Sorry to say, but no, it's the most problem solution.

I won't even get into the details, but it's like a heart replacement, and there are many issues by simple swapping packages from the default in this sense. Everything is shipped expecting whatever distro defaults, and just swapping things out doesn't work that easily.

It sounds like you probably had issues with specific apps that didn't properly support Wayland, and you couldn't tell the difference between the entire composition environment, and a single app having issues because it only support X11.

Avoid Wayland (especially with nvidia GPU), avoid Pipewire

Why? I have multiple devices running on Wayland (incl. 1x NVIDIA GPU), as well as Pipewire, and they run fine; what was your experience?

Some distros come with both pre-installed so you don't really need to swap out anything. If it's not pre-installed, I don't know, you might be right and it won't fix anything.

I've had issues with specific apps that just don't support it, others that require installing more packages and others that I didn't care enough to look into. That's a significant enough number to take it into account when trying things.

Literally doesn't matter

How is your experience with screen sharing?

Yeah, we’re gonna need more details, like your DE, GPU, maybe the monitor?

But I would start by test booting images and just… see what OBS package works out of the box. Try Cachy or Nobara with KDE, plus whatever their respective wikis say about OBS usage.

Fair point, I haven't tested that yet