OBS Studio is one of the most successful projects of the free software However, it carries an important but, and that is that for many years it has not offered symmetric support between the platforms it supports, so the version for Linux has fewer features than the Windows version. Added to that is the fact that Ubuntu and Linux Mint are the only officially supported distributions, which will thankfully change shortly thanks to Flatpak.
There seems to be interest in improving OBS Studio support for Linux, especially when it comes to covering the spectrum that goes beyond Ubuntu, since Red hat has donated $10,000 to the project in charge of the development and maintenance of the popular video recording and streaming software, which is used not only by free software enthusiasts, but also by professionals who publish on platforms such as Twitch and YouTube.
In parallel with the Red Hat donation, the ground is being prepared for the Flatpak build of OBS Studio is official, something that should finish materializing with the release of version 27.2 of the application. What’s more, the beta version of OBS Studio 27.2 already ships the Flatpak version as an official build.
The officiality of the Flatpak version of OBS Studio is a work that should primarily be attributed, if not directly attributable, to Georges Stavracas, the GNOME contributor who has taken over the Wayland support that has officially been around since version 27 of the video recording and streaming software. Stavracas is also the main maintainer of the Flatpak package available through Flathub.
And since we are getting ahead of the launch of OBS Studio 27.2, this one too has incorporated experimental support for AOM-AV1 and SVT-AV1, which are Open Source renderers for AV1. We note that these renderers require a very powerful processor to render real-time rendering with a high frame rate per second, so most of us will probably continue to use x264.
The officiality of the Flatpak compilation of OBS Studio is an important step for Linux users, because it means that the official kernel of the application developers will answer for any bugs it may have. On the other hand, it makes available an official compilation that should work in any distribution that allows the use of Flatpak, thus overcoming a barrier that has harmed users of non-Ubuntu distributions. We are not aware that this will affect the official PPA repository, which should continue to function as it has been up to now.
