Recording and content creation on linux

I’ve been using OBS and the steam game recording feature to record gameplay for linux, and they function fine, but I have real concerns about it.

For one, is it just me or does VAAPI produce pretty terrible results? I’ve just fallen back on recording with x264 as the quality from GPU encoding was middling regardless of bitrate

I also can’t figure out how to isolate audio capture from a specific program, and instead have to capture my entire desktop. This means I can’t play any music in the background whilst recording.

I make images with Krita and GIMP 3.0 and I edit with Kdenlive, what are you’se all thoughts?