It seems when you have a terrible attitude of entitlement and no willingness to learn, you’ll never be happy with anything. Huh.
In that case, I’d rather have him stay unhappy on Windows and not make those videos anymore.
Linus is not a tech guy and it shows
Give me a break from that clown
If I went to macbook, tried my windows knowledge of CTL+alt+del, and it fails. I don’t blame the macbook.
I’ve watched Linus some 10 years ago and it always seemed like he’s more of a face and a presenter and has others do research and tell him what to do. They give him some minimum info and let him go and make content. He knows more than the average person and apparently that’s enough to make content.
I wish he took it more seriously. He has a huge platform and can reach a lot of people and he often rather uses it for his own enrichment instead shining a light.What I would like to see is a Windows challenge, where they try to achieve privacy as close to out of the box linux as they can get. That would probably genuinely be entertaining.
Oh no, not this clown again. Is he running out of content? For sure.
No one ever asked him about linux things, yet he still wishes to share his imbecile opnions with the world. What a joke!
His entire OG staff is evaporating and he’s letting them rip pieces off the boat they helped him build to do so. I honestly wish I could never see this dude’s face or hear his voice again, but his slop is so ubiquitous it’s impossible to escape.
But Zip Tie Tech is a fun channel that’s come from the ashes of LTTs reputation.
There were some decent people in his team in the past. I’m not against anyone else, just his obnoxious character.
i’ll have a look at this channel. Thanks for the tip!
Actually people have been asking them to do more linux content and to try out linux. Especially in the last 6 months with windows having controversy after controversy. You probably didnt watch but it was a positive video about linux and none of the issues were his fault or outside what I’d expect a new user to run into.
He really can’t find pop os on a good day huh?
It’s hilarious how he wants it to work. I think it’s the pre-installed Nvidia drivers he wants to take advantage of (even though installing drivers on most distros is simply using the package manager) which I don’t understand why he fears driver installation, even windows doesn’t come with Nvidia drivers pre-installed. I don’t get why everyone is hating so much, it’s not like he simply made a video about only his experience.
Elijah and Luke are actually good view of what the average user might encounter (minus multi screen configuration).
Also wtf is chimera os? The only 2 times I’ve heard of it are in their videos.
ChimeraOS is a ghetto reimplementation of SteamOS but for regular PCs.
ChimeraOS predates the current Arch based iteration of SteamOS by several years. The first release on GitHub is dated 2019 (then called GamerOS).
Windows laptops absolutelly come pre-installed with the drivers compatible with that system.
Also while hit or miss windows update will install graphics drivers (on a slower cadence than direct from.nvidia/amd) even in a fresh windows install. It’s a common pain point for windows update to mistakenly downgrade your drivers.
Linus is a tool. I’ve been saying this for a long time. The guy is good at marketing, but he’s very far from what I consider a tech guy. I personally have no idea why his channel has the following it does, and I’ve no idea why some of my friends enjoy his content…which always staggered me because they know more about tech than he does. Hard R, amirite?!../s
Honestly, I think lots of people are hating on him just because. Pop is still highly recommended on a random Google search, and his reasons to pick it are legit. Plus he acknowledged that last time the issue was user error + unimaginable level of bad luck, and removing that there would be no reason for him not to use it. Also if you saw the WAN show he also installed Bazzite and Kubuntu on two other systems and got two other issues.
As much as I want to say he did something bad like last time, this time I don’t see it, his issues are legit and to dismiss them because he’s using an “unstable” (that is the default and recommended) DE or because he chose a distro that is in the top recommendations on every site out there is disingenuous.
He picked PopOS again???
Look, I have nothing against people who prefer Pop. But the issue with Steam last time around gave me a very negative impression of it. A few months ago I organized a local Linux install party and tried giving it a chance. I could not get the damn thing to install, even after trying multiple ISOs. You can say “skill issue” but if you want a headache-free distro, which Linus very clearly does, my recommendation is to try something else. If Pop works for you, again, more power to you.
this time around, it looks like he had issues with their beta-quality new de.
please just pick debian or fedora or something god dammit.
they did mention, that were shying away from debian because old software, but still choose pop os (follows the 2 year lts cycle of ubuntu, though the kernel is more up to date)
in the end, elijah (one of the 3 are partaking on the challenge, it isn’t just linus) happened to choose a fedora based distro and had like 0 issues, it is almost like they should have had choosen fedora
That was my reaction too. Its almost as if he used ChatGPT as an excuse to use POP and have a bad time.
spoiler alert, he did use chatgpt
Why do people watch this guy’s videos again? I’m baffled more and more
because they also use chatgpt
He uses Bazzite and Kubuntu in the next video.
Hey, can you say more about the Linux install party? I’d be interested in hosting something like that! Did you find or make any resources to help?
I hosted it at a local maker space. It wasn’t like super structured. My wife and I took care of most people who came in and occasionally delegating help to the knowledgeable volunteers with the space. I brought some personal laptops with a few distros installed for test driving. Linux Mint was by far the most popular choice. https://endof10.org/ has some useful resources.
We need to agree on a better way to get new users to easily chose a new Distro without having horrible choice paralysis. Asking AI doesn’t work, asking reddit or lemmy just starts a massive debate and gets the person asking nowhere.
Perhaps just refer everyone to nicks latest tier list although that is really for his use case, I mean he doesn’t even have bazzite on the list when it’s a good choice for a lot of people. Maybe there is a website that asks questions and recommends a distro based on that, or maybe I saw a cool flow chart photo that seamed good, but it’s an image so it won’t update itself when people come back to it later and the recomendations change.
This gives me an idea.
Sort of a questionnaire that kinda walks you through the kind of things you’ll use your machine for, what kinda hardware you have,… and then eventually gives you say 3 to four choices at the end. (So the average user can look at a few screenshots and make a choice based on that. Because let’s be honest we all choose our Linux partially with our eyes just like we listen to music).
Well fuck, another project my adhd wants to tackle but probably can’t.
Something like this? https://distrochooser.de/
got popOS from this so its still just as cooked.
Now you have to install it it’s the law
That’s awesome. Now to find some opportunities to share this with people.
I feel like Ubuntu used to be the sort of default “new user” distro, but they keep going off on these weird tangents so that doesn’t really work anymore. Then it felt like PopOS might have been the new one, but now they’re mid-way between transitioning to COSMIC so that’s not really a good fit either. I think maybe Mint is the default one now, but also Cinnamon is kind of it’s own thing so it doesn’t set a new user up well for becoming familiar with the more universally used DE’s like Gnome or Plasma.
I think Fedora and Debian are also a decent fit for new users, but that’s also not a very exciting answer so that’s probably why it doesn’t come up as much lol.
I dont think we can agree on one distro, there are too many compromises. But we should agree on one resource. Not sure what though.
Unfortunately there isn’t a silver-bullet for picking a distro. It’s a hurdle to get over for sure, and one that is likely to hinder general purpose adoption of Linux for a long time to come, but it is also part of what is awesome about Linux if people are willing to understand it.
Trying a bunch of different distros is really the only way to find out what is going to work for “you”. Scrounge up 4 or 10 flash drives at least 4GB each. Flash them with the ISOs for every distro that remotely tickles your fancy, and boot them up and see how it goes. Figure out your top couple of choices, and install one. If things go well, great, enjoy your new OS. If something is broken or breaks right away, then go install choice number 2 and see if it is still broken. Reasonable chance it isn’t and then you can enjoy your new OS.
I wish that wasn’t a video, but a website with everything explained on one page. We used to host things damnit! /end rant
Manjaro was the go-to distro for laymen, but manchildren got upset it wasn’t “their” distro being recommended by parties like Valve so they berated anyone who suggested it.
People berate Manjaro because it’s objectively bad. If you use it and like it, more power to you, but please stop recommending it to people new to Linux as it is likely to push people away from Linux when it inevitably breaks. Everyone that recommends Manjaro does so as an “easy to use” and “beginner friendly” distro, but it isn’t. So when it breaks for some arcane and obtuse reason, new users tend to just resign themselves as “not smart enough” for Linux and they go back to Windows. Meanwhile, there are people daily driving Mint, Ubuntu, and Fedora that barely know which way around to hold a mouse.
I don’t have the patience to argue with you, but you are wrong.
That literally is arguing…
There is no requirement for you to reply if you don’t want to take part in the discussion on this social platform, but I feel I took great care in my original reply to not attack or berate anyone, you included. Sorry that your favorite distro isn’t the “go-to” recommendation anymore, I guess.
Jesus Christ this place is toxic as hell
ffs stop using popos
Put Fedora gnome workstation and be done with it. Heck, put Linux Mint XFCE and I guarantee he wont even need to reinstall the OS unless the hardware breaks
I also don’t get it. How many people realistically only use their desktop PC for gaming and what’s the benefit of using a “gaming” distro if the same can be achieved with minimal amount on a more versatile distro?
what’s the benefit of using a “gaming” distro
User of Garuda Linux here.
The distro comes with an installer that asked me if I want to install Lutris, Steam, Heroic Games Launcher and the AMD drivers. Asked me about my browser preferences, including Vivaldi, which I actually use. It also took care of installing Wine and Proton GE for me, I just had to select them from a list.
It also includes a Garuda Toolbox application which is a general “I don’t understand Arch but need to do maintenance” kind of software. You hop in, drop tasks into a queue (things like checking for updates, clearing orphans, merging .pacnew, etc., etc.), and then it handles executing them all in the appropriate order after just a single root password prompt.
Sounds great! Do you have experience with other Distros and do you think this distro lacks in any area when it comes to use cases other than gaming?
I still consider myself to be primarily a Windows user (I can actually properly troubleshoot stuff there), but I have dabbed in Linux many times over the years. I’m using Garuda for about a year now and I’m super happy with it.
As for other distros - I tried Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mint, Tuxedo OS (basically re-branded Kubuntu, specialised for Tuxedo Computers), Fedora, PopOS, and probably a bunch of others I’m forgetting.
Garuda gave me the most “just works out of the box” experience to date.
Don’t get me wrong - there was still a bunch of things I had to do to get the experience I truly liked, but it gave me the fewest and the least annoying surprises so far.
As for things it lacks - if you get the “Dragonized” edition, you end up with a fairly heavy KDE, and some… questionable default theme choices. I’m running the Garuda Mokka, and I think it just looks super pretty out of the box. I disabled a couple of Window Decorations, but even out of the box it wasn’t anything super over the top. You can also always switch to one of the classic KDE themes, like Breeze.
This was my first foray into Arch, so I can’t tell you if it “breaks” anything someone experienced with Arch would be annoyed about.
I’m not sure if CachyOS counts as a “gaming” distro or not, but I use that on my desktop/work machine. I’m pretty familiar with Arch (BTW) and I can do a manual setup from scratch if I need to (that’s what my laptop runs) but Cachy just seemed like a way to use Arch with a simple setup and a bunch of default optimizations. So tl;dr laziness I guess lol.
I am using bazzite cause its the first distro that I didnt have to use hours of my time to fix stuff and fine tune. I normally dont switch my distro often so I never remember how all the small fixes worked
Gaming distros are great. They come with preconfigured drivers, controller setups, emulators, gamescope. Kernel patches, latest git for new game compatibility.
https://wiki.nobaraproject.org/modifications/kernel
https://wiki.nobaraproject.org/modifications/packages
There are a lot of tweaks that even experienced users wouldnt think to make and it all adds up to the experience of plugging stuff in and playing games be seemless.
How many people realistically only uses their desktop PC for gaming […].
The majority? Not everyone can or wants to afford 10 gaming gadgets just to play the same games on different devices.
what’s the benefit of using a “gaming” distro
There are some benefits. (I haven’t and don’t plan on watching the video, so I don’t know which they used.) CachyOS has some optimized kernels that help squeeze out more performance out of latency sensitive games. It is not earth-shattering, but there are measurable differences. One personal example was CS2. It ran fine on Fedora 42, but on Cachy there was noticeable less stutter when there was a lot of action.
I guess then we agree? Not many people can afford dedicate devices for just one use case, so a PC, in most instances will also be used for other use cases than gaming.
Thanks for the reasons for dedicated gaming distros, I wasn’t aware of those.
I have misread the meaning of
onlyin your sentence. Only for gaming and nothing else, almost 0%.
Far and away, business is the primary use case for PCs, education second, art and design art likely third, and gaming (while always growing) is still niche use case for PCs worldwide.
At best, gaming has over taken media consumption as a PC task but I think that has more to do with media becoming primarily, a mobile device activity in the last decade.
TBF, I think the majority of “people who play games” play them on their phones these days, and PC gaming is not that big of a percentage.
Why shouldn’t we use popos? Just curious…
You can realistically use whatever you want. But if you want a stable out of the box experience, choosing an OS that is in a beta testing phase of a new desktop environment, might lead to a less than optimal experience.
Yeah, I agree. Popos` new DE is bad…
The LTS releases should not have that DE just yet, right?
Yes but he didn’t choose that.
He did grab the lts
You are right. I assumed they wouldn’t test a new DE in an LTS version, but they, in fact, do that.
Yeah I was pretty shocked they were shipping it LTS with no warning or disclaimer
Isn’t popos just Ubuntu with more eyecandy?
And preinstalled nvidea drivers (if you get that version)
It used to be, and is still based on Ubuntu the same way as Mint is. Their Cosmic DE used to be a tweaked Gnome, but the current Cosmic iteration is a ground up developed DE done in Rust. It has a lot of promise, but their v1 is basically still beta quality with lots of bugs.
Not as i’m aware of it. It’s clearly an Ubuntu branch, but they did other things to it. I don’t an expert 😅
And imo popos is still better than Microslop.
Well that ain’t hard to achieve :)
absolutely :)
What’s wrong with Popos?
Cosmic is basically a beta DE right now. Most of Linus’ bad experiences seem to be because of that. It looks promising and I can definitely see it as my daily driver, but in a year or so.
It should be labeled as beta but its not. Its version 1.something so there is no warning of instability on the download page. Really massive L from system76.
Yeah, there’s no winning for them. They obviously underestimated the time needed to write a general purpose DE from scratch and felt they needed to release something.
I think they were mostly testing it on their own hardware and didnt weigh up how brand damaging it can be for users to download their distro and use it on random hardware and get cooked by random issues. Even linux youtubers run into issues on it. Its getting good fast, if they’d just held it back another year it’d be so good.
It took a lot longer than planned to get it into an available beta and I guess too long for comfort to 1.0. They should have released in an ”early adopter” release and kept the older Gnome base as an LTS at least until the shift to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS as a base.
Fair enough.
I used it on a secondary laptop for a while. I agree that it looks promising, their “Spotlight” equivalent is great, much better than KDE’s default.
This seals it for me, Linus picks bad distros on purpose for views. Wtf, why would you pick pop os again? Distro is in a huge transition right now.
And a new user trying to pick a distro would know and understand that … how? Because that’s the experience he’s trying to emulate.
I frequently see pop os recommended on lemmy too, so please don’t act like it’s obviously some outrageously silly choice.
I have two different views and explanation what could have happened. Choose one. :D
The only benefit of doubt I can give Linus with this choice is, because its praised and recommended a lot. And that Linus is tackling this from a end user perspective who is searching the web and ChatGPT recommendation, coming of fresh from Windows without Linux experience. We all know Linus has Linux experience, but he might go the unexperienced route as a guide. And none of the websites doing these recommendations talk about the transitional phase PopOS is in right now.
But if I assume “bad” intentions, then he very well have made a risky choice by choice. Because he knows the other two will have good experience and then almost nothing controversial would happen = boring video, no interactions in the comment. He might have chose PopOS to boos his channel, not because he really really want to try PopOS again after he got burned so hard last time…
I think he’s a sleazy little shit who loves money more than anything. There is absolutely no good intentions about this. Even your “average user” knows where to go and whom to ask. The fact that a person goes out of their way to think about replacing an operating system already puts them in a higher bracket on the intelligence scale. Those who don’t know, won’t even have a problem with windows and will never even know what Linux is. I dislike Linus even more after this video.
I mean, he does answer why. You can disagree about the reason but he answers your question.
Because an average user would do that. Hell, I use Linux full-time and I didn’t know that PopOS in a huge transition. A user wants a gaming-focused distro an picks one. It should just work if we want all those Windows users to transition. He can’t do it right either, there will always be someone complaining about his choice. People here seem to think they’re an average user, when they’re really way above average in terms of technical knowledge. Even if Linus should maybe know better, it’s better that he does some dumb stuff because that’s what many people would do.
Yes, but he could disclose that Popos is in this state. It’s ok to show the experience but he did not go the extra step expected from a tech youtuber. What’s the difference between watching him struggle with popos or having my mother do the same? Isn’t he supposed to be techy and informative? And he did it in a lan party instead of his super expensive and professional whatever lab he built. It feels deliberate to not show the full picture. Linux is incredible for gaming and all he does is ‘let’s ask chatgpt’ and ‘it fails on my machine’. Very good tech tips.
Did you watch the video? Every complaint you made was answered
What’s the difference between watching him struggle with popos or having my mother do the same?
I can’t watch your mom on youtube? Average windows users will want to know if they can make the switch with their average windows user knowledge and approach, that’s valuable information to them.
If he used all these special resources he has, that would be akin to those “I built this super awesome table from scrap wood I found behind my local supermarket” videos that fail to mention they also used the 100.000 bucks worth of tools in their professional woodworking shop. And people would then rightfully complain about that.
You clearly misunderstood me. I don’t think there’s much value for someone looking for an easy way into Linux watching someone who already knows the drill. Linus whole motive is helping non tech savvy people with tech things, and I think he could have done a lot better about communicating the state of Linux after installing popos (something you couldn’t watch my mother do even if I livestreamed it to you). He also did not show the troubleshooting afterwards or even testing another distro which can be done very quickly, and declared that Linux still isn’t a good out of the box experience after just one test. To be fair, I also encounter some bugs now and then, but so does every OS. The message I think his video is lacking is that everyone can figure out Linux for general purpose usage. What’s the tech tip otherwise? Stay on Windows because it is a good out of the box experience? From what I remember after tinkering many years before switching to Linux, setting up Windows is a slow, data recollecting riddled, expensive miserable experience. Linux is literally free, he should encourage people to try it.
I think the purpose of the video is to review who you can just tell to switch to linux and have them be able to do it unassisted in a short time frame. I think it does a pretty good job of showing that, the type of person linus was emulating represents a pretty large group of people and they generally can’t switch without either a large amount of frustration or a helpful friend. Also keep in mind this is the first in a series not a single video.
I think you are grossly overestimating people’s capabilities if you think anyone can switch to linux with no interactive help. https://xkcd.com/2501/ . “Setting up windows” for most people means swiping the credit card and pressing the power button. They do not care about data collection, and if its slow then they think they should buy the upgraded model.
I also think its funny how many of the people in this thread see this as a negative video, when I think it actually shows things in a very positive light, just a realistic one. I have already had someone switch to linux because of this video.
He also did not show the troubleshooting afterwards or even testing another distro which can be done very quickly, and declared that Linux still isn’t a good out of the box experience after just one test.
Because he had people waiting for him in a game lobby (that’s the thing I’d actually give him shit for, trying out a new OS at a LAN) and decided to fall back to a known working OS to be able to get on with his day. And that’s exactly what many average users would do in a similar situation (not necessarily sitting at a LAN but maybe urgently needing to get on with productive task x y or z instead of troubleshooting).
He also did not declare “that Linux still isn’t a good out of the box experience after just one test.”, this is a multi part series and he already said he tried different distros afterwards.
The video is 3 different people not just Linus. PopOS is not an uncommon choice, go into any beginner linux space and you’ll find people installing it all the time. All the issues were from System76 this time and last time.
I hate LTT with a passion, but pop os is my fist linux distro in a decade with very limited knowledge, and it works really well. I haven’t booted up windows in like 4 months, so i’m not really sure what the fuck he’s even doing.
I just saw pop recommended on this community. Its still got a ton of people who’ve had good experiences recommending it. But they might not know it now defaults to cosmic.
Pop is a great distro, but it is currently going through a transition. IMHO, recommending to anyone new is a mistake. It’ll create a bad image of the hard work the developers have been doing.
I agree and wouldnt recommended it either but ultimately the devs shouldn’t be putting cosmic up just yet especially in the LTS. People will always recommend the most random shit when it comes to distros combine that with those dogshit listsites and AI new users should be encouraged to try multiple just to not have them getting stuck on one thinking its representative.
