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
He’s more of a salesman for shit people don’t need.
Most of them seemed to be giving it a fair go but Linus himself seemed to be treating it more like a Cheap Car Challenge from Top Gear. He was cracking (bad) jokes about “just Linux things” before he’d even started and he gave up pretty much straight away. The problems he was having with Discord seemed more like Discord issues than Linux issues.
I game on Linux without issue. Literally 95% of games just work without issue. Deathloop never ran well and Routine (a UE game) for some reason kept want to install and uninstall a package each time I ran it (but it played fine). I don’t think I’ve found another game that doesn’t play and I recently bought ARC Raiders.
Between this, his alleged mistreatment of employees, his problematic takes on unions and worker power, his incorrect reporting proven by other tech reporters, and all the staff I actually enjoyed watching leaving and starting their own channels…I dunno why anyone gives this fucking ass clown the time of day anymore.
Stay on Windows then, you corporate fuckboy! Enjoy XBox cloud gaming and never owning anything again.
Stay on Windows then, you corporate fuckboy! Enjoy XBox cloud gaming and never owning anything again.
Yep! Linus is basically rendering his own channel obsolete by doing this shit.
I was watching an lmg clips video about it last night, and personally found it very unreasonable how he said a game that supposedly worked without tinkering, actually needed tinkering because he had to use proton experimental and add a simple launch command. Maybe i’m an out of touch linux user but… what? Is he really saying it’s that difficult to select proton experimental from a gui dropdown menu, and then copy paste a simple command? There are probably games out there on native windows that require more tinkering than that. If you literally want no tinkering at all, you’re probably better of with a console, which is ironic considering linus is mainly a pc gamer.
I think it’s fair to call out reviews that say:
“This works out of the box, and requires no tinkering at all. Anyways, here’s what you’ll need to do to get it to work.”
Having to tinker with settings and commands is literally not what “requires no tinkering” means.
Oh yeah, i did agree with him that the review was silly by stating two opposites like that, but i did feel like he made it sound like the tinkering he ended up having to do was very involved, eventhough it just takes a few seconds, especially when a review like that has already figured it out for you.
Honestly, I think he’s right on that one. No tinkering means no tinkering, selecting a proton version to force to use the windows version of the game and passing command arguments is tinkering. That is the difference between gold and platinum in protondb, gold means it works with tinkering while platinum means works oob. L4D2 is marked as Gold, so protondb agrees that some tinkering is required, his complaint that a Valve game in a platform Valve is pushing should work without tinkering is perfectly valid.
A useful video would be a bunch of people beating on stuff (off-screen or in an extended cut) to figure out what’s actually easy and reliable for beginners, then presenting that information. It would get approximately 237 views, which is roughly a million fewer than the linked video has at this time.
What succeeds on Youtube is entertainment first and information a distant second. A video where everyone sat down in a quiet environment with no pressure, installed a reasonable Linux distribution, and had a smooth experience wouldn’t be very entertaining.
it’s that difficult to select proton experimental from a gui dropdown menu, and then copy paste a simple command
you still need to find the command, to know that you need to use proton experimental, to not be scared away by the name or the idea of going into options, to know how to open a context menu(something that so many people i have seen do not know), to know how to copy and paste something
these are not difficult things to do, but they require effort and to learn how to do; the average person(that i have encountered) does not want to spend the time and energy to do those things. They want to just double click the game and for it to open
i dont think assuming “without tinkering” means without changing the default settings is that unreasonable
Like i said, i agree that it was stupid to put “no tinkering required” in a review, then proceeds to list tinkering steps. I just feel like the difficulty of said tinkering steps is overblown. Especially when you consider ingame graphics settings, pretty much every game requires tinkering regardless of OS, which is one of the reasons i find myself booting up my ps5 instead at times, and if you’re that allergic to tinkering or can’t do it, then console is your best bet. When we’re talking about these basic kinds of troubleshooting steps, i just don’t believe that’s a linux gaming issue, it’s a pc gaming issue.
He’s said a couple of times that he’s trying to view it through the lens of a casual, non-technical user, and the fact that similar problems also exist on Windows doesn’t stop them from being problems.
True, but I wish Linus had tried switching distros, or at least not using a distro he’s already had issues with in the past. A lot of his problems are stemming from using an Ubuntu-based distro and COSMIC being a brand new DE that still has a bug of bugs to quash.
Hopefully in the next couple of weeks they do a collab with Wendel to go over what were the causes of their problems and final recommendations. Sure, the listicles for Linux distros are useless, but having a conclusion from trusted voices informed by people with a lot of experience (aka Luke and Wendel) would do a lot of good by cutting through the bullshit.
If his teasers are to be believed thats what he does for the second installment of this.
Supposedly Linus switched to Kubuntu, but we’ll have to wait for part 2 to see how that turned out. But from the WAN show I don’t think it went well.
My biggest issue is that there is zero information of what everyone is actually running.
“I’m running Kubuntu”, cool, what version? LTS or STS? What kernel? What version of Mesa drivers? How did you even install the OS? Ext4? Manual partitioning? Are you using swap? Is steam installed via flatpak, snap, or the deb?
But nope it’s “lol I installed pop again, shits still broken, Linux sucks! I’m cursed!”
Oh yeah, installing Steam from a flatpak also seems to be a good way to avoid some tinkering, I don’t think they have ever done that.
I know Valve recommends using the appimage above flatpak, but even that requires little to no tinkering
He’s a moron but yeah copying and pasting a command is beyond normies. They would want to get the command from LLMs for one thing, which would almost guarantee it wouldn’t work.
Linus is not at all a moron. The trouble with him is that he plays the role of a boulevard journalist. So he constructs bs narratives to have something to talk about, even when it makes absolutely no sense to create these little plot points.
It seems to have gotten to a point where he can not switch his style off. Seems to have gotten this way since he started LMG.
The real problem with these videos is that Linus decides to try and emulate the average user, but then refuses to do even the smallest amount of troubleshooting “because the average user wouldn’t do it”. So it leads to a lot of moments where something doesn’t work out of the box, there’s a trivially simple solution that comes up as the first Google search result (if you ignore Gemini’s output), but he doesn’t bother and just throws his hands up (like the average user would, I guess).
It just gets frustrating, because their Linux videos end up being entertainment first, and educational… fifth, maybe?
Have you met the average user? 😀
They click on ads that look like windows dialogs.
true and people forget how troubleshooting makes them smarter
It’s the difference between entertainment and information. Gamer’s Nexus is less entertaining when they recite statistics number by number, and so they have less viewers, because people prefer poor information but with an entertaining presentation, rather than the opposite.
Kinda like Top Gear used to be, they had some valid information but they could bend it if it meant the show would be more entertaining.
You might be right, I’m not even sure what his actual intelligence level is and I didn’t express myself well. I just don’t like the fuck. He was at his most charming when he did the video with Actual Linus™ and he still kind of got on my nerves. And unlike some others, I do not think his criticism of Linux is constructive. And unlike others, I do not find the gamer Nexus expose on him to be a dismissable hit piece, because to me it showed a shady corrupt business relationship with hardware companies and sloppy benchmarking. Not to mention the sexual harassment accusations, which I find credible.
I think if he had somebody better to onboard him, he’d have a better experience.
In classic manchild fashion, you people always blame the user instead of the technology. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that switching to Linux is not going to be without issues for anyone, let alone the average computer user.
Instead of taking the opportunity to be a loser by gatekeeping, we should be saying “Yeah, the Linux ecosystem still has a long way to go. What makes it better is that it’s free software. You now get to be a part of the community making it better and get to see for yourself where we are.”
None of you will say that though because you’re too stuck in your ways. It makes me sick, but I’m glad I’m not one of you.
Youre right. Its actually a good chance for the linux community to clean up long standing bugs and work out a better way to combat the misinfo new users face when onboarding. I hangout in a few noobie linux spaces and the suggestions they find are insane sometimes. Its common to see people suggest someone buy an entirely new GPU to fix an issue thats unrelated. Or switch distro to fix a minor issue. These make linux look so bad because no one should have to switch GPU to not have their screen flicker or have to switch distro to have Bluetooth work.
The l4d2 bug would happen on every linux distro when someone tries to run as native.
This video might shine some light on these issues and get valve to remove the native linux version of l4d2 since its completely broken.
I also had some issues with hyprland and steam. That’s why i changed back to KDE. Luke made a great choice to leave hyprland for a later day.
LTT is not sincere.
It’s the Pro Wrestling of tech. It’s Tech Entertainment. The focus is drama instead of technical accuracy or knowledge sharing. He “lost the match” because he never intended to win.
Totally agree! We canx’t have serious mass if it keeps getting portrayed as some kind of cheap toy.
On the other side of all this, tho, we do have Pewdipie seriously having Linux as his daily driver.
PewDiePie has probably brought more people to Linux single-handedly than LTT ever did.
If we are thinking in terms of roles in a production of a sketch, Linus is the one that accepts the role to emphasize and emote about the problems. Picking a distro with known quirks (being a beta in this case) is a signature setup for that role. Without the drama, it would be a pretty boring episode for the LTT demographic.
That being said, anyone who is ingrained into how Windows operates and has quirks in their workflows (as in - tuned their workflow to work relying on some edge cases), a month is too short a time to transition and embrace that necessary change.
Cosmic is not in beta. Its presented as a LTS option front page on system76’s website. Linus does play the lighten rod role for critism but in this one he was completely justified, popOS was a fair choice for a new user and it was a bad experience. Now experienced linux users can see this from a mile away but hes obviously not doing a video about installing linux as an experienced user.
Yeah, I agree even though for all intents and purposes Cosmic v1 is still a beta in the same way any AAA game is still a ”beta” with day 1 patches on release. It should have been an ”early adopter” release at least until the transition to the next underlying Ubuntu LTS.
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
I watch some of the videos from the main channel as well as Short Circuit and honestly I’m more there for the other hosts, even in this video Linus is the most negative of the three. Luke actively uses Linux after the last challenge even if it’s not for every device.
I watch Jake’s channel now that he left and he’s got more interesting things going on. Same with Alex.
Thanks for the insight
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.
If you’re going to get Windows users with limited technical knowledge to switch over Pop makes quite a bit of sense given they can go out and grab a System76 PC and not have to think about how to use Rufus to make a bootable USB.
He would still have these issues on system76 hardware. The problems were cosmic and valve not supporting their old games.
On which website is Pop_OS! the top recommendation?
Tell me you didn’t even saw the video without telling me you didn’t even saw the video. But you want an extra one? This one, here’s the link to the pinned thread on this same community where the top 3 recommendations for beginner distros are Fedora, Mint and Pop: https://lemm.ee/post/37682729
Is watching the video a requirement to participate with the comment I wrote?
Not really, but this is a reply to most comments here about the video so without seeing the video and reading some of the other comments you are missing a lot of context. In the video Linus shows several different sites that recommend Pop, he even looks for recent sites written by people specifically because he got some bad comments about using listacle articles before. He also asks chatGPT, and while that’s not exactly reliable it is based on average messages online so it’s not fully random. Also, like I pointed out, the community we’re using to discuss this also lists is as recommended, which goes to show it’s not a fluke of the sites he used but that it is generally recommend broadly.
The fact that he asks ChatGPT should tell you all you need to know about his professionalism.
Besides, all top 10 websites that are returned by i.e. Google Search list either Ubuntu or Linux Mint as the best choice for beginners.In rhe video, in case you did not watch it, he made the point to use the distro any user coming from wondows was likely to choose. So asking chatgpt was an explicit and natural process in the selection.
But go on concluding shit about the video and its professionalism without watching it, you are doing great mate.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
He also looked at several sites before asking chatGPT to see what other options it would recommend, and he specifically says he asks it because that’s what a lay person would do, in those eyes I would say that a journalist that doesn’t ask chatGPT for this would be a bad one. Also, these are the first 3 links from my search:
Top comment says Pop.
https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/top-linux-gaming-distributions-2026-play-better-open-source
First item is SteamOS, the one after that is Pop.
https://www.interserver.net/tips/kb/6-best-linux-distros-for-gaming-and-playing-windows-games/
N°1 on the List is Pop
Even being generic about best distro for beginners without mentioning gaming at all
https://linuxblog.io/best-linux-distro/
All 3 of them list Pop, so it’s not surprising that someone looks at 6 different sites, sees multiple recommendations, one of which appears in all 6 of them and at the top for gaming specific ones and decides to use it.
You might not like it, you might have issues with it, but to say it’s not widely recommended is disingenuous.
Tell me you are a redditor without telling me you are a redditor
If I went to macbook, tried my windows knowledge of CTL+alt+del, and it fails. I don’t blame the macbook.
This is what bugs me every time I see LTT Linus talking about Linux. He spent decades learning Windows. He immersed himself in it. Now he’s older and doesn’t realize the small amount of researching and “RTFM” for Linux is nothing compared to the energy he spent learning Windows stuff.
On the positive side - seeing stuff like this in others has helped me realize when I start exhibiting the same negative thoughts and behaviors.
Jesus Christ this place is toxic as hell
People are being exposed to something outside their bubble, and are lashing out.
As it should be. Linus is a patented moron.
He is but he actually did nothing wrong. Nothing he did this time was unreasonable from a user perspective. All the faults this time were with linux(system76 and valve).
he actually did nothing wrong
The left 4 dead 2 thing could have been fixed by running the game through Proton, as the native Linux port of thegame is less than stellar. Helldivers 2 is Helldivers 2, and honestly I wish LS just did a bit more research on PopOS to know that it switched to COSMIC (or just right out the bat didn’t make ChatGPT choose a distro for him by regurgitating those awful listicles with outdated info), and maybe, just maybe, reconsidered installing an OS at a LAN party. I’m sorry but if you’re installing an OS at a LAN party and let alone trying to troubleshoot things while people are waiting for you on a match, everyone will laugh at you.
However I will give LS the benefit of the doubt on Cosmic, that windows duplication bug was insane. idk how System76 decided Cosmic is ready for release now. They could have at least put it up as a second download option with a short disclaimer alongside the GNOME version or something.
Elijah and Luke did way better imho. They actually went onto the internet, chose the distro after a little bit of thread hunting and a little research, and tried their best to troubleshoot their problems.
I know how he could of fixed things thats not the point. The point is these are linux issues that I dont fault a new user for running into.
He didnt need to do more research the video shows 3 different approaches, searching/ai, searching reddit, having basic experience from immersion.
If he had gone and picked something no user would ever pick maybe I’d have an issue but popOS is still commonly picked and recommended and its fine for him to bring to attention how shit it is for new users.
Overall I think the video was linux positive and I’m expecting the whole series to show linux favourably. I’m hoping the community reaction to ep1 doesnt change that. Theyve been insufferable.
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.I do agree - years ago he was doing some good case reviews and I’d pick his videos to compare against others, but I do agree with other comments here that he’s getting click-baity and I tend to skip his vids now
Its a huge media company at this point so by its own logic it has to churn out a lot of content to mantain itself and grow. Basically they just produce a bunch of slop these days.
LTT is the internet equivalent of those TV channels that were nothing but ads.
I use Fedora and a MacBook Pro and I still had a better time than him.
I use pop os with hardly any previous knowledge for 8 months now and everything is working. I don’t really understand wine, but that hasn’t been a problem so far
Are you on cosmic?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Can he not. He’s a moron.
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.
Give me a break from that clown
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ChatGPT advice here is basically regurgitating the Pop OS circlejerk. Pop OS is a horrible distro and it shows.
Linus also made a great point showing how all top articles recommend different things. Everyone is shouting to use their distro and when it doesn’t work some other Linux zealot says “no you should have used the distro I use”
PopOS is a great distro! It’s pretty stable, comes with easy full disk encryption and backup partition out of the box, and just works. I agree with the criticism of calling cosmic v1 already, but I disagree that it’s that bad. I daily drive it and rarely have issues, it’s missing some features I expect in a mature DE though.
It’s fast, it’s stable, it’s beginner friendly, and it’s a perfectly fine distro.
Really? All the linux vet YouTubers have run into countless really really bad bugs when using cosmic. I dont think its anywhere near stable. I have nothing against pop, my only issue is them shipping cosmic to early with no disclaimer or warning.
I don’t watch any “Linux vet YouTubers” so I have no clue what they may be experiencing and running into, but I’ve been running it daily since alpha, and it’s been rock solid. I’ve had a couple times where the Nvidia driver crashed that could have been caused by cosmic, but I didn’t verify. Though both times I was messing with OBS and a virtual second display.
I don’t like the file manager, the dock/panel are not as customizable as I wish, it’ll glitch after running updates sometimes but a restart of cosmic fixes that. I was never a fan of tiling windows but with cosmic I use it daily on some workspaces.
There aren’t a lot of applets yet, but I like these: package updater, privacy indicator, nitrate, minimon.
I wish I could have expanded ungrouped tabs in the app tray instead of a grouped icon, definitely my biggest annoyance. Otherwise I absolutely love cosmic. I’ve stopped using gnome after gnome shell, and it’s never won me back, kde always felt like a side project just to get it to look how I wanted. Cinnamon is my second choice if Cosmic isn’t available, but I really like Cosmic.
My wife is my barometer for how beginner friendly any tech is. She had zero issues adapting to popOS. She had many issues when I tried to force Slackware on her.
Bro is trying to bait Linus for a third time
Linus (of tech tips) is a hopeless certified moron, there’s no Linux distro that’ll work for him.
