I use Fedora and a MacBook Pro and I still had a better time than him.
Off course he picks PopOS, because it bite him before. And off course PopOS is currently under a huge desktop environment change.
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
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.
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.
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.
I also don’t get it. How many people realistically only uses 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?
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.
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
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.)
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.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
Isn’t popos just Ubuntu with more eyecandy?
And preinstalled nvidea drivers (if you get that version)
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 :)
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.
Can he not. He’s a moron.
Great video showcasing Linux still has many issues for average users. Pop OS is garbage too.
The amount of cope here is unbelievable.
Yes, Linux based operating systems have still many issues. So does any other operating system. No one said a Linux based operating system is perfect. In fact, Windows has more issues than Linux, that is why people switch.
I’m so mad he chose Popos again. I really hope he realises how not for his use case it is and just uses something else for the next videos.
I’m really happy with Luke and Elijah’s distro choice, Bazzite and Cachyos actually seams perfect for each of there use cases.
Also as much as most of us don’t like his content we still need to care about it. Millions of people rely on Linus for his recommendations. He could probably single handedly create the year of the Linux gaming desktop on his own if he gives Linux the thumbs up.
I mean Linus’s windows just completely bug out and he has so many other issues. When is he going to realise that no one else is having these issues. He says he’s cursed but he just keeps on using Popos and he keeps on having problems.
Why do you assume no one else is having those issues? Cosmic is in a terrible state right now.
I mean neither of the other people in the challenge are having issues, because there using Bazzite and Cachyos. Not Popos.
Sorry I didnt realise your “no one else is having these issues” extended to the entire linux space. I’d say thats even more wrong. People are having these kinds of issues on literally every distro. Go into beginner linux spaces and see for yourself. Look at how many people complain about display issues with bazziteKDE its a common issue.
Wow I had no idea.
Also the issue he had with Left4dead is present on every distro. Its an issue with the native linux version of the game being broken and its been unfixed by valve for years.
I really hope he realises how not for his use case it is
Installing a deck verified game with a gold protondb rating and playing it?
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.
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.
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 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 mean, he does answer why. You can disagree about the reason but he answers your question.
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.
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.
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.
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 actually super appreciate these videos. I’m absolutely convinced at this point that, regardless of compatibility issues, my next system will be Linux, but I have absolutely bounced off of it the last couple times I tried. Being able to see different people’s initial experiences with different distros feels pretty invaluable to me at this point.
At the moment, I only have a laptop and can’t afford either a new system or for my current system to go down, though, so I’ve been hesitant about making any actual changes. That said, my laptop’s about six years old at this point and starting to really struggle, so I know it’s coming in the next year or so.
By what you just told I can’t tell if you have ever tried a live distro with it. I hope you did, or if not, that you pick a distro of your liking and try it with your laptop.
(My PC is about 7 years old and it’s still going as new, so I was shocked reading your comment - I completely forgot Windows/Mac really tax you for “old” hardware)
I’ve got a laptop from 2012 that still works like new lmao. Not a chance that would be the case under Windows
A live distro? I’m not actually sure what that is. I’ll do a bit of looking around about it, though!
Think about a linux installation on a removable usb drive or a CD or DVD.
You won’t install Linux directly in your hard drive or whatever but in a removable device.
With it you can boot your laptop in it and use it almost as if it was actually installed on your laptop. It will let you check for hardware compatibility and that sort of thing. Also it won’t be as smooth as if it was actually installed on your laptop but for the looks of it even that way you would notice a huge difference with whatever you have installed on your laptop right now.
There are many linux flavors to test, and maybe people around here can give you better examples, but at the tip of my tongue right now there’s ubuntu or fedora, which have great hardware support by default.
I appreciate the advice! All my looking around so far has me thinking Mint or Bazzite, but I think Mint will end up being what I go with so I actually learn how to troubleshoot in case I need to move to something else in the future.
I’ll look for a free drive and try and test this afternoon!
If you have space in your laptop for a second SSD you could dual boot. That would let you switch without worrying about losing your Windows setup.
And if you go the dual-boot route, make sure you have selarate drives for the OS’s. Windows updates like to destroy the Linux bootloader when they’re on the same drive
I unfortunately don’t have the money for a second SSD at the moment. I considered partitioning my drive, but I only have 500GB and it feels like that would be a pretty big issue if I don’t figure things out quickly enough.
Yeah, don’t partition your drive just to dual boot Linux. While Bazzite has an install option for only patching the bootloader when Windows breaks it, having to run it after most Windows updates is still not something you should sign up for
I advise against dual booting from one drive anyhow. Not because it doesn’t work just fine in concept, but because windows literally nukes the boot data randomly sometimes. It’s fucking insane but it’s a real thing that happens. Seems like something you can only call malware but instead we call it windows.
You don’t need a second drive to dual boot. Although some atomic distros don’t like to share.
I would really advise against dual booting Windows on a single drive.
I have to admit that the last time I did it was with windows …vista?
Why isn’t it advisable?
Just install Linux today. Don’t wait.
I would if I could handle significant downtime on my computer. I absolutely cannot have my only device not working for some elements of my life at the moment, so I’m hesitant to just swap and hope. Someone else recommended testing live distros, though, so I may try that for a couple weeks just to see if anything goes wrong.
I know it’s not what you’re looking for because it might be overly complicated for someone getting started, but if you ever have the extra hardware (or can run a VM to play around) to give it a go I recommend you look into NixOS.
Nix is very different from other OSs you might have used because you declare your system and it gets built, if you want to install a package you add it to your configuration rebuild the system and now the package is available in the new generation of your system, but the old one is still available and you can select it via boot menu. This sounds overly convoluted, but for someone with a PC that MUST ALWAYS work it’s unbeatable.
You update the system and the new drivers broke the game you’re playing? Select previous generation of the system and carry on until you have time to figure it out. You installed a program and that broke something? Go to the previous generation keep on working and figure it out later.
I’ve never been afraid of updating my system, but since switching to Nix knowing rolling back is not an easy option is nagging at the back of my head constantly.
With all that being said, Nix is hard to get into, and this tip is unlikely to help someone getting started (I really think it’s better to get your toes wet on something more close to what you’re used to to avoid frustration). Nix requires learning a new language (which is very weird and not really that intuitive in certain things) and configuring your entire system with it. But the plus side is that once you’ve done it it’s done, and your entire system uses the same configuration format, and any hack quirks or random fixes you had to apply are there in code so you can’t forget about them when you reinstall the system or migrate to a new machine. This might not be helpful to you, but maybe it is to someone else.
Putting linux on that thing will give it several more years. The performance gap between windows and linux just keeps growing.
I’ve heard that as well, but at this point I can’t really risk something going wrong and not working at the moment. I am tempted to give it a shot, but I need to at least make sure I have a fallback if something goes wrong.
Yeah if it is a work laptop then your caution is warranted. The thing about linux is, eventually something will go wrong. However, with the slightest inclination and some internet searching skills you can always fix the issue. Windows and Mac like to fight you when you want to tinker with something, but Linux facilitates it.
Try out some live boot disks then. Several flavors of linux will just boot up, and give you the option to install from within the booted OS. I forget which ones lwt you change things and basically treat them like normal, but some will even carry over any made changes right through the install (if you tell it to, anyways).
Then, you’ll just have to identify any critical applications you need and see if they run on linux, or have any viable alternatives that do, or worst case try to run the windows flavor through Wine or proton or so.
If you need stability above all, I’d recommend avoiding the bleeding edge distros or the young ones that are changing a lot. It sounds odd, but I’ve been digging MX Linux a lot, and I’ve tried a good few flavors over the years. It’s based on Debian Stable, so it’s repos won’t be the bleeding edge, but it has that classic Debian “Just Works” going for it. The only bugs I’ve had have been issues from Wayland that also affect other distros.
I actually just spent the better part of this afternoon doing just that! I messed around with Mint and it basically ran perfectly fine. Literally no issues at all (besides some of me not understanding how things worked). All my critical stuff works perfectly well, with the sole exception being a game I run where mods are pretty heavily windows-based. I did find a decent Linux community around that, though, and they seem to be running things pretty well, too.
I know I shouldn’t dual boot with a partition, but that’s what I’m gonna do to see if I can make it a couple weeks without anything major going wrong. I tried the live boot disk, but at the moment all I have is an external HDD and it makes some things insanely slow, so partitioning is the move for now. I’ll drop Windows in a couple weeks, though.
Edit: I’ll probably also try out some other distros once I’ve got Mint set up as well, just to be sure I’m not missing out on something else that will work. For now, I just want easy to use and easy to learn.
Nice! Sound like you’re on the right track, though might want to keep a live cd image on hand in case Windows decides to take over your boot options until you can finally squash it. xP
There’s a hidden upside to him being a dumb fuck: it keeps the equally-dumb parts of his audience from clogging up the support forums and git issues with stupid shit.
In case you can’t tell, I really hate this particular Linus.
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.
The reaction of the linux community to this video was fucking embarrassing.
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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.
Bro is trying to bait Linus for a third time
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.
Didn’t we already find out Linus is a scumbag to work for like, 2-3 years ago? Why do we still spread around his content? He’s a talentless hack that got lucky being one of the early tech personalities on youtube through NCIX
Lemme guess, he runs into a very minor snag and then runs
rm -rf -no-preserve-root /because ThAtS hOw NoRmAl UsErS wOuLd Do ThInGs.Jesus Christ this place is toxic as hell
