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.

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.

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.

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.

I have not yet watched the video, but it also depends on how easy it is to find the needed settings and how authorative they are. Previously I was on Ubuntu trying to get Nine Sols working with a usable framerate. ProtonDB hat some comments about the needed settings, each comment saying something different, non of them giving positive results. And for using something like gamemode I first had to install it, which is just another step not provided by anything other than comments.

When I installed Bazzite on the same PC (which was torture in itself because I didn't want to give it a full disk alone), everything worked out of the box for all my games. That tells me, that Ubuntu had no focus on making the experience for gaming better. Similar to Fedora 43 removing support for old Nvidia cards, while Bazzite still supports them. (I still debate myself on switching again from fedora because of all the hassle)

Part of the problem is that people have gotten lazy. I’d say the biggest advent of people losing touch with the actually tech is windows 7. It had everything at your fingertips. No need to look for drivers, little need for compatibility changes or added set up requirements. Couple that with nvidia automatically adjusting “best settings” for your rig on a per-game basis and you’ve got what we have now. People don’t want to learn and they’ve forgotten how we got here. Unfortunately, click and run seems to be the consumer de facto now and it isn’t going to go away.

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.

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