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.

Think of him what you want, but I think this nicely shows the problems that "gamers" will encounter when switching to linuxand gives a good view from outside the Linux community

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!

The biggest issue for most casual users starting remains picking a distro, and to that end I think we as a Linux community need to stop recommending flavors of the month. Even Bazzite has come up against some recent drama and having to break down distro drama for a new users is an absolute deal breaker.

Based on their skill level and needs just get them into a bucket: Mint, Fedora, or Arch. They've been around forever, they're stable, there's plentiful documentation and there are no weird opinionated decisions buried in them that'll go off like a landmine or confound troubleshooting. Install the Nvidia proprietary drivers, I've had less issues with those (until recently I dunno, we can revisit this point) but overall just everything simple and smooth for a transition.

Once people are on Linux they can start to come up with their own informed opinions depending on how well they take to the environment but at the same time there's nothing wrong with starting and ending with the above distros.

(I actually don't know much about Fedora, there might be a slightly better variant recommendation but it's gotta be something analogous to Mint. I'm pretty adamant on vanilla Arch though, if that's the route you want to go. Anyone who starts with Arch will be able to better determine an Arch variant down the road for themselves and are also more likely to do multiple installs. Doing so much as even a single reinstall may be a deal breaker for casuals).

I don't understand how these tech people can be so bad with researching things and then installing a distro.

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.

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.

Give me a break from that clown

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.

I studied computer engineering in Finland, so Linux is probably way overrepresented in my circles.

Personally I just don't see any other viable desktop operating system. But gaming is pretty far down on the list of things I use my computers for. If a new game doesn't run, I'm fine waiting for the switch port a decade later.

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.

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.

Linus is not a tech guy and it shows

If I went to macbook, tried my windows knowledge of CTL+alt+del, and it fails. I don't blame the macbook.

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.

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.

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.

EDIT: I found an external HDD to work with! I'm setting it up with Cinnamon now and I'll spend the next couple weeks trying to treat it like my main driver to see if I can handle any quirks that comes with it.

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 did the switch to full time linux gaming a few weeks ago.

Initially I was on PoP OS but I wasn't happy with it. I reinstalled everything on Cachyos and it has been very good so far.

Here are the main "hurdles" that I think I should not have encountered in my "liberation" :

• I activated FDE in cachyos but the LUKS decryption prompt was never on my keyboard layout so I could never decrypt with the original key. I should not have to handle keyboard layout issues when decrypting FDE. This would be fatal to any beginner.
• I still think the tinkering with proton is too involved. Some command line arguments should be activated automatically depending on your setup. Players should be able to anonymously opt-in to sharing settings for all the game they start.
• Mouse sensitivity is wonky on many linux distros for gaming. Mouse acceleration should not be a default if you target gamers. I dont care if original Arch has this default. 99% of FPS players avoid it.

That being said, leaving Windows makes me incredibly happy and I'm very thankful for the great opportunity the open source community has given me through great free software.

I'm glad at least one of them went with Bazzite. If you had never used a Windows computer before, Bazzite "just works" for games even more seamlessly than Windows.

The problem (I was guilty of this for years) is that people who are techie enough to know about Linux are much more likely to see a "mainstream" distro and assume they would prefer something more specific.

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.

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'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.

Can he not. He's a moron.

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.