Linus Tech Tips Linux Challenge Pt. 2 - Veteran Linux User REACTS

all right so we're gonna do a quick reaction video to the second linus tech tips uh linux challenge video that they put out i'm gonna do one for the first one but i know that this is the most recent one so let's do it this way uh i'm just gonna pause the video and talk about it when uh when my time arises let's go death to microsoft the open source community is ready to send you to your grave your tyrannical reign over pc gamers is on an end three [Music] is what i would say yes i understand uh the whole um inside joke on this one that a lot of linux people are uh very into freedom and open source and uh they will fight to the death for it i get it if i lived with linus wallace the third over here in fantasyland where any of that was true so far the one month linux gaming challenge has been as advertised a challenge and in part two it's what you get when you use pop os luke and i are gonna be taking it to the next level by not just gaming on linux but by recording and streaming our gameplay to viewers on twitch now i'd be lying if i said i'm not expecting some speed bumps pre-flight checklist of tasks to complete to be streaming ready we'll need comms to chat and collaborate with our fellow creators and software that's capable of capturing our gameplay audio and face cams and obviously we'll need the aforementioned audio interfaces and cameras both working we both use elgato key lights which we've always controlled using windows software so we'll both need to find a workaround for that and no points will be awarded for having an ugly or bad sounding stream it's got to look every bit as legit from a viewer perspective as it did on windows yeah one thing i'm going to say right now is that the ui ux experience on linux is a little bit lacking i think that's because a lot of developers care about the program they care about the like what it does and a lot of people run programs from the command line they don't even like the gui is a complete afterthought um so i get where they're coming from here however that being said i am shooting this on obs studio on a linux system so immediately i started overthinking things sometimes that's the problem with knowing just enough to be dangerous i tried to apt-get obs the industry standard for desktop capture and streaming in the terminal only to discover that manjaro the linux distribution that i'm using doesn't come with apt because apt is for managing packages on debian and related os's yeah there is different package managers for different distributions arch-based is pac-man debbie and his app get um i only use pac-man on the desktop but i do use debian-based systems on the server and i mean i get it's a little bit confusing but you get the hang of it oops making life more difficult the message that comes up when you try to execute the command doesn't say hey you should probably be using pac-man you don't it tries to install some kind of dependency for apt then just quietly fails and prompts you to do the same thing again when you try to use it infinite loop baby speaking of which i had a panic moment when i checked obs compatibility and found out that it is actually unsupported in arch by the way and its derivatives uh fair point but a lot of packages are unsupported by the distribution maintainers that's just because they don't they don't manage them themselves however they do work on on the distributions quite well so but the good news is that upon launch i was immediately relieved to find that it works exactly as expected with some exceptions for example the nvinc new encoder doesn't show up as an option which appears to be down to nvidia's pooptastic drivers on linux sidenote here i always kind of assumed that the linux community was grousing about nvidia primarily for their locked-down proprietary approach to things and that it had less to do with the actual quality of the product now i properly understand that it is definitely both that is a point of contention i think that um you can solve a lot of the issues by installing the proprietary nvidia drivers a lot of people that use linux don't want to do that i get the ideology but um in order for me to run something like davinci resolve i have to install the proprietary drivers it seems and they do seem to work better for various programs that being said what is this font i just noticed that but i'm not sure what this is as mentioned core product functionality from like a couple of years ago is missing the control panel looks like it's from 10 years ago and the interface is kind of confusing thankfully i was able to enable g-sync on my display but for whatever reason you allow it in order to actually turn it on which you then verify in a completely different tab and this kind of confusion is not a deal breaker it's just obvious that the linux software has never gotten the kind of tlc from the ux team that the windows software does and that's kind of what i mentioned at the beginning of this video is there is some lacking ui ux in the linux side of things i think a lot of people are doing this through the command line and that's probably why there's a little bit of afterthought but i i get where linus is coming from here yes for me acquiring obs was no problem i just got it from the package manager and it was all okay once installed though we noticed something window capture on linux can be a little problematic we couldn't seem to get it working at all at the start i had an option for it but it didn't work and linus didn't even have that but a few days later i tried it again for a different project and it worked just fine i checked in with linus and his did too neither of us know what might have fixed it but that's cool i guess the beauty of using open source uh software sometimes something won't work for me and then a day later it does because somebody well after i update my system somebody has written a patch for it it's kind of cool to be involved with i'd get the frustration um that being said when i was filming this i'm filming this on obs 2. um i had to reopen the window just so that it recognized my webcam wasn't doing it had to take the source down and put it back up i get the frustrations the bigger issue for me ended up being the software that just doesn't exist there are third-party tools for example that allow key remapping keyboarding master is evidently a popular one but if your peripherals have a manufacturer provided tool that is used to reconfigure rgb lighting or the lift-off distance of your mouse or the sensitivity steps of your dpi button then get ready to install windows in a virtual machine pass those devices through configure them and then hand them back over to linux it's extremely tedious and doesn't even remotely restore full functionality you have the technical ability to start a vm pass through all of your peripherals and do that but you can't get versus pac-man one thing that when i used to game i would have to i ran both windows and a linux system on my desktop um and when i made changes to the hardware in the windows system it does generally carry over to the linux side of things if it's stored in hardware if it's not if it's a software solution then you're kind of out of luck that being said there's are all a bunch of different um ways you can map keys on linux systems depending on what you use for display environment or window manager you can use hotkey daemons you can use the system settings and when it comes to rgb i have no comment continue for example don't expect to get a low battery warning for your gpro wireless mouse and it's even worse for my audio interface the go xlr has a handful of unique features including decent preamps reprogrammable screen labels a built-in soundboard function and the infamous beep button that i am so fond of using during my live streams about the kind of bull that nvidia puts them through i'll have it in the affiliate link down below by the way the bad news about it is that as far as i can tell tc helicon has given exactly zero thought to linux whatsoever but wait there's a solution all i have to do is follow these simple instructions to download a random script off github and run it with no indication given whatsoever for how exactly to run a script there is some cost of entry when you're coming over to linux and understanding how to run scripts and uh how to use get i think that they're going to talk about that too is one of the cost of entry um this program i'm not sure if it's run or maintained by the developers of the hardware um one of the cool things about open source is that this may be somebody like you or me that's maintaining a uh a github repository so that you can use this on linux is kind of cool even the process of downloading it was unintuitive and i know github is for developers and not for end users but it's really hard to hide behind that shield when it took me less than two days to run into a situation where i had to use it i mean at that point if github is only for developers then desktop linux is only for developers uh developers sys admins people that use technology github's kind of like again i said it's a point of entry but to learn how to use git is a valuable skill and if you're using it in your job it's it's a skill that kind of when you become a developer developer excuse me or sysadmin or whatever it's one of the very first things that you learn um it takes a couple hours to get a hang of it it's frustrating i've i've dealt with it personally but once you do get it the way that you download packages and everything through the command line it's far more simple than just doing what linus is doing here you can't have it both ways unlike on ltt store where you can find great merch at fair prices our mouse mats are rated five stars with literally thousands of reviews just to get all the fuss about the link below anyway i found a guide on how to run a script i'm grateful for that but i'm frustrated by the condescending tone i mean my assumption that a file with a dot sh extension would behave as i would expect it to and launch in some kind of script running application doesn't seem that unreasonable newsflash random contributor you can also change a file extension in windows and it will attempt to launch in the default program for that file type it actually serves exactly the same fundamental purpose hinting at the contents of the file the only difference is that these hints for the user are also used as hints for the operating system it's actually a lot more convenient than digging into the properties of the file to find out what it does depends on your file manager sometime most of them will open files that are as such named as such in the proper ways when it comes to scripts i think again command line here is really the ultimate answer and uh if you go to script files they in the initial line of the script you have kind of what it is it's a script it has usually slash bin slash uh essay or sorry slash bash because it's a bash script um you just have to go into the file and see it but anyway pompous tone aside that contributor did help me figure out my github download so it turns out that right click save target as gets you an html file in sh clothing because i don't know some borderline arbitrary reason problem i'm not sure why he's using git like this you should be cloning the repository to your machine and doing it that way it's much simpler actually and in order to get it to be an actual sh file i had to copy it into a text editor kate and then save that as a don't use kate script and executed in the terminal it spat out a bunch of again this is kind of like this is the desire to not use a command line here is making things more difficult errors and as i expected most of the buttons don't work but all the inputs and outputs that i had already configured in windows did show up my faders work i even have my button until my go xlr loses power for any reason at which point i will have to pass it through to windows reconfigure it in windows and then pass it back over to linux without losing power compared to that all the other stuff is minor i can't comment on that because i don't know exactly what he's talking about generally when it comes to peripherals for me i've been plug and play like i can plug in my uh scarlet um for scarlett xlr input for this mic and everything it works no problem never had to configure anything system just sees it same thing with pretty much keyboard mouse etc i hope the most notable issue i had was that my audio devices were just kind of screwy in obs my voice came across very unnaturally deep and it sounded like my mic input had been duplicated my voice just feels deeper now i don't know if i've got something lodged or what and yeah chat was pretty convinced that i had set something up incorrectly and if i was a viewer of my stream i probably would have said the same thing but i've been using obs for like six or seven years now so i had my doubts i even streamed my obs settings panel to prove it but eventually feeling out of options i just restarted obs and yeah that solved pretty much everything which was kind of frustrating because i've heard time and time again that you don't have to turn things off and on again to get them working in linux but you do hey maybe that's just because i'm not really great at linux yet maybe there's something else i could have done not sure on the good side of things though my mixer has worked flawlessly from the start though it is pretty simple as far as mixers go i didn't have to change any settings i didn't have to install anything for it i just set it as my default input device and was good to go that's my experience as well once i got pamack figured out getting comms going was surprisingly simple pamac is a program with a graphical user interface that functions similarly to the pacman package manager that you operate in the terminal at least it does once you find the hidden button in pamac to search snap flat pack and arch user repository entry the arch user repository is so good i would avoid using snap and flat pack because you're going to create a bunch of conflicts on your system and you're going to you're gonna you're gonna have a bad time um if you use strictly the arch user repository in the community repository i think you have 98 to 99 of the programs in those repositories it's basically like the pop shop from popos except it didn't try to brick my system the first time i used it the only really difficult thing was choosing the right package to install for discord there's regular discord and then there's canary discord whatever that is i chose the most official looking package and i was up and running almost immediately once i found the super convenient per application volume mixer in the bottom right corner the interface is kind of clutchy like scrolling with your mouse wheel scrolls through both the audio devices and the levels of the individual devices which is not great but other than that it works really well and my first voice call to luke went completely without a hitch or it would have if i'd known that it was starting unfortunately i actually still have not figured out how to get desktop notifications working i found a guide but the instructions fell apart almost immediately when my discord package didn't show up in the list you can also use discord in the browser i mean that would probably alleviate some of these issues um that being said i don't use discord it's where it's supposed to be for me to fix it i think that's probably a project for another day discord was an easy install for me again it was just automatically available in package manager that being said there was certain missing features screen sharing across slack teams and discord are kind of sketchy at best they feel less stable or they're even missing some features here and there outside of that there's even really simple stuff missing every now and then like if i download a file in slack and then try to click the open containing folder button just nothing happens and speaking of missing features i use the phone app for the elgato control center just like linus did i had found another solution through a script on github but i thought that way would potentially be problematic in the long term so i just avoided it unfortunately for my camera however canon eos utilities doesn't work on linux i'd been using that software on windows for quite a while now to get a live feed from my canon 70d over usb to my computer it was flawless and didn't require a capture card i do have an avio 4k capture card which does work on linux but i don't have the micro hdmi cable that it would need to connect to my camera i could pick one up but just for this challenge i decided to go with my old logitech c920 which while it doesn't remotely look as good it works just fine and when you make the window for it really small no one can really tell i think overall the easiest part for me was getting my cam link 4k up and running it was garbled when i selected one of the duplicate sources in obs but immediately after trying the second one it cleared up and has been picture perfect ever since so it works but there's a much larger upfront investment in getting it working the question is just whether it feels worth it in the end it worked if you connected to the stream after we were done about 15 minutes of troubleshooting while we were just in the thick of trying not to starve i'm sure any random viewer wouldn't have been able to tell a difference between one of my old windows streams and this one audio was good capture was good that's where the good ends however literally everything i used past this point was a lesser experience compared to its windows counterpart almost everything was missing at least one feature and some i'd say most notably obs and teams were just buggy requiring restarts for simple settings to actually apply and had other various problems it definitely wasn't teams i have no comment on i would assume that as a microsoft service you would you'd run into miss you into some issues on linux um obs i've never had really that many issues impossible and it was actually easier than i expected but due to various bugs missing features and incompatible software it wasn't as simple or clean as doing it on windows but i wouldn't say that was enough for it to be a deal breaker for me the bottom line is what you're looking to get out of it if you're daily driving linux for game streaming out of a genuine passion for learning more about it then have at it have fun but just know what you're getting into pc gaming already requires a certain amount of tinkering i mean there's a reason that more people game on consoles you know whether it's trying to track down save files in some vista era folder or forcing an aspect ratio in an ini file but a linux gaming pc it requires all of that crap and then another mountain of crap on top of it there's a fair point like when i was i used to game on windows there was still issues that i came across where games crashed i had to go into the files and do a bunch of different things depending on the game of course some of the games ran flawlessly no issues whatsoever but that's the the fun thing with linux is that the way that things are going with the steam community and uh valve at the forefront and also with the uh the portable device that they're the steam deck i believe is called i think that this is only going to get continually and continually better on a linux machine um that being said there's always bugs when it comes to computers always uh it's unavoidable but a lot of the games that are coming over are 100 playable some of them even online i was looking today just to just out of curiosity but rocky rocket league for example is a essentially native experience on linux that's very like five years ago you would have never ever considered something like that so um we'll see what they're closing uh statements are but i had problems with windows too it it's just the nature of the beast when it comes to computers like when something doesn't work you can tell yourself yeah well i never wanted to use that functionality or i never wanted to play that game anyway but honestly it just comes across as sour grapes it is not that easy to use the good news though is that a shocking number of experiences don't start and end with sorry you can't do this so stay tuned for part three where luke and i are going to be trying to get as many games up and running as possible starting with twitch's top 20 and then expanding into some of our personal favorites it's gonna be a really good one just like this message from our sponsor it's sponsors like that that are gonna put him through college wanna say hi to youtube hi all right he wanted to be in the video okay good video um i think that they are giving this a fair go through the eyes of somebody that um wants a game and like wants to come over and not spend the hundred and whatever dollars it is to install windows on their computer after building a computer i get it and i think that these videos are only going to encourage more and more development in the linux gaming community it's only going to push these developers that are um developing you know these tools for i think one of the pieces of hardware you mentioned to make it better and that's the beauty of open source um communities is that they see something wrong and they fix it whereas when you have a company maintaining these code bases or these games or these programs or whatever you're at the mercy of those companies uh one thing that i love about linux is that hey i have a problem somebody else probably had that problem too and they may have even built a solution for that problem all i have to do is do a quick search and you know what it may be solved already for me and the one thing that you're gonna notice about this video when it comes out and they finish this challenge a lot of these problems aren't gonna exist anymore and that's that's really cool so i i have to give them props for going down the exp experiencing it going through the motions and the ups and downs of using a linux system for gaming and for daily driving really because that's what they're doing i'll close with this if you're wanting to use a linux system you have to have a sense of experimentation exploration and understand that you're going to break things um when you first start with it you are probably going to have to reinstall your distribution a couple times but three years on for me like i don't have to do that anymore i don't run into those issues and if i do run into an issue i generally am able to solve it but that comes with the confidence and the ability to use these systems you have to stick with it and eventually you do come to a point where you know what i am a super user now because i went through all the ups and downs and the breakings and the and the tears and everything but yeah good video i'm i'm i'm looking forward to seeing what they do in part three and i'll do a review on part one just because why not catch you guys in the next one thanks so much for watching

Channel: Joshua Blais

Views: 9,804

Keywords: ltt, linus tech tips, linux challenge, linux gaming challenge, reaction, luke, linus, linux gaming, linux, arch, mint, manjaro

Id: nL40awAqtL8

Length: 25min 25sec (1525 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 23 2021