(horn blaring)
- To celebrate the exciting launch of Windows 11, Luke and I are challenging each other to ditch Windows altogether and replace our Windows
PCs with Linux for a month. And if either of us caves, they have to dye their hair in red, green, blue, and
yellow quadrants permanently. Easy, you might say, but I'm not talking
about our work machines that are basically just
used for word processing and web browsing. I'm talking about our personal rigs, the ones we both use on a daily
basis, primarily for gaming. Has Linux gotten to the point where it's user-friendly enough that any tech nerd can pick it up and run? Is game compatibility gonna
be an instant deal breaker? Will any of my other
applications even run? Who would sponsor this madness? Instantly see your current
and past network activity, detect malware, and
block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android
device with GlassWire. Use offer code Linus and get 25% off glassware
at the link down below. (upbeat music) Embarrassingly, I have never actually
made an earnest attempt to daily drive Linux, and one of the reasons for that is the utterly paralyzing number
of choices you have to make before you even get started. Now, I could just call
on industry contacts or even use internal resources to make these decisions for me. But the point of this challenge is that, Luke and I should be using
the exact same resources that anyone else would have. And with that in mind,
right out of the gate, I would forgive the average gamer for making it as far as
Google hit number one for best Linux distro for gaming and bailing on the entire deal. I mean, nothing against
the author of this article, I did pick up some really
useful information, but it is full of jargon
that a non-Linux enthusiast couldn't possibly be expected to know, not to mention seemingly
conflicting information. How is it that Ubuntu
can be simultaneously easy to use and beginner-friendly
and hassle to set up? Another big one is that
customization gets built as this major selling point for Linux, and fair enough if that's your thing, but speaking on behalf of normies, I don't want a dozen novel
ways to do the same thing. I want one fast, easy one. I mean, it's horrible when Microsoft scatter system settings all over the place. I think we all agree on that. And so we should all agree that it's horrible when
anybody else does it. I mean, (sighing) I'm the kind of person who doesn't even rename
my video game characters because it makes it a nightmare to look anything up if I get stuck. And there are a ton of other red flags. Let's move on to hit number two here. This time from TechRadar. Supports several controllers, should not be a selling point
for a gaming-focused product. It seems to imply that
most of my stuff won't work and included games are not the reason that anyone chooses an operating system. How, how are these
articles so out of touch? Furthermore, the messaging around what
makes an individual distro stand out compared to the other ones gets really muddy in some places. Like the way that these
articles are often laid out, it sounds like, if I choose the one with
support for hybrid graphics, I'm gonna be giving up kernel
level gaming optimizations. Or that if I want broad hardware support, that could cost me the
customization that I crave. But the truth is that,
that's not the case. With a bit of elbow grease, the gaming centric features
and tweaks of one distro could be applied to another, but with some exceptions. The Pantheon User Interface, for example, is specific to elementary OS. And for a more gaming related example, TechRadar mentions a feature of gamer OS, now called ChimeraOS,
called the Chimera App that sounds super cool. It allows you to easily install
and manage non-Steam games and even ROMs for a wide
range of retro consoles. Except that if I wanted an OS that doesn't support multitasking, I would invent myself a time machine so that I could go back and use it. But wait. Hold on. The Chimera App can be used
outside of the ChimeraOS. There's even a guide. But unless I wanna really
get into the weeds, I better stick with something
based on Arch by the way, like Manjaro or Garuda. Not that that's gonna be my final answer. In spite of its spectacularly stupid name, Pop!_OS topped just about
every listicle that I found and legitimately has some
compelling selling points, like demystifying the
notoriously difficult process of getting my Nvidia GPU working properly and making installing the apps and tools that I'm gonna need to
run my Windows games, a one-click affair with the Pop Shop. If it was 10 years ago and I
was looking for a challenge, Manjaro's bleeding edge approach, please forgive the occasional screw up, definitely calls to me, and did I mention it's
based on Arch by the way. But I wanna win this thing without pulling my hair out for a month, and Pop!_OS looks like a
really good bet for that. It's Ubuntu-based, so if I really want to get under the hood, that's totally an option. But the challenge here is, play games, not get your PhD in Linux smart-assery. - I, on the other hand,
after a lot of deliberation, decided to go with the
daring, the uncompromising Linux Mint with the Cinnamon
desktop environment. As for how I think that's gonna go, honestly, I'm pretty confident. I've used Mint before. I daily drove Ubuntu,
the distro it's based on for about two years back in school. So I'm not scared of figuring out how to install a GPU driver
or use a package manager. I'm comfortable getting
my hands dirty with GRUB, but that doesn't mean
I'm not a little scared of you (chuckles). I'm pretty technical and I
work in development every day, but hardcore Linux Chads
are absolutely terrifying! You scare me, (chuckling) and I really
want this to go well, because I still want you to
like me when this is all over. - Got my drive ready and Windows couldn't possibly have picked a more
appropriate time to just, bug the crap out. It's like it knows what's gonna happen. (mouse clicking)
It won't let me click Power. (mouse clicking repeatedly) Obviously, I'm not a hundred
percent committed to this yet. So my plan is to remove my
existing SSD from the system. It's not a GEN4 Drive or anything, but I'm not expecting that to matter. I mean, what am I gonna be doing? Running direct storage? Huh! Got them. - [Luke] Okay. So this is what happened last time. My desktop kind of... You can see where the, where
it's supposed to sort of end, but it keeps going and my
mouse can go over there. So I'm gonna right click
right below the Mint logo. Nothing shows up, but, there's the menu. If I try the mouse over
these, I can't select them. But if I move my mouse
back to below this M, there it is. (laughing) Found it. Okay. So my mouse has to be right there. I was gonna see if I can do an easy fix of just turning off my monitor here. To be fair, it is not installed yet. This is a live boot environment. Let's see if it comes back
when I turn that back on. Display Port: No Signal. Okay. - I was worried that my
Thunderbolt connection, I use Thunderbolt to connect
to a dock for my main display, was gonna cause problems
with the installer because there's no drivers
installed or anything. So I hooked up my monitor that's
here in the server closet, but. ♪ Tantatatatantaa ♪ Hey, there it is just like that. My mouse, he no move. Oh, wait. Where did it go? Oh, I thought... Oh, wow. Oh, the sensitivity is just so high that I couldn't tell it was there. Okay then. Yep. That's the one. Here we go. Full Name. Ah, yes. - [Luke] Just a quick restart and turned the side monitor off. And it's fixed to the bounds of the screen and the mouse problem is solved. So just installing directly
from the live environment. So I do want the Multimedia codecs. It's nice that Mint comes with those. Not every district does. I haven't decided which drive
to actually put Mint on. So I'm not entirely sure where it's installing these media codecs, but it's doing something. Okay. Finished the install. It wants me to remove my flash drive. Got it. And then press enter. This is our first login and we're there. Check video drivers. I knew I was gonna run into that. Installing Mint instead of Pop_OS. But that is a challenge I
have decided to undertake. It should be okay, but we'll see later. I'm gonna go through this Welcome Manager. - [Linus] First order of business is to get our mouse speed down from over 9,000 to
something more reasonable. That seems more like it. Also, why the hell is this on by default? No obvious indication that any of my hardware
is not working fully. Even my Aquantia network
card picked up just fine. I knew audio was gonna be a challenge because I don't think the
GoXLR has any kind of... Oh, this is interesting. Output. Hello? Okay. It appears to be taking
my input right now, which is my mic over here presumably and turning it into output. Blah, blah, blah. Yep. That's definitely it. Does this work at least? - Front left. Front Right.
- Okay. Well I've got the sound at least. I was looking for a simple way to just list all the hardware
connected to the system so that I could verify if
my drivers are installed. Linux, apparently doesn't
really work like that, but I can just install this
utility called Hardinfo. Not exactly a hardware info substitute, but it's a lot better than nothing. Of course, I don't wanna
get too deep into the weeds on any of this for now because the goal today for
part one is to pick a distro, get it installed, and run a game. I will definitely need Steam. Failed to install "Steam". WARNING: You are trying to remove the following essential packages. What are you, what are you talking about? I've done nothing with this, other than install that Hardinfo thing. It's hilarious. The last time I tried to
do anything on Ubuntu, I ran into this exact same thing. I was told, "It's super
simple. You just install it." No, you do not. This is stupid. Apparently this is the solution and I have to type, "Yes. Do as I say," in order to install it. And maybe it will install and launch now. What is the point of having a... Oops. Hello? My computer just hard reset. (laughing) What? I mean, to be clear, I've seen some broken Windows
behavior on first installed. This is...
(keyboard keys clicking) He's dead, Jim.
(keyboard keys clicking) - [Luke] Okay. So we've got the Nouveau, or
however that's pronounced, open-source driver. Fantastic. Happy they made that. But we are going to try to move to the proprietary Nvidia 470 driver. Install done. Just need to restart. A few more errors than last time, but I think we're still good. Genuinely think this is fine. Yeah, nice. Okay. Now Linux Mint also has an Update Manager, a new version Update Manager is available. Apply the update. It updates, and then it finds all the
different updates that we need. - Pressing the reset button on
my computer did not, in fact, allow it to come back to life. Let's try and all the
way off and start again. Not that I think that
we'll do anything different from the reset button. Man, if I manage to completely break
this install in 15 minutes, that might be a new personal best for me. My machine is not even posting now. I have plugged the HDMI
cable back in here. Let's see what happens. Hello? (laughing) Hey, there we go. Okay. So that's back. That's not. My phone battery is only like 6%, but I'm afraid to turn the camera off now because this ride has
been absolutely wild. Pretty low... Oh! Hey, there we go. Hello? Oh. Oh. Wait, what? Did I manage to completely
nuke my desktop environment? Like my gooey. How? Just logged in and this is what I got. Ubuntu comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. I can see why. This was a terrible experience. And I think that's where I'm gonna have to leave it for tonight
because I found this other post saying, "Hey, yeah, I had this problem. This was not easily solvable.
So I had to fresh install." I don't think I'm going
with Pop!_OS again. I mean, that was... You guys were there for the whole thing. That was utterly ridiculous. - [Luke] Continuing to install updates. I have turned on my side monitor. One minor issue. I can't go over there with my mouse because my mouse has to go, all the way left and then it's over there. So I need to reconfigure the desktops. Right click doesn't get me there. So yeah, we'll figure it out. - You know what? No, forget it. The wife's still awake. So I've got, Manjaro loaded up here and we're gonna take
another crack at this puppy. To be clear, it's entirely possible that I did something completely wrong, not knowing what I was doing. And I'm responsible for
the OS getting bricked. I just also think that with
you guys along for the ride, the things that I did were
not entirely ridiculous or unreasonable. So you can be mad at me for breaking it, but just at least acknowledge
that it could have happened to anyone who's not already fully, well-versed in the black
arts of Linux Bree. Okay. Hold on a second. I didn't manage to catch
the boot selector prompt. It started complaining about USB devices. It feels like the old days, doesn't it. I made a video about our 10
gig NAS using Emulex cards maybe like nine years
ago in this very room. A lot of memories in this house. Mixed feelings on moving. Manjaro went straight into
the live boot environment. So we're just gonna launch the installer and good luck everybody. - [Luke] I got Wine installed
through the Software Manager. I needed to get Lutris. I didn't find Lutris in
the Software Manager. So I just went to the Lutris website, followed the command line stuff. And I now have Lutris, which we'll close for now and use later. The Mint Software Manager had Steam. Well, I selected install. It made me put in my password twice and now it's removing. It never stopped trying
to do that removing thing, but I just closed the Package Manager, clicked on to, I'm gonna call Start. I don't know if it's called Start here. And Steam was (chuckling)
sitting right there. So I launched it. And it seems to be working. So maybe we're fine. Okay. Sweet. I'm gonna log in. I'll see you on the other side. - I just want you guys to be here with me for the experience so that if
I completely explode this one, (laughing) you'll at least know why maybe. And you can leave a "know it
all" comment under the video. I'm ready. I'm ready. Come at me guys. I'm trying here. I'm trying. (mouse clicking repeatedly)
Oh, who needs sound anyway? Microsoft has a very broken
setting situation right now, but this is worse. Hey, is my game controller
picked up just like that? Oh, nice. Look at that. Why are the two columns
open-source and installed? Does this mean... Is this proprietary? Because that's what I
think I told it to do. X Server Settings. Where is X server? X Server gonna give it to you what? Okay. All right. This seems to do kind of
what we need it to do. I'll figure this out later. Let's get Steam. Let's see if we can get Steam. I saw something about Steam in that update that made me restart. Oh. Steam runtime. Hello? Oh. We're updating again. No problem. - [Luke] Okay. Steam installed. No problems. So I'm gonna quickly go to my settings, go to Steam Play. Enable Steam Play for all other titles. And then have... I guess we'll do Proton 6.3-7. And then I'll go to Shader Pre Caching and Allow background
processing of Vulcan Shaders. I guess we gotta restart Steam real quick. I believe FTL has a native Linux version. I'm just gonna install directly and we're gaming on Linux boys. There we go. I think I'm done with the first challenge. That wasn't really a challenge. I suspect we will run into
major challenges down the line. - Library. Oh yeah. Oh, hey, look at that. Look at that. Look at that. Boom Linux. Now the game I've been playing
recently is "Cave Story+". Is this Linux, just
like native freaking... Let's go boys. Oh, wait. My sound still isn't working. Yeah. I still have no sound. Honestly, I'm kind of
willing to live with that. Let's just... It's on the right. And no dice on the controller, even though it was
picked up by the system. I guess we need to figure that out now. This video ended up a lot
longer than I expected. The goal was simple: Install
Linux and run a game. And I managed to screw it up, so royally that I'm here, hours later, still (laughing) trying to figure it out. This is a native Linux game. Let's just, (sighing) let's just play it. And we're gaming. It's running nice and smooth. This is a native game. So this is really not
that much of a challenge. My sound still isn't working. Still have no idea why that
would be, but we're gaming. And it seems to just
been a "Cave Story" issue because my controller,
(controller slamming on desk) is working just fine. I jump, I haven't ever attacked. Yeah, there you go. Hopefully Luke had an
easier go of it than I did. The best part of this whole thing, is that we are just getting started. A lot of the games that I wanna run like "Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance" appear to have ways to run them. Discord, looks like there's
a way to get it going. It involves a lot of command line. Hopefully I won't brick my OS, but step two is getting streaming working. Both Luke and I stream. We both need it working if we're
gonna run this for a month. So, good luck everybody. Thanks FreshBooks for
sponsoring this video. FreshBooks is a simple accounting software that's designed specifically
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help you if you need it. And you can try FreshBooks
for free for 30 days today with no credit card required
at freshbooks.com/linus. (upbeat music)
If you guys enjoyed this video you might also enjoy the
time I switched to Mac. It was kind of a minute ago and some things have
definitely changed since then, but it was quite an experience. By the way, if you've made it this far
to the very end of the video, I did in fact, figure out
what happened with Pop!_OS. For whatever reason,
apt-get installed Steam did all a whole bunch of other stuff. No idea why it did that. I hadn't touched anything. And I did not read
carefully what it was doing. In my defense, a lot of
that stuff was jargon that an average user might not understand. And all I was doing was installing Steam. I thought this was just stupid
hoops I had to jump through in order to install
something from the terminal. I didn't know it was gonna
remove my gooey, for example. (laughing) Whew.
Lots of harassment coming out of this, although mostly good on r/linux, but I'm going to need to lock this. We'll have to revisit if we want to continue allowing this challenge to be posted here - not because of anything Linus did, but because of the broader YouTube and Linux, especially Linux Gaming, communities not behaving,
Couple of follow ups:
This challenge has had many posts since it started, with this one causing the most problems. Yes, it's a small subset of users causing the issues but at the end of the day there are still issues.
The challenge is bringing in a lot of new users, and that's great. One thing to understand, though, is this is r/linux and not the comment section of the video. Which is still open for comments, you are free to comment there. Not all of r/linux is interested in the challenge and we aren't letting the subreddit get flooded with posts about it. Some users consider this to be the most important thing going on in the world right now, but most of r/linux and the modteam doesn't. We welcome LTT criticisms and tips on how to improve Linux.
We have a new users FAQ: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/wiki/faq and recommend r/linux4noobs in getting started with Linux.
The multimonitor issue likely relates to the live disk running nouveau drivers. Even though they've improved, they're still 2nd class citizens. It was instantly fixed with Nvidia proprietary drivers. That wouldn't happen with AMD or Intel gpus but that's not the point.
Luke is going to have a horrible time having two monitors with different resolutions. If they also have different refresh rates, he will probably never achieve max refresh rate on his primary monitor after reboots.
He's going to have a skewed monitor setup at every reboot, inherit the refresh rate of the secondary screen on his primary, and dragging windows will be lagging and tearing, if he has roughly the same setup as I did.
I've been troubleshooting that problem for years myself with a nvidia card, where I had one 1080p monitor at 60hz, and a 1440p at 144 hz, and I've just given up entirely and bought another 1440p monitor. Smooth sailing since then.
Pretty amazing that installing Steam removed his desktop environment.
What a PR disaster for System76, that was made by a packaging mistake (probably). I feel really sorry for them (It doesn't mean it's not their fault though).
Reminds me of my first installation attempts many years ago, I never used it for gaming but Linux with no or limited command-line usage (aka you don't know it yet) is legitimately awful regardless of the distro. And I was doing it with simple single monitor old laptop. Package Manager guis are just... bad. It almost incentives you to learn cli to not use it.
Even today Linux as been it's best for me as a server, and a work laptop (luke mentioned this use case to in the WAN SHOW) with a vanilla distro (kubuntu).
I have the feeling that this won't go over too well with this sub lol, but I think it was a pretty fair take.
Other than the part about 'customizability' not meaning 12 different ways to do simple tasks, most of the issues he encountered could've been seen by regular, average users, and they probably would've responded in the same way.
The Steam package on Pop OS uninstalling his DE wasn't his fault, and as Linux users are always saying to 'use the terminal' lol I can definitely see how people using the Terminal for the first time would easily skip past that massive wall of text. After all, they're just trying to install Steam and their first easy option (Pop Shop) didn't work.
He didn't have any issues with his Thunderbolt dock setup which was good to see also. And he's definitely right about those confusing ass 'best distro' articles. At least he was able to get up and running a game smoothly with his controller.
But at the end of the day, for typical users trying out Linux and seeing if they want to switch (not making a video series out of it), this was really not a good first experience at all, and I wouldn't be surprised if people tried this, got the same result, and just decided not to bother with Linux.
I put this on Linux_gaming but I’m pasting it here too:
Honestly…..
This hurt to see. Because this video had nothing unreasonable at all on Linus’s end.
Linux failed. Hard. Pop already fixed that issue but it never should have made it to mass release, especially when they actually say themselves that their OS is good for gaming. The fact that the live iso still isn’t updated (or wasn’t last week) is frankly absurd. This isn’t a small thing like “obscure mouse doesn’t work,” this is “one of the most used pieces of consumer software nukes the OS and it wasn’t fixed immediately.” That is incredibly unprofessional, and deserves the criticism.
The mint issues are also a bit absurd. I know multimonitor on Linux is hit or miss, but it’s definitely true that for the average person that this would be a deal breaker. We shouldn’t be hand waving these issues away.
The sound problem I’m a little less worried about right now because Linus has a niche setup. Linux doesn’t market having compatibility with every single piece of modern peripheral hardware so that is what it is.
All in all this was painful to watch because the criticisms were all things that should have been fixed years ago, but arent.
As for the marketing thing - that’s 100% true too. I just had a small conversation with a pop dev when they were talking about making their new desktop environment where I was saying “this is cool but why not try another DE if gnome isn’t working. KDE for example is great and could use the extra hands, while being powerful enough to do it”
And basically every response was “choice first because Linux” and that was heavily upvoted
And I get it. Choices are great. But let’s face it - while we have a million choices without clear reason for some of them, and then some defaults are broken (like the pop steam thing), how is any average person supposed to reasonably expected to do it all right first try?
P.S. aww Luke we still love you.
What a disaster for Pop!.