Reacting to Linus Tech Tips' Linux Challenge Part 1

so linus tech tips released a video this week that was the part one of their linux daily driver challenge and i decided to do a reaction video for it because uh why not i've actually never done a reaction video at all for anything so this will be interesting and because i'm a little bit crazy i decided to do it live streamed on my channel so we'll see what happens here let's jump into it to celebrate the exciting launch of windows 11 luke and i are challenging each other to ditch windows all together and replace our windows pcs with linux for a month 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 i was gonna skip it [Music] embarrassing what was that i just like to interject for a moment when you were friends of course they did of course they did 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 oh okay hold on i gotta move my camera start playing again see what he's saying you have to make before you even get started so a paralyzing number of choices i think that's an interesting thing because there are a lot of choices now there's really not a ton as many like when you look at the list there's hundreds in that list but you don't actually you really shouldn't be looking at all of those there's more of like 10 or so maybe like a handful in general that you would really be looking at especially as a beginner i mean i know even someone who is a windows power user is still a linux beginner so they wouldn't be looking at the vast majority of the options there so it's not as bad even though it is still there's still a lot of options and there's a in looking at the uh stuff on screen showing different icons it's interesting that they have these icons i mean there's the the typical you wanna you would see like the linux mint the elementary ubuntu manjaro papa west fedora those are all like things i would have expected to see however that's also kind of you know kind of weird that i see laka on there for those who don't know the one that's like so it's garuda linux uh chimera os laca and then draugr os uh it's weird because these those last three are gaming specific distros however laca is more of a retro gaming distro made for you know doing a appliance gaming so if you wanted to make a you know like a retro console out of a raspberry pi and that sort of stuff that's what that one's for so it's interesting to see it's in there so they mentioned that they were going to be looking at the gaming stuff so that makes sense that that would be there but that is a distro that you would not use for everyday purposes and chimera is also not everyday purposes because that's like a big picture mode steam os type of thing so let's get back to the video 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 i like that policy it's very it's very good policy because then you'd you'd have a little bit of an excuse a skewed experience if you had access to people who can just show you how to fix everything instantly and you're not going through the process yourself so i do like that as the policy going forward 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 well that's not the best way to find the best distro to use um just searching google but also i don't expect much from this article 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 okay sure there's a lot of stuff in here that it's not this is not helpful for beginners at all like kernel gaming focus kernel modifications they don't even looks like they specify what that even means tons of de options desktop environments but i mean that even in itself is kind of esoteric all right not to mention seemingly conflicting information how is it that ubuntu can be simultaneously easy to use and beginner friendly and a hassle to set up fair enough that is kind of weird easy to use and a hassle to set up doesn't make any sense um that's it maybe it's because they're talking about like installing uh proprietary drivers which because in terms of like if you want to play games without having any kind of like frames per second issues and whatnot you wouldn't by default have those drivers installed typically so in terms of ubuntu you'd have to install the drivers after the fact so maybe that's what they're referring to but it is real it is kind of worded weird that's fair another big one is that customization gets billed 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 scatters 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 yes i agree that system settings should all be in one place and that's for the most part that's kind of true depending on what the e you're using what distributing there are you know there are sometimes they're scattered but there's you know it's not necessarily customization in terms of like being able to do the same thing with you know like every single type of configuration it's more of like if you wanted to customize how it works you can you can't do so so that's really what they're referring to customization not necessarily everything is scattered but it's a fair point because there are things that are you know if you're going to edit something in gnome you have gnome settings and also gnome tweak tool and then you have stuff in plasma you have like the system settings which has most of the stuff but not everything is in there let's move on to hit number two here this time from tech radar supports several controllers is it just me or is the website look of how that this website is laid out as exactly as the other one these are two different websites but they they lay their article out exactly the same it's maybe i mean i haven't looked at the articles i don't know but it it looks like it's the same thing 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 i love i love the pinball reference it's fantastic 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 going to be giving up kernel level gaming optimizations or that if i want broad hardware support that could cost me the customization that i crave yeah these are these articles are not good options i would tell people to never look at these articles because they're they are basically just it feels like they're more like keyword stuffing because these are typically articles made by websites that have people who are not remotely you know linux people just finding different pieces and slamming it all together and hoping that it works out so and that's that's a very good point about the whole like comparison between things if you're going to have a pros and a cons list you should use the same criteria for every single one of them to kind of give a reference of like you know like a kind of like a pricing table that you would see on websites for services and whatnot 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 yes though not exclusive you can put it on fedora and it's also i'm pretty sure on arch but you can get it on fedora as well for a more gaming related example techradar mentions a feature of gameros now called camaro s called the camara 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 okay but to be fair to camaros it is not intended to be an os for everyone so this is this is kind of the issue of having so many options because if because he looked for specifically for gamer based distros or distro for gaming you're gonna find distros like that that are specifically for the purpose of an appliance mode because chimera os is more like sitting on the couch having steam big picture mode as an option to play it so kind of turning creating your own console so to speak so that is the reason for come here os and people not knowing that like linus you know it makes sense that would it would seem like that's a negative even though that's one of the cool things about linux is that there are ways to do appliance approaches to linux but wait hold on the chimera app can be used outside of camaros there's even a guide but unless i want to really get into the weeds i better stick with something based on arch by the way like manjaro or garuda not that that's going to be my final answer in spite of its spectacularly stupid name pop exclamation mark underscore 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 that is very nice you just install you just download the iso for nvidia users and you don't have to worry about the drivers that is very nice feature of pop os and making installing the apps and tools that i'm going to need to run my windows games a one-click affair with the pop shop not necessarily the pop shot will handle everything the steam stuff easily for sure but the the pop papa west i'm not sure if it does like lutrus and that kind of thing like how much it does it handles that but by the way also the pop shop fun name not relevant at all to this video but i just wanted to put that in there 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 want to win this thing without pulling my hair out for a month and popo s 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 smartassery 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 that's a that's that's interesting because linux mint is a very commonly suggested distribution and i do think it has a lot of value for the beginner it's one of the 10. i'm not sure if it's necessarily the best depending on the situation like if you have very very new hardware distributions that don't have updated hardware stacks are not going to be that the best and i think mints in that that kind of that category so depending on what you have it is a very it's an interesting choice that uh linus went with pop and luke went with linux mint i am aware based on some tweets that some people sent me that the the pop os thing changed and he went with manjaro i'm not sure exactly why but i did get some hints that there was some kind of bug or something so the problem with being a for those who don't know and if you're just watching this video as the introduction to me i do a news show on linux called this week in linux so i am paying attention to what's happening in the linux world and i see news so i do see a lot of things happening so i have like some of it is a little spoiled but not like not everything so we'll let's get back to it 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 i'm pretty technical and i work in development every day but hardcore linux chads are absolutely terrifying you scare me and i really want this to go well because i still want you to like me when this is all over i like that as a goal but i do i do think it's interesting because there the community like i think that people say the community is toxic way more than it actually is it's a very small minority of people there are people who are like that but that's true for every single community of any type of subject whatsoever that's gonna happen i think that the problem more is that they are very very vocal in this community but they're not as big as it seems like it is so i don't think that's necessarily something to be afraid of or maybe i'm just you know my community in terms of like dln community and everybody else if you want to have a friendly community check that one out because i guarantee you that one is because i i help make it back to the video 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 it won't let me click power that's a fun one and windows everybody windows obviously i'm not 100 committed to this yet so my plan is to remove my existing ssd from the system that's a good idea and it's also a very good tip that i would tell people if they can remove this like if they have multiple drives they should just like for example some people will buy a new laptop you could take sometimes take the drive out of the laptop put a new drive in and that way if you want to resell the laptop you could also just put windows back on in an oem style and it's kind of like new again not exactly because i wouldn't say tell people that it's new again but that is an option that i've seen people do which i think is a good idea because if you there's no if you have other drives there's no reason not to try that not do it that way it's not a gen 4 drive or anything but i'm not expecting that to matter i mean what am i going to be doing running direct storage ah got em so what lina just said about the gen four thing um as a person on a show called hard radix i should know what that means i don't so i'm gonna have them explain it to me on a future episode of hardware addicts so check that out on destination news network this is just perfect timing for plugs all just constantly 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 almost can go over there so i'm going to right click right below the the mint logo nothing shows up but so i have seen stuff like this before we have multiple monitors and there's some like you click you right click and things just on the wrong monitor and that sort of stuff or like the configuration is just weird for example if you have like a horizontal monitor and a vertical monitor that can be weird stuff can happen that kind of thing however i i this is something that i have a guess like a prediction of what's going to happen because it's being it's being pointed out as a an issue in the video so my guess is that the right side monitor that he's currently showing is having the display pop up but the interaction will be on the other monitor and i don't know why that happens but i've seen it before and it's not it's not a very common thing to happen but it can happen depending on your setup for multi monitor and that sort of stuff like i typically run three monitors so i've had stuff like that happen occasionally it's usually pretty rare but it has happened before so that's why that's my guess to see what happens here's the menu if i try to mouse over these i can't select them but if i move my mouse back to below this m there it is i found it yeah nailed it okay someone knows has to be right there i'm just 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 that just turning it back on would not fix it but also when you install it it would fix it because typically that's just because the drivers are not available and if it doesn't fix it if you install the distro and then upgrade the system it would fix it because it would be it's just missing a driver usually if that's if that happens it's very it's not a very common thing to happen though so it's it's unfortunate that they experienced it because it's now going to be in a looking at the views 1.7 million views you know that's not ideal but it happens things happen i used thunderbolt to connect to a dock for my main display was going to cause problems with the installer because there's no drivers installed or anything so i i hooked up my monitor that's here in the server closet but hey there it is that's pretty cool i have i was when when there was talking about doing this challenge i meant i heard him like people talking about how he uses a thunderbolt dock to do everything and that i kind of expected that not to work so that's pretty cool it does because you know i don't have one of those so i've never tested it i don't know about you who has tested it so that's cool that worked just like that here we go full name uh yes this is not important at all but the whole full name thing that every distribution puts in that list every time i install i don't put a full name i just put a name for a user or my first name and that's it why does it always say full name that's kind of weird not relevant to anything at all related to this video but it's just a side tangent i guess i do want the multimedia codex it's nice that mint comes with those so every distro comes with that now uh basically uh not every distro i shouldn't say every distro but pretty much every distro does come with it pretty much every district because it's usually just a check box to install them there used to be a thing from like 10 years ago where linux mint's claim to fame was that it came with the codex by default and other distributions didn't offer that but now it's just a checkbox in the installer in most installers and in the case of mint they adopted the same style that ubuntu did from the ubuntu installer so it's kind of funny how you know that's still a thing that people reference even though it's been they've been doing the same way for i think four or five years now check video drivers i knew i was going to run into that installing mint instead of pop os but that is a challenge i have decided to undertake i mean that'll happen if you don't if you have nvidia that's just going to happen in general because most distributions don't come with the nvidia drivers already pre-installed and i uh the only one i could get off the top of my head is pop os so there's other ones that make it easier to do it but that is the only one i know of that comes with it but like it's funny because watching this video and they talk about using nvidia uh there there are likely going to be some issues with nvidia here and there throughout the video and it's kind of like i've been spoiled because i switched to amd a couple years ago and it has been amazing to use amd for my cpu and my jeep my gpu because i don't do anything i just install any and every distro and i have full support of my hardware that's awesome and i've gotten i guess a little bit uh spoiled by it so i knew audio was gonna be a challenge because i don't oh go xlr okay so go xlr is a cool piece of hardware uh it's just it's just a cool idea and i want one but uh last i checked they have like almost zero support for linux so he's probably gonna have something i don't think the go xlr has any kind of oh this is interesting output hello okay appears to be taking my input right now which is my mic right over here presumably and turning it into output 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 hard info so linux does have that but it's not there in the sense of like the def like depending on which distro you have there it does come with it so if you have a kde plasma based distribution it will come with something like that because it's called k info center and it will give you those details but depending i guess papa west doesn't come with something like that but you know there are some versions that do not exactly a hardware info substitute but it's a lot better than nothing of course i don't want to 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 fail to install steam morning you're trying to remove oh no this is why this is why you went to manjaro for sure i i have to assume that he he totally did this because he wouldn't know not to do this but just by default but pop desktop pop session okay yeah that will that'll break the system so if that's his first experience with papa wes it makes sense why he would switch the following essential packages what what are you talking about i've done nothing with this other wait a second did that say xorg oh xorg due to pop desktop yep okay so it's gonna break his system not just mess up the desktop it's it's gonna just basically like just shut down essentially not actually but you know kinda with this other than install that art info thing you know 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 it is basically super simple and you just install it in certain cases and in pop shop and pop shop when papa s is one of those distros this is absolutely a bug there's no way that this is intended to happen in at all i don't know what it is uh because steam is based is a 32-bit based platform there's probably some kind of 32-bit package that created some weird issue i don't know why this would happen but it is a hundred percent a bug there is no way that that would and i had also because this has happened i would bet that this has already been patched and it's good to go no you do not this is stupid apparently this is the solution [Music] and i have to type yes so this is actually a pet peeve of mine that i've never liked really quick there is a little bit of blame for linus not reading this part because it does say the following essential package will be removed and it says you should not this should not be done unless you know exactly what you're doing that that's not clear enough to but what what's about to happen in my opinion for this these details and the thing that you're forced to type is not clear enough either so there you can give him a lot of leeway and say that he didn't know what this was going to do and he didn't read through it because the 99 of what is in this list is kind of like gibberish stuff to most people so it's you can forgive the idea like didn't see the two sentence mixed in between with the nightmare nonsense of like how much there is i get it from that perspective uh so i'd say like maybe five ten percent fault on his part but the vast majority of it is it needs to be addressed to the point where this one should not even be possible unless you do an extra you know jump through a bigger hoop and the idea that yes do as i say is the only thing you have to say it should say something like yes i'm aware i'm about to break my system i know how to fix it i'll do it anyway something like that where it's very long and very clear then that's fine do as i say in order to install it and maybe it will install and launch now what is the point of having a oh that's gonna do that yeah um hello did my computer just hard reset the reaction is funny so the it did not har reset it removed xorg and xor stop and therefore that happened so a cool thing about linux is that you can recover from this kind of situation it seems like a massive problem and it necessarily it is you you're essentially breaking the system by removing xorg for example but you can easily replace it or fix it just by reinstalling the things that were removed but understandably linus would not know those things and would not be comfortable in doing those things so it's totally i get why he would decide to move to a different distro because from his perspective it's like i'm just trying to install steam and all of a sudden my system is broken like i get why that would but it is we're also worth noting that the pop shop would not allow him to do it and it was going through the terminal that made it possible and another cool thing about linux is that you can do pretty much whatever you want even if you shouldn't and this is an example of that kind of power so there's pro and a con to that as you can tell but there are some other things like um like if you use a fedora distribution for example or like you know if you use fedora whatever edition you could have dnf history and you could do dnf history undo last and it will just fix everything from one command which is kind of cool as a fedora user i've gotten to love the package manager of dnf from stuff like that i don't really use that and i've never had to use it to for anything that actually mattered i just like to play with the stuff so it's just really cool 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 yeah as expected because you know if you want to play games you kind of need that the the nouveau drivers are very impressive the amount of work that they're able to do and because it's all reverse engineered it's not like nvidia is helping them make it so it is very impressive that they have got it to be as good as it is and also relatively good for gaming for older hardware and that sort of stuff but yeah i get it if you have anything relatively new you'd want the proprietary now linux mint also has an update manager a new version update manager is available apply the update it updates most distributions of linux have an update manager just it's worth knowing that that's true for most distributions and then it finds all the different updates that we need oh i guess in the context of um windows versus linux that might be a different experience because you know there is a technically a windows update manager but it's not it's not the same thing logged in and this is what i got unto comes with absolutely no warranty i can see why well to be fair um this is because it is a free thing and saying that it comes with warranty that would be a not a very good idea for legal purposes so that's why it says that 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 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 you know well versed in the black arts of linux three yes it could easily happen you know if you like the problem is that the the notification was not clear that it could break your system and that's really what it was but it could totally happen to anyone it's not necessarily his fault it's it not being the warning not being clear enough it should be like completely overt you will break your system and like something like that so because otherwise that would have stopped if he had to type that he probably would have not continued because the all it says is that do as i say and that's not enough so hopefully i i did hear about something related to this because system 76 and debian are talking about changing this now i know why they're working on changing this so there you go well who needs sound anyway microsoft has a very broken setting situation right now but this is worse so the sound issue is still likely the go xlr thing um i i didn't i don't know he mentioned about having sound or not last time but the go xlr is probably involved in the sound issue uh just because you know there's no drivers for it and there's no something i want there to be so people who may go xlr please make it support linux because that would be awesome but that's i i would expect that's the issue uh what is x server x server gonna give it to you what okay all right this seems to do kind of what we need to do there are a few things in that settings utility that are helpful to have activated and that will improve stuff like you might have screen tearing issues you can change things for that i haven't used that in so long that it it just kind of like threw back memories or whatever because with amd i just you know just i'm done already like i install it i'm done so it's kind of like uh bringing back memories not the not the good kind but 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 trying to figure it out the unfortunate thing about that is wait three four days and that wouldn't have had that experience because the pop os would have been fine just that that bug you know that bug this is a native linux game let's just let's just play it and we're gaming the best part of this whole thing is that we're just getting started a lot of the games that i want to run like supreme commander forged alliance appear to have ways to run them discord looks like there's a way to get it going involves a lot of command line hopefully i won't brick my os but discord is really easy to install you can just use the flat pack or the snap and that's it you're done so discord is not hard to install at all and i think there's actually rpms and devs too i'm pretty sure i just use the flat pack but i think there are other ways it's not a difficult thing to do there are things that like if you want to run a specific game there might be some extra configurations that you'll have to do for those specific games that are not made for linux but you shouldn't like people shouldn't expect a game that's not made for linux to work on linux and then be disappointed if it doesn't in fact you should be amazed and like mind-boggled that a game that was not created for a platform still works on that platform that should help people react to those things like it should be amazing you know not games and he's not really done that or anything i'm just saying as an example when people say well this game doesn't work so linux is not good enough like the fact that it plays games it's not supposed to is in in and of itself amazing so 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 uh that part's super easy because obs works just great on linux as i'm doing right now good luck everybody so i got a message in the live chat that says i should react to the pinned message that's on the the ltt video so let's do that the issue i have with popos has been fixed for some time now after the fix a broken package should never be able to uninstall the desktop unless you specifically work around it i agree that is that is true it shouldn't that shouldn't be possible however to be clear you did work around it through the command line so it should be harder to work around and more obvious that you're working around it because the yes do as i say is not clear enough like i said but you did kind of work around it and the broken package the pop shop doesn't allow you to do it so again i don't blame linus for it i think that this like may be five percent his fault for not reading those two lines in mixed in with the hundreds of lines of other stuff but it is it is patched and also um as i said i saw some messages for them like rephrasing how it's done in debian which if that happens that'll be great so that'll be a benefit for people going forward so there is benefit to this being in the video even if it did kind of get a an unfortunate experience for linus in the process uh so typically that won't happen and if you install papa west now that won't happen well that's it for the reaction so uh hopefully i provided some information of that was useful in some way i don't remember exactly what i said because i was just doing it off the cuff but yeah i guess that's the point of a reaction video isn't it so yeah if you'd like to more content like this let me know if you want me to react to the future videos that linus does i may or may not do those live uh it depends on the timing of when they're released and that sort of stuff this was more of like you know i wanted to do this video when i saw it was published i wanted to do the reaction to it but i didn't have time throughout the week to do it and then after the show i was like you know what let's do a live stream uh just go ahead and do the reaction right after if you want more of this kind of content let me know in the comments below

Channel: Michael Tunnell - TuxDigital

Views: 21,866

Keywords: linux, gaming, steamos, gnu/linux, steam os, linux overview, critique, commentary, criticism, LinusTechTips, Linus Sebastian, Lafreniere, Luke Lafreniere, Floatplane, LTTstore.com, LTT, Linus Tech Tips, linus tech tips, pop os, linus tech tips linux challenge, linus tech tips linux, best linux distro, ltt linux, ltt linux challenge, best gaming distro, best linux gaming distro, pop os steam, arch linux, ltt linux challenge video, pop os 21.10, linux distro, open source, linux gaming

Id: kpQY5JRLBPM

Length: 35min 38sec (2138 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 16 2021