I said that driver info screen with open source and installed was a KDE app, it's actually made for Manjaro but that doesn't change it being a weird layout

12:34 it's actually not KDE's fault but Manjaro's. Manjaro devs are the ones that wrote this KCM. KDE never has such confusingly named columns with checkboxes to denote if it's yes/no.

2:58 "You can have things that are easy in one way, but then are a hassle in others". Yes, but remember, the article is about best linux distros FOR GAMING. If gaming is a hassle to get set up, it's not "very beginner friendly" for a gamer. It's like an article for "best foods for nut allergy sufferers" saying a particular food is "Super healthy" and "really delicious" but also "contains traces of nuts". It doesn't matter what other areas it's really good in, if it isn't suitable in the main one you're wanting out of it.

About the contradiction part : I think Linus is right here. It's an article about Linux distros for gamers and gaming IS a beginner operation. So if setting up games is a hassle, it by definition is not 'beginner friendly'. Loved your commentary btw!

I see a lot of people make that case that it is at least “partially” Linus’ fault for not reading the message, but let’s me real: you should not have to be aware of and then research a system-level bug before installing something as trivial as Steam. Even if he did read the message, what is he supposed to do to proceed? If a show-stopping bug ships with “stable” software, a first-time user is probably not going to do the legwork to fix it or wait for the devs to, they’re going to just move on. Yeah sure if you’re doing things like patching binaries, then you could expect things could go terribly wrong, but this is Steam. Yeah it’s fairly complex to get all those dependencies installed to get full 3D games functioning, but an end-user is going to be interested in doing the things they’re used to, and unwittingly nuking your whole desktop when you’re just trying to play some games is going to create a very bad impression that’s not likely to be reversed maybe ever.

I actually nuked my system in the exact same way when I was a new Ubuntu user way back in the day. I had no idea typing that was a warning. And even had I read through everything, I'd have had no idea what any of it meant at that time.

Linus didn't just nuke pop on his pc he actually nuked system 76😂 I mean just think about it. Imagin a giant tech channel uses ur distro for steam and u shipped steam with that massive bug. I feel bad for pop os cause it was my first distro and it has a special place in my heart.

The bug in PopOS is actually hilarious. I can only imagine how many people messed up their systems because of this

I’ve been enjoying Linux youtubers reacting to LTT. Though I don’t really care for mass adoption of desktop Linux it’s still nice to see people exploring

7:29 "If you accidentally pick the wrong drive, things are gonna go bad". This is so true, speaking from experience XD. Bricked my Windows install with fdisk while trying to install Arch leaving me with a completely broken system (two broken systems to be exact).

Linus had the same issue as me with pop os i had to completely reinstall my whole OS cuz the update nuked my system by it breaking core dependency’s making half if all my apps unuseable

7:25 My very first experience trying to commit to Manjaro... Always double check your drives, kids! Didn't realize what drive is was until I had already installed a bunch of games on it.

I feel bad for the Pop guys. Terrible time to run into a bug with a user not remotely equipped to handle it.

Great video! I love the subtle humor and objective feedback on the video. Good stuff :)

What do you mean "mistakes that shouldn't been included". The whole point of this challenge is for them to interact as the new users they are, to make mistakes and document them. If they go and edit the (some) mistakes out, as silly as some may think they are, we wouldn't be getting their honest review. For example, Linus killing PoP!_OS happened because he didn't carefully read/understand what he was doing. And he even went ahead into the terminal, got the same warning, and even typed a big confirmation text which was there to prevent users from accidentally breaking the system. Anybody who knows a bit about Linux would just say "Oh! This is bugged and trying to get rid of gnome?! I'll just get the flatpak version, the apt installer is obviously broken". The fun thing is, the solution to his issue was a combo box away by changing the source of installation for Steam in the store. But Linus doesn't know that, and neither would a whole bunch first comers to Linux. What happened to him, can easily happen to some one else and that is the whole point of this challenge.

3 out of 6. Now I need DT, Luke and Kenny's reactions.

7:10 It was especially good that he removed the SSD. Ubuntu has had a bug since 2014, still there in 20.10, that writes the bootloader to the first efi partition, regardless which efi partition you choose. If pop has inherited the bug he could have fried his windows bootloader, unless he knew that he needs to remove flags from the other drives.

12:46 That ISN'T even BY KDE AT ALL, that's all on Manjaro.

I think recommending Arch based distros for new users is a mistake. Fedora is imho better than Manjaro for new users.

12:37, I'm not sure if you're referring to KDE here but they're not the one who made the Hardware Configuration, It's made by Manjaro. Kinda like an extension made for browsers.

oh nice you finally did talk about the actually video, ets hope that video opens the eyes of the distros that wish to be user friendly.

I watched 1 recommended Linus Linux video reaction and now I'm being flooded with reaction videos from Linux KZfaq channels. It's great!

Aside from working with pulseaudio/pipewire, i think the reason Linux says Discord requires a lot of command line is because of the issue where the server list lags when you scroll through it. iirc it's an issue with hardware acceleration or something.

13:48 - I was in IT doing desk side support for a long time and to no surprise -> Windows has this problem as well. This is just a limitation of technology. The OS has no idea how your screens are positioned and have to just guess It really just luck if it gets it right on the first try.

"Two dudes, one steam linux install" - Title of their next hub video

As a Manjaro KDE user (might switch to xfce on arch or maybe garuda) i can say that it should not be your first distro, it's just too unstable. I had to switch to an older kernel once because the newest wouldn't boot and plasma died on me two times (widgets/taskbar/other UI elements, but kwin and shortcuts still worked) and i had to open a terminal window, execute startplasma & and then disown.

Super pumped Luke chose Mint, I switched an old laptop of mine to Mint last week due to this challenge and the Steam Deck. Now if I could just figure out how to update my BIOS so that my battery would charge...

12:48 They arent exclusive. Its a strange way to convey the information, but it just lists the driver options and tells whether they are open source or not, and if they are installed or not

Part of the challenge is getting discord streaming to work correctly, as they use it for work as well, so I'd guess that that's what he's referring to.

You can't be "beginner friendly" but it's a hassle to play games. ANYONE play games. It does conflict with each other.

More of these please sir.. that was fun.

About the "Hassle to setup for Gaming" thing for Ubuntu, it was clearly under a article mentioning "best gaming distros" so Linus is fair to say that it's conflicting info

The driver app in the settings in Manjaro, Its actually a Manjaro app not a KDE app, it just integrated to the settings, so Manjaro bad KDE gud.

I am so happy about the traffic Linus & Luke's video has generated like a penetrating oil that has moved every echelon of not only the Linux community, but also the throngs of potential linux inductees. Nothing has ever been this huge for stimulating and guiding linux evolution in the 44 years I've been in front of a computer. I've wanted Linux to knock M$ and Apple on their ass in the PC realm for a very long time. It finally feels like that roadmap might be getting some long awaited clarity and frankly this is a great way to create the demand from all the major driver vendors to embrace linux as a lucrative personal experience not just for the ultranerds.

12:52 "open source" and "installed" are independent of each other. This is a very confusing way of presenting it

A lot of distros, like popos don't include multi lib, so any packages steam shared with xorg and gnome was removed for the i386 version. Not a bug, just a feature you need to enable.

Heyyo Brody, entertaining video as always! With regards to the discord audio streaming fix, have you gotten that working before?

re: manuals, tutorials, etc for linux/bsd/etc. Would it be useful to add a glossary for any word used that's no among the 1000 most common english words and to define them in the glossary?

Interesting reaction video. I myself have come across the left screen behaves like the right screen and vice versa problem, but I got that fixed. The latest issue however I did not find a solution for. It seems to be a bug that persists, and have presisted for years apparantly, on debian based distros. And that is if you are trying to copy a large amunt of files, which in total are big in sizes, think 32 Gb or more, to a usb thumb drive, then the file copy window always freezes. I have had this problem on several computers (on every usb port on those computers), several debian based distros, using several different usb thumb drives (usb 2.0 and usb 3.0), even different formatted usb drives (Fat32, and exFAT). The problem even persisted on a fresh install of Raspbian OS on a Raspberry pi. However, if I try to copy the same files to a usb harddrive, then there is no issues what so ever. So that was the solution I had to go for, purchase a usb harddrive to copy the files to, since I could not resolve the problem of copying the files to a usb thumb drive without the copy windows freezing up. I am a bit tempted to try an Arch-based distro to see if the problem is on those distros as well. But debian based distros are often refered to as beginner friendly. The likes of Ubuntu, and Linux Mint. The latter is what I have tried to use most. And as such, supposedly beginner friendly distros, there should not be bugs related to the use of usb thumb drives. Was it some kind of odd piece of hardware, well then I could give the distros som slack, but not on such commonplace hardware as a simple usb thumb drive. Especially not when said thumb drives works well on both Windows and Mac.

This series is going to be interesting because I too am trying to make the switch to Linux recently and I too have ran into some problems. I have an MSI Delta 15 AMD Advantage Edition laptop, and I have inserted a second nvme drive into it. The idea is that windows is on one nvme and Linux on the other. I decided to install Garuda Gragonized and it all went relatively well at first. However the issue I had was that upon installing Steam, I realized that my native Linux games were running on the integrated AMD GPU as opposed to the dedicated AMD GPU. I tried to fix the problem to no avail. I tried adding that "DRI_PRIME=1 %command%" flag to the launch option of the game within Steam (as described in a forum post I found), but it didn't work. I then tried some fancy commands I didn't really understand into the command line, but i don't think it did anything. They were something about setting up a "sink" and a "source" or something like that. It had to do with rendering on the dGPU and passing it to the iGPU so it seemed very promising, but it didn't solve my problem. After that I tried a different launch command in steam. I think it was "prime-run %command%". This definitely did not work because it actually would crash the game as soon as it attempted to start. I know that with the DRI_PRIME command it was still running on the iGPU because I had actually also installed Mangohud and I edited the config file to show more information, and I could clearly see "Cezanne" for the name of the gpu instead of the weird name it shows when it runs on the dGPU. I then decided to just try another distro so I tried to install Fedora 34. It didn't recognize my network adapter despite it being an Intel one (apparently those usually work in Linux) so I tried to install Fedora 35 Beta. Unfortunately I goofed during the installation and clicked "delete all partitions" meaning to clear out all the partitions on the linux nvme, not realizing it would also grab the windows one as well. I ended up nuking my windows. Luckily I had backups of everything so not much loss other than a few hours of my free time. I have since been thinking about this issue and I'm not sure if perhaps I typed the "sink" command backwards and told my computer to render on the iGPU and send it to the dGPU. My laptop doesn't have a MUX switch so the display is wired to the iGPU and the dGPU is wired through the iGPU. Perhaps this was causing the game not launching assuming I typed the command backwards? I don't know, I think I'll try again next week end. Someone told be to use Lutris but I don't really understand what Lutris is. Why are there so many compatibility programs? Wine, wine tricks, dxvk, Lutris, proton, proton tricks, etc... Maybe they all do different things but I don't really understand the difference. If anyone has any suggestions feel free to share. I'll be trying to do the same challenges that Linus and Luke because I too want to switch to Linux, as I've been watching some Linux videos for a while now.

That thumbnail is just hilarious, with Linus as the devil and Luke as the holy angel XD

I mean, starting with Windows Vista, Windows installs are also closer to a live CD, with the exception that it's running something more like Windows Core instead of a full Windows. But they don't necessarily have all the drivers available immediately. So there can be some driver issues.

12:35. That's not KDE's design flaw. That UI is designed by Manjaro.

In fairness I took the exact same route when I made the move to GNU/Linux, I left myself a "oh shit!" safety fallback. I installed to a new drive and left the Windows drive alone.

The columns are a bit awkward, but I believe it’s meant to tell you if each driver is proprietary in the first column (check = open source. No check = proprietary). The second column is supposed to tell you if it’s currently installed. Linus happens to only have the proprietary driver installed, so it seems as though only one of the two columns can be checked for each line. Which wouldn’t make any sense.

Brodie couldn't stop himself from inserting I am using Arch btw already in the title.

What I think happened with the GoXLR was that it probably supports the standardized USB Audio Class interface, which can be used by the generic USB audio driver. That will at least make the most basic functions work, but for anything that is not normally supported by a sound card, a specialized driver is needed.

Manjaro made a very pro move with pre-installed Steam

13:44 I think it varies by distro, what drivers they've bundled in - I have a triple monitor setup and Elementary, Mint and Kubuntu did this to me. Manjaro doesn't if I use proprietary drivers but will if I use open source drivers - but think overall it's an NVIDIA issue. I just resort to unplugging all but one whenever I'm installing now 😅

As a newbie programmer I personally started with manjaro for my first distro with no Linux experience. To set everything up it took me days and I didn't know what I was doing. I'd say that for people who like the process of trial by error, learning by doing things and being fine with having no computer for hours or days it's an amazing first distro. I genuinely really enjoyed learning manjaro and arch and recommended it to a few friends of mine who all enjoyed it. But I wouldn't recommend it to most of my friends. Mainly because to understand the arch wiki you need quite a bit of knowledge in computers/programming.

Display layout being the other way around has happened to me on windows time and time again. Didn’t really understand why that’s even worth bringing up. And by the way - I don’t recommend installing “some tool” to fix this, it’s always (at least in the 4 distros I’ve tried) in the system settings.

I am somewhat new to Linux. The only reason I picked Manjaro is because I see that the Steamdeck will come installed with this. I figure millions of new steamdeck users will need to get use this this distro. I haven't had any issues as of yet but we will see.

Just thought I'd say that I'm pretty sure Luke has his monitors plugged in the right order. Otherwise his bios would open on his 2nd monitor. So it's more that by default they expect your monitor to be on the left (which I think is the least common probably?)

i have not used POP before but what surprised me is being mainly a gaming disto i would of thought Lutris and Steam would of been preinstalled

Open Source / Installed I assume are just status icons to show that the nvidia driver is *not* open source, and therefore taints the kernel. They aren't buttons you press, they could all be installed which would be indicated on the right most column.

It is actually highlighted but only apt displays color so apt-get wont display highlights

Last time I select that recommended Nvidia proprietary drivier, I can't enter Xorg. I have no idea why, I don't want to use my phone as a troubleshooting browser but I can't run browser in my Linux. So, I reboot to Windows, then installed a VMWare, mount that partition to my Boot Repair Disk distro VM, recover my data, delete the Linux Mint and I don't using Linux for 2 years until I got AMD laptop. Now I'm satisfied with KDE Neon even though Plasma crash so annoying when I developing a Qt5 app that didn't use KDE framework, it takes me a month to recognize that problem because of my compositor theme won't work in a normal Qt5 app. Such a troublesome.

I appreciate that the chapter lines are in a very similar arrangement as the original :)

When I was using XFCE Manjaro on my old desktop, I would have the same monitor bug as Luke like every week

How long will it be before I can trust installing apps on linux as much as I can on windows?

I've been daily driving Linux for about 8 years now and Linus destroying his desktop in Pop OS made me laugh so damn hard. 🤭

The mint live cd was the reason why I used manjaro as my first distro

This whole thing is definitley a good thing for linux. I have learned more about Linux from "Linux people" reacting to Linus that I ever had reading forums... I think best way to see the shortcommings is to let a "noob" try it and see what is happening. That way maybe developers are getting a better grasp of small things they can change to the distro's. :) I am going to try Manjaro myself, see how it goes :P

I started off Linux by thinking I could do a dual boot. I ended up somehow corrupting my Windows instance and going "well I guess I'm moving to Linux permanently"

If i remember correctly, my first linux experience was with SuSE in 2001. And it was hard at the begining, so i can relate to that.

it looked to me that the sound actually worked on the POP OS.

I am not sure whats so difficult about the Manjaro driver installer, they are indicating boxes, one column says "Open Source" meaning the driver is open source and hence the reason "video-nvidia" is not indicated and the other column is "Installed" meaning what driver is currently installed and in this case "video-nvidia" is currently installed, but yes they may have been able to remove the "open source" column and just have it in brackets like "video-linux(open source)" but it might have some effect on the "Auto install open source drivers" button

Linux: figure it out yourself, read the docs Arch: do we even need to tell you?

Just installed PopOS! on an oldish Steam Box (an Alienware with a Haswell i7 and mobile 900 series GPU). Haven't tinkered with it much since the install, but I'm gonna try to get Steam up and running on it tomorrow.

Having watched the original video before clicking on this one, I gotta say, I love the thumbnail lmao reflects how I feel about the video perfectly. XD

I think the GoXLR might require firmware stored in volatile memory. It seems to work if you run Windows, have the Windows software upload the driver to the GoXLR, then reboot into Linux. But once the system is completely powered down, the firmware gets wiped and it stops working. Just a guess…

6:10 -- big same, buddy. and like, a decade later, I still use it 14:30 -- There is in the Display settings; it's click and drag to reorder the windows. The Display settings are really, really limited, though.

We need to have a windows competition hosted by brodie, dt, luke smith, mental outlawe etc

huh i don't remember that part of the challenge video

12:55 The columns refer to if the driver is open source, and if it's installed. If both are true, both are checked.

so do you know how to set up screensharing with audio in discord on linux? lmao I've been trying since ages to do it but i gave up.

I agree with you Brodie, Linus shouldn't go near Arch based distros until he's less of a newbie... I speak from experience. Arch is complicated compared to Debian based systems (IMHO only)

11:38 well, it's not gonna happen, unless you create this file /etc/apt/break-my-system which ok with me. I wouldn't mind if Debian accepts this merge request. 12:57 the first column is actually a boolean value that says something is opensource or not. The second column is also a boolean value that says something is installed or not. So, if in your design language you're supposed to show booleans with a checkbox, then you'll end up with something like this. A better UI would probably change "installed" to "status" and for false values would write "not installed" in the cell and for true would write "installed". Also it would change the "open source" column to "license" or something and write the words "open source" and "proprietary" instead of the checkbox. But the statement "it absolutely doesn't make any sense" is not accurate. It makes some sense, but it definitely need to change, specially for noobs.

In regards to the multimoniter issues, I've had issues where different Distro's put my Displays in different orders

2:40 actually in this first point he was googling distros for gaming. So he's not saying it's a hassle to set up. What he means is that a GAMING distro can't be "beginner friendly" if gaming is hard to set-up

Pop user here. I have been playing around with Arch (KDE ) and Manjaro (XFCE and KDE) and in the end I settled on Pop. It might have been me (100% I guess), but the ux has just been awesome since I went PopOs way. Setting up dual boot and having the boot loader (systemd) appear every time , when I switch on the pc, was so far, the biggest hassle. Other than that... "It just works"... Steam? Installed. No mans Sky (Lutris - GOG)? Runs like a charm. Visual Studio Code? No issue whatsoever... So far, so good. To be fair, I didn't modify any installation whatsover from a DE point of view. Vanilla Pop is just it... Right now, I only keep W10 partition, just to be able to play DayZ and EFT.

Just straight up: my first distro was arch and for me that was the best choice. One could argue that it's because I am an IT-student (computer science), but you dont need to study for linux. There are 2 reasons. The first is that I am interested and willing to learn, when I have time. When I encounter a problem that I can't fix right now, I switch back to windows temporarily. Second: I know I will encounter problems on Linux. More problems than I ever encountered while using windows in the last 15 years. Maybe I was lucky with windows, I mean even while using vista I had no problems. But that is not the point. I knew I needed to fix problems mainly on my own. The reason there may be more problems on linux is, that periphery, games or other programs may not be made with linux in mind or just straigh-up don't run on linux. So I could have gone with an easy install and had never learned about grub, mkinitcpio, different filesystems, xorg vs wayland... and so on. But since I needed to learn about this at least a little bit during "installation" I may have the advantage of understanding problems more thoroughly and being at least able to pin down my problem better in to short google searches. E.g. I know about the grub-mkconfig so it didn't take me long to change the default boot option to the last one used; or I know about the mkinitcpio.conf so when I had the wrong keylayout, when asked for the passphrase, it didn't took me too long to learn about the existance of the keymap hook. Troubleshooting on Windows is subjectively rarer, because way more use-cases are working on windows than on linux. And it is objectively easier, because: First, the linux community is often (*not always*) toxic as good old modern warfare mp times. And second, you problems depend on your combination of software: the distro, the filesystem, the display server, the wm and de, encryption yes or no, pipewire vs alsa vs pulse etc. ... So there are fewer people using linux than using windows and while I believe that the percentage of actual users willing to help is higher with linux users, the specifics of your configuration may just reduce that group of helping hands again. I hate the fact that linux is not able to be easy for non-techsavvy people. I would love if some branches of our educational system would switch to linux, let it even be ubuntu, but shit just needs to work and that is a 99% chance with windows and at most a 50% chance with linux. 50-50 is not gonna cut it in areas where tech should just be the helping hand and not the central topic of discussion. In other words: Tech must be time spending and not time consuming. Linux doesn't do that, because it's whole philosophy answers the question "what needs to be easy?" completely different.

i think you are the only linux person i watched that agreed that massive wall of text should have a sense of importance.. from my experience on my manjaro kde days.. all of these "guide" immediately opts out to using terminal.. so Linus' statement is not weird.. Linus' experience is actually on-par representation of average person trying linux..

At 12:50 when he blames KDE over weird UI, I can happily say that the menu is made by the Manjaro team and embedded to their settings menu. Blame Manjaro devs, not KDE. ( In my experience the "installed" checkbox means the driver is installed. Open source means it's open source. That was very weird for me too, basically just install video-nvidia with no open source ticked and installed ticked )

depending on what games you want to play you can do execelent gaming in linux trough steam

10:12 OMG he's removing the desktop LOL

I've installed Mint several times with dual monitors, no problem. Maybe an Nvidia issue?

I've experienced the same screen bug as Luke, in mankato kde when setting up dual monitors. Changing the monitor arrangement twice solved it for me.

I chose Manjaro as my first distro hoping that ill accidentally break it a lot so I have to learn how to fix it

To get used to the upcoming steam deck and how it handles proton, I’ve been using Manjaro, and to be honest? One thing I’m still wrapping my head around is Pac-Man after coming from DPKG and years of using Debian based systems. Main reason is wine and the fact that the steam deck can be used as a full PC if desired, hence maximizing the investment. Some of the syntax in Pac-Man is a little confusing. I had to go through two separate article guides just to install something. Now I’ve got a general idea, but sometimes I think I put forth a command and I end up forgetting something. I’ll shush now. Lol

The Open-Source and Installed thing in the drivers gui is a manjaro thing not a KDE thing, it's their mangaro drivers stupid settings

THIS IIS THE BEST REACTION VIDEO TILL NOW

When I started with Linux I found myself researching material to research material to research material to research other material to work out how to get the Nvidia to do the things.

Mint in general is a little bad with multiple monitors. It takes a good bit of tweaking with nvidia settings, xorg, and sometimes even BIOS settings to get multiple monitors working properly.

the software manager on ubuntu (based distros) have always been weird. I have had the same bug as luke on ubuntu for over 10 years. I have also had the same bug as linus on ubuntu where i tried to install some program and it wanted to uninstall gnome/unity, around 4 years ago

I don't consider Discord "working" if major features don't work.

You really do can anything get working on any distro. Kubuntu LTS + Xanmod + a PPA for faster updated GPU stuff, that's all I need

In Linus's Defense: You said, if you ware seeing this message stop. But that is the key problem with Linux. He first tired installing it one way; got the error message; then then switch and tried to go the route of terminal, as everyone keeps saying to use instead of flatpaks and other stuff; and he gets the same message. So Yes, Linus read the message and did it anyways....but the bigger question is Why is there a thing where I'm trying to install steam... and why whole desktop environment gets deleted...why is this a thing? Again let's be honest; Linus is a techy guy...if this happens to anyone that is non techy, they are immediately going back to windows. Everyone keeps blaming windows for weird bugs especially on windows update...but this thing completely eliminated his desktop environment.. this is a far worse "bug."

That's the main reason I never liked apt, it's not formatted really at all so the wall of text can be difficult to read sometimes

It is silly the Sys76 changed apt for this. They screwed up in the packaging or Linus did not update after the install.