I think chris is a secret anti desktop enviroment agent, just look at the photos he choose to show gnome and kde

“OS Age : 36 days” I’ll check back in a year.

"you never have to worry about it breaking" while running a rolling release distro

"it never changes and it always works." You mean until you break it again. 😂

Opus ... I have learned something today

I can agree with your video 100%. It takes time to actually "know" what you will and will not use in your system - but once you have a routine and a suite of tools you trust - your Linux installs become minimal and powerful! But we all know we cannot recommend stuff like this to newcomers as it would ruin their experience

We need more videos like this to be honest. the more these pain-points get exposed, the more likely they are to get fixed later down the line. and if work-arounds exist, they might get highlighted too. That's all everyone really wants at the end of the day, right? To make linux a better experience today/tomorrow than it was yesterday? Well.. I'd like to think so anyways.

You doing dirty by showing those old screenshot 😂

It is very true, Linux isn't all sunshine and rainbows, and everything working... But, once I got everything working under Linux, I started to do the same thing under Windows as well, and realized that I often had to spend time tinkering, searching out solutions there as well, and when I accounted for that... They BOTH weren't sunshine and rainbows...

At the end of this video (and elsewhere of course) you said something important: People who try Linux and run into some problem, stop there. I think this is because they have learned from Windows or macOS that there is nothing the user can do about it. With Linux, one must change their way of thinking completely. Help is available and most often there is another way to accomplish the same thing.

This is the reason why I still spend most of my time in Windows, something around 80 or 85% and the rest on Linux. I consider myself a power user, I'd been a Windows Server, VMware and Citrix administrator for 15 years until I moved into an IT management role. I have a home server running Debian 12 but my main workstation and desktop computers are both running Windows 10 due to the easy of configuration. I just simply don't have the time to investigate every single issue that Linux currently presents to me, I need to use my computers for work, I don't have the luxury of having spare time to search for workarounds, test them, search for more alternatives when those workarounds don't work as expected, and so on. I barely have time for entertainment when I'm at home and I don't want to spend that time trying to fix things either. I still installed Linux on my parents PC as, like Chris said, it's suitable for people who only use their computers for casual, online tasks such as reading the news, checking emails or the weather, shopping, etcetera.

This video is a masterpiece. Simultaneously showcasing both the PEAK of Linux systems and the worst part which is we're not CTT to do all of that 🤣 I love it.

really enjoyed this tour of your system, gives me tons of ideas

chris titus is the type of dude who uses a 1500$ xeon very casually

I appreciate your videos, how in-depth you go. I'm a recent transplant from Windows to Linux (Mint) after trying years ago with zero success. My use case has changed, I'm not trying to set the world on fire with games anymore and I like something that just... works. Linux fits that need. I'm trying to learn, but boy there is a learning curve. I'm dual booting at the moment, just in case I do need anything from Windows, or boot in to play a game or two that isn't supported on Linux, but have only been back to Windows a handful of times over the last two months. I'm just struggling to figure out how to tinker without breaking things. Because once I break them, it's a system wipe - I don't know how to fix them, obviously! But your videos inspire me to become a better user, I enjoy how clean and quick your system looks, how stable it appears, and how it just... works. I'll continue watching your videos and seek out some tips on how to go from "noob" to "power user" and continue to give it my best!

The biggest thing I have always appreciated is the fact that you change your stances on stuff so much! 😂 But it's valuable. I like hearing and seeing both of what has worked and what hasn't worked for you after so many years, it's always been insightful. Might not be everyone's cup of tea but I have no issue with it. On a side note, sad about your 7800XT not being fully utilized, it's quite bizarre. I'm running a 7900XTX and average on 98% utilization for games. ( I have a VM with an A5000 passed through as well). Keep up the great content.

Switched to Linux on my gaming PC last weekend. Arch+Wayland+Hyprland on Nvidia. Running Mint+X11+i3 on various older laptops. The great thing about it all is choice. And really the only thing I still need to dual-boot windows for is some VMWare stuff (Horizon...) and DCS in VR.

Was hoping SOMEONE would deal with all these types issues while we’re young. Thanks for this video Sir.

Desktop Linux greatest strength and biggest weakness is that almost nothing is standardized. Just the fact that there are different audioservers, display servers, package managers, init systems, c library implementations(!), ... . It can be great if have the time and motivation to learn all of that stuff, but it creates so much issues when it comes compatibility and just downloading something and expecting it to just work. I really think its for those "powerusers" like me that are in the top 50 - 99% of computer literacy that struggle with this. If you are in the bottom 50% and need a browser, music player and email client, you never have to deal with this, but if you need more niche software or use some non common hardware... yeah!

I love how hopeless is this man in every single cover

Chris one thing I love about DWM and windows managers that use Xorg xrandr is the ability to set --pos 0x0 for a seperate capture card set to a lower refresh rate than the application you're capturing on your main display. I then pipe my audio out the HDMI output with an OBS instance. Then my streaming PC handles the streaming/recording. It's amazing... Why desktop environments struggle to display the same content with varying refresh rates boggles my mind.. or how does DWM or other window managers do this it's complete magic.

Freaking font rendering is my only issue with any Linux distro. Especially with 4k display

I appreciate the honesty! I think "Linux just works" only applies in the best case scenarios for the most vanilla users. Wayland being the default is good.... now someone has to fix all the broken stuff for all the vanilla users.

Thanks for always talking about Linux and helping people understand its potential and weaknesses. For now i'm still on Windows on my main system simply because i want something that just works, but i got a second system (a laptop) with Linux to fiddle around and learn, and so far very few things didn't work as expected.

Thanks for the deep insight into your hardware and software requirements. I have average Linux skills, but I'm in the process of learning more and more. Looking at your problems makes me understand my current situation! You have helped me by working out your problems, as I have had almost the same experience in the last month...! Tuxedo OS2 goes 3 - wayland is now supported... I use KDE and also have the pulseaudio issue. Will have a look at your description! Other example: libinput gestures are still working fine on x11, not at all on wayland. I'm using AMD hardware on the really really awesome Tuxedo Pulse 15 gen2 laptop. Long story short: I've now plucked up the courage to go troubleshooting with Tuxedo's great customer service! This Tomte software will certainly help 😅

I appreciate the video. I have to say I'm a bit disappointed to hear about your AMD troubles. My workstation PC has been on Ubuntu for several months now, and since 24.04 I haven't touched my Windows partition.. to the point I'm considering reclaiming the drive space. I'm making the switch on my gaming PC this week.. but it has a 7900XT that I'm quite happy with. I suppose we'll see! I've been around since the MS DOS, Windows 3.1 days so maybe a return to the command line is in my future? Thanks for taking the time to document your experiences.

I'm glad to hear you had similar issues with Wayland. It has caused nothing but issues for me as a new Linux user.

Excellent point about Linux vs Windows. When I was using Windows as a developer everything was easy to install and get going with, but I'd constantly be searching to fixes for 3rd party libraries that had randomly broken. Linux is harder to learn and get setup, but there are far fewer random bugs cropping up and I feel more in control instead of needing to apply workaround on top of workarounds just because the windows version of a library was unstable.

Wow. I don't do a lot of video editing, but I would love to see more about how gaming works with this setup. Thanks for sharing your experience.

ty titus , made the switch lately and im impressed (secondary sys)

great video! I love the tip on blacklisting audio devices! thank you

Wow, Chris has come a long way. I remember when he was still a (youtube) baby.

Lol I have encountered and have been working to solve some of these same problems, and have been walking towards the same or similar soluitons. Great upload man. I am planning to use Resolve myself.

My problems whenever I tried switching to Linux permanently has always been audio related. If I get it working right on desktop, it doesn't work right in-game. If I get it working in-game it has problems with equalizers, headset output not working or some combination of the above. And from my experience trying to get help on the topic nobody wants to help deal with it beyond the very basic troubleshoot.

This was great... I'm a new pop os 22.04 user and I like it. I'd love you to relate your Linux gaming experience and tips some time. I'm reading your posts under your Linux section about gaming :-) I'm looking forward to Cosmic. The choice of floating and tiled window managers is really good.. Nice keyboard shortcuts to get around. it seems really quick and getting rid of windows at home has been great. Being able to ssh between machines is so much easier than farting around with slow windows networking. Even the remote desktop sharing is so good. Also the USB audio works really well with my external DAC. But I've found getting games going a headache. I have lots on GOG, Epic and Steam.. I've messed around with Bottles, Heroic, Steam and Lutris and haven't had a lot of success. A few games work but most don't. I'm using the nvidia version of pop os 22.04 and my gtx 1080 does its thing. It would be great to have a single approach where I'm doing the same thing to organise and play games.. at the moment it seems pretty fragmented.

I've been a Windows user since I was a kid, but 11 is so bad I decided to give Linux a chance, and know what I really like Linux Mint! Still getting used to it, of course. Linux Mint feels like the best introduction for Windows users to switch to Linux, and when more comfortable, switch to a better distro of their choice.

One of my personal issues with most distros is the coupling together of OS and Application package management. You can decouple them by using multiple package managers, flatpaks, or even manually installing and you will generally have a more stable experience.

Thanks for the good advice Chris! I am slowly migrating to Linux permanently and you are a treasure trove of information :)

Finally, some honesty about Linux. and not just people raving about how easy it is and glossing over problems as if they're minor things. While in my experience it is somewhat true that if you just have /basic/ user requirements like running a browser or libreoffice or GiMP it /is/ pretty straight-forward to run Linux in my limited experience. I'm fairly certain if I could get it setup for him, even my barely computer-literate brother could mostly run it as a daily driver since he only really uses firefox, a word processor, and sometimes minecraft. However like in this video I /am/ a power-user, have been that way in windows for years. And going from an high-level user of windows to Linux is like stepping onto an alien planet, or at the very least into a foreign country with a different language you barely understand and different customs and ways of doing things. I've run into /many/ bugs trying to tweak linux how I want it to work, or how I'm used to using a computer, and since I've gotten used to a very custom setup that I literally spent years scripting and tweaking, and I have little to no idea where to even get started on some of it on Linux because the same software doesn't exist, and will not work properly under WINE due to sandboxing not really allowing you to make global tweaks to your system. Also the /constantly/ trying to do something only to realize I don't have permission and need to re-launch something with sudo and make all the edits from scratch and/or enter my password again and again and again. My most common thing I miss is AutoHotkey, as all the macro software I've tried on Linux just pales in comparison even the attempted linux ports are missing tons of what I consider basic functionality. No blocking key events, no capslock/scrolllock/numlock control, no ability to setup a hotkey for only the left/right modifier key, no having the hotkeys be dependent on what window you're in. And that's not even starting on trying to script my custom interactive stuff like making a popup menu for doing operations on the clipboard. The only stuff I can find online says something about trying a python library and making a python script, though I can't tell if the library actually only detects input events or if it allows you to block and override them. Heck, I'm not even sure if Linux architecture even allows something like the Windows Global Keyboard Hook which Autohotkey relies on to work. I had some limited success with some of my basic hotkeys by tweaking config files and using a couple different programs, but it was spread-out, unstable and a rather cludged together mess, metaphorically held together with gum. It was far from centralized and easy to implement/change or reliable. The one software only let the hotkey work the first few presses before it reverted back to default behavior. underwhelming

How do you deal with XORG allowing all windows to access all keyboard input. That is your calculator, notepad, and browser can see the sudo password you use along with you bank account username and password? I think this is not possible with Wayland and with Windows you need to install a keylogger modified to broadcast key presses to all apps.

The Opus tipp was a banger. I started Audio editing and for a friend who wants to start youtube. It is kind of a pain in the low point on linux. I was kind of thinking about davinci resolve but I guess I stick to audacity since I do not want to uninstall my DE. But yeah I will look into Opus thanks a lot.

I had lots of problems associated with steam proton's fullscreen mode. Since it's not an actual fullscreen (wine emulates it by scaling the window to avoid changing the actual desktop resolution), mouse input breaks in some games and scaling looks terrible, especially fonts. I don't even know what it is, but fonts look much better when they're in actual fullscreen mode and there's no option to force that.

for resolve did you need to buy the license to get hardware encoding to work with NVIDIA?

Is there a way to use Visual Studios 2022 and MS SQL Management Studio on linux or do I need wine for that?

I think it might be interesting to see a Linux setup on a portable computer. I've been tinkering putting Linux on an older MacBook Pro that I inherited and it was a little tricky, mainly because of lack of drivers, but it was fun to do. I'd like to see what you use for a portable computer, if you have one at all. Thanks for another great video

Great video :) That's the way, just use whatever solves your problem, either hard-, or software it is. works for me atleast

Even though there wasn’t anything that I can directly reflect upon and implement right this second, this was great perspective as usual.

Is this floorp or thor something because I'm looking for an non chomum something browser that is good and don't use much memory nor high cpu

I need wayland to work on Nvidia 40 series because my screens have different resolutions so it's not usable to not have scaling per display.

Great info, as always! As you said, the thing about Linux si that you can set it up as you wish, however you need it to work. Yes, it requires a bit of work but, what doesn't. I have issues with DaVinci Resolve as well, who knows, it might work someday ;-) 😬

What do you suggest for the 'cool kids' like me with amd gpu and want hdr display to play games in hdr. Using fedora with KDE and Wayland, but very new to Linux and unsure if there is any way to keep system lightweight and simple. Also can not find any good options to play games with mods and using windows just for this.

Do you use Hyprland, a dynamic tiling Wayland compositor based on wlroots that doesn't sacrifice on its looks?

I want to use my Mint laptop (Alienware15) to flash my Pixel mobile but cannot find how to check that the U-dev rules are there or not in my Cinnamon Mint. Is there a place where I can go to get this information? When I asked in a Linux forum I got a lot of flak...just for asking! TIA

This is the greatest strength and sometimes the biggest roadblock to new users, choice. You can have a bog standard distro with KDE loaded up for grandma and it'll be a "just works" bootloader for a web browser. Or you can go with an ultra minimalist custom kernel riced set up that's almost a server like this. It can be intimidating for perspective users to sift through but it's amazing to have al those options.

Thank you Chris! Any thoughts on IME? Can we do anything about this global backdoor?

"I just like setting everything up in terminal", the same for me. Once you get used, the terminal is unbeatable.

I'd be interested in a Debian 12 setup for Resolve, with the demise of Windows 10, my laptop will probably need to be set up for Linux. After the CentOS debacle, I've gone for Debian on anything that matters. I am not a power user! Also are you using the software activation or a USB dongle? Several years ago there were some reports of problems getting the USB dongle working. Since I have a dongle for activation, that's a concern for me.

Can you pleas tell me why do you disable audio over hdmi, any specifieck reason for this ?

Isn't issues with Wayland on Nvidia sorted now since version 555 of the proprietary driver got it's beta release?

It’s so satisfying to see such a new full-time Linux user doing in such an old-school fashion! Please keep influencing people to do the same. 🤗

Great Video Chris!

Thanks for Sharing Mr Titus! One question: Will you use your 7800 XT for passtrhough action now?

It would be awesome to see a video of how you setup your desktop and stuff to where its a cohesive environment like KDE or Gnome.

Funnily enough, when Arch Linux switched to pipewire, after some initial problems, it has basically solved any audio issues I had.

Curious if anyone has tried an Intel battlemage with this setup and also AV1 encode/decode ... also Chris , why could u not use like an Nvidia Tesla math card in tandem with a radeon?

A Chris Titus Linux image setup like this would be awesome. Or I could just try to learn arch the hard way. 🤣

It's always going to better as Wayland support for Resolve is in beta right now for the next version (19), but you're right, use what's work best in the present.

Today I tried to install arch using the archinstall script the official one. I picked KDE and can't make it past the login manager it just keeps reloading itself

my laptop has rtx 2060 and an integrated amd gpu, when it runs in hybrid gpu mode, wayland works perfectly, but as soon as i switch to dedicated gpu only, issues appear on wayland, practically very hard to use wayland with it, im guessing this will be fixed this summer with the wayland/nvidia update but its still very weird to me, especially as a beginner (using linux for about 9 months now)

That setup is so cool-looking. I would love to be able to use Linux entirely from the command line, with Cool Retro Term and maybe Midnight Commander.

Hmm... any thoughts on why I would get eye strain from Linux (both debian and arch, any distro) ... messed with refresh rates, backlight settings, redshift, flux etc. But it always seems too bright even when the brightness is turned way down. It isn't specific hardware as I've tried Linux over the years on different hardware and monitors, always the same issue. 🤔

Hi Chris, on the subject of AMD, how could you tell that your 7800 was not being used to its fullest? Please note that I am new to this and currently running Ubuntu 24.04 K:6.8.0-35-generic.

How can i get same mouse acceleration in linux as in Windows using "Enhance mouse precision". Mouse is feeling weird in any distro i tried and touchpad is unusable almost. I tried ubuntu, endeavor OS, parrot OS, linuxlite, and changing flat and adaptive settings in KDE doesn't help

Xorg does not "just work" in my experience. I always have screen tearing even with TearFree set true. Wayland is more reponsive overall and never tears.

If you only have one gpu, how do you do your gpu passtrough vms?

I want to install linux the way you do but my knowledge is not quite there yet. Where can I find some more guides and info on it?

New sub here, I saw you on Omnizoa's video it was a supercut of reactions from the LTT Linux Daily Driver challenge. Anyway, I've been using Linux on my laptop for a few months now and very recently I've been using it on my main gaming machine, mostly because I don't really give much of a crap anymore to the newest games to put up with windows bs anymore. It hasn't been painless but it was much less painful than I thought it would be. My main concern was my GPU which is an Nvidia one and I was very reluctant on using it under linux because I heard so many horror stories about Nvidia and Linux not vibing. I got the same setup on both my laptop and my main pc (Arch, Xorg and KDE) and but really the only problem I had so far is that i've noticed a difference in how my DE behaves on the Nvidia machine, on KDE with proprietary nvidia drivers the desktop animations (like closing, opening, minimizing windows) are VERY choppy (and that's mostly a problem with KDE) aside from that, nothing serious or system breaking. Hearing you talk about issues on linux with an AMD gpu has come as quite the revelation from me haha.

Can you tell me more about the 7800XT issues? I have switched to AMD 7700XT and it have worked fine for me, but I only play Diablo 4 and use Blender. But it's A LOT easier to install Nvidia to use Cuda cores in Blender than it is to get my AMD 7700XT "cuda" stuff (can't remember the name) working in Blender

This is the kind of video I was hoping someone would make. Audio drivers and frame rate mismatches for my multi-moditor setup that didn't work out of the box were two of my major issues, I hadn't even gotten far enough to figure out how to get resolve working. With NVIDIA Linux support improving, this will be really helpful to me, thanks.

Do you have any ideas on how to get Scrivener to work? I am se Cinnamon and that is my most valuable program. I probably need to go virtual drive.

The only reason I haven't switched yet is I still haven't figured out how to properly route audio and MIDI in Linux, and just trying to get anything working right ends with me inevitably breaking something...losing time and money in the process, so I get forced into going back to Windows to get any audio work done. Something on the insanity of Linux audio, and how to properly navigate it in a pro-audio setting would be a great video!

Very nice perspective and installation! (I like the old school approach!)I am not that kind of "poweruser" when it breaks down to audio/video. I mainly have some trouble with audioportswitching (rear/front) on my Debian 12 (no big thing to me). This is coming from an older version of alsa-ucm-conf. I am using "Linux" as a daily driver for 3 years+ now. Before that I used to use dualboot Win/Linux (25 years+). As everything is working for me, I finally dropped / banned Win from my SSD. ;-)

My two hurdles are my need for solidworks and my massive catalog of autohotkey automation scripts ~75000 lines. I have given up hope on solidworks ever running native, but could do a vm. Autohotkey looks like it can be mostly emulated with xdotool and autokey. What would really be ideal is a cross platform toolset, where automation logic is common and interfacing with the os is platform specific code. I see promise with using python and its keyboard package for automating keypresses and the win32com package for doing COM operations when the script is run on windows. How would you go about automating guis in linux?

I had to go back to X and pulseaudio as well, for many of the same reasons you ran into. Hyprland (wlroots 0.7+) and audio (recent pipewire) don't work in VMs anymore. An alternative to dwm is DK wm which is only a 140K binary but has many of the patches (built in and configurable externally) that you would normally apply to dwm. The only thing I miss is the wayland foot terminal, which is lightweight and has sixel support.

Really nice and all, but have you been able to solve the long standing problem of videos being decoded on the CPU rather than the dedicated decoders on GPUS when viewed in browsers?

can you make a distro or tool set to setup like yours? maybe a nix config, which anyone can just copy over and get a working davinci resolve?

Successfully installed arch multiple times but I am not able to tackle Nvidia driver, plz make a video about it

Windows can also break a lot when going through extended periods of major updates at once. It's probably some flaw of more complex desktop environments in general. I took out my windows laptop that I haven't used for a year one and a half weeks ago, let it update... And it completely broke everything. Explorer exe didn't even work. I just made a clean Windows install because screw dealing with that.

New linux user here (at least as a daily driver) with a Nvidia card. I can definitely agree that wayland is causing a lot of flickering and other issues. Since I've gone away from KDE and wayland I have less issues like that. Also as a power user I love timeshift, it has saved me a lot these days. Now that I'm commenting I wanna say, I appreciate your videos and what you do for this community, your windows utility is a fantastic tool

Do you get hardware video decoding when watching youtube?

@christitus - Can you please create a post regarding DWM install on fresh debian (with no desktop environment), Also what are the dependencies to be installed before DWM install and What are the essential softwares you installed for the basic/normal day to day use...

I totally get what you are saying, with the recent news and how it was going windows, i've been trying to drop windows all along. I switched to ubuntu studio, because i like to make some music and edit some videos and it has a low latency kernel. But in recent update from 22.04 to 24.04 for whatever reason the amd drivers are not working, there is no new version to be downloaded but the old ones refuse to work. I've been using safe mode for a month with mesa drivers which are not ideal.

Anyone have experience with software KVMs on Wayland? Something like Cursr? I use Barrier between W10 and Linux and it doesn't support Wayland, so Xorg it is, for now.

Since you asked for linux gripes, here we go. A few driver versions ago nvidia introduced a laptop feature to desktop, so called runtime D3 (RTD3). This allows you gpu to fully power down when not in use, now for home server applications this is great! The feature promises to drop you nvidia card from something like 14 watts to basically 0. However I for the life of me cannot get it to work, if you ever get the chance, do take a look at this feature. I am especially interested in how to enable it on a motherboard that doesn't have the right ACPI calls implemented by the board vendor. Perhaps by patching the DSDT of SSDT tables.

As with most with Linux usage, the desire is to keep using the latest and greatest without real consideration for stability. As Chris even said, "I had issues upgrading from Plasma 5 to 6". There's no reason to do that if you want stability! That's tinkering. Stick with LTS's and stable versions and you'll typically be just fine!

does he have an image for his deployment for download? Would be curious to run in proxmox just to try it out.

enjoy your stuff Chris! I've been trying my best in the past 6 months to migrate from Windows 11 to Linux, and I've settled on Fedora. My main issue is I have a AMD graphics card, and while Resolve launches fine, it just does nothing. I've read it has to do with h264 encoding, or it could be a combination of my graphics card as well. Not sure if you've seen or heard of similar problems? It just looks like I'm going to have to keep some sort of Windows 11 just for video editing and photo projects.

As a Ham radio operator, many technologies I want to use involve computing. With Linux the classic search is for the USB port that my radio or other device is using, then we want GPS and the accurate timing it brings, on the go, so we can do digital modes in the field. Lastly, sound. The software creates sounds to send through the radios, and many operators have difficulty with Linux's handling of sound.

I have random intermittent crashes when running VMWare Workstation, Islands of Insight, and some other high-usage things such as Chivalry 2 without proper error anywhere I looked, especially dmesg, on my 7900XTX. The crashes occur on both x11 and wayland testing with hyprland, sway, i3, kde, xfce, and openbox. I just stopped troubleshooting it at some point because I stopped having to do the stuff which resulted in the crashes being annoying/moved on from those games for other reasons anyway.

I've been using Nvidia and Xorg for 10 years. Everything works fine. Resolve has always worked well for me, but I switched all my video/audio editing workflow on an Apple Silicon Mac. I've used tiling window managers, and various DEs. GNOME has always been the one that gave me less issues. I recently switched to KDE Plasma just to try it out after years. It was semidecent until the upgrade to Plasma 6, which is garbage...I think all the issues in Linux desktop boil down to the DE and the audio stack. So far I've been very happy with the switch to pipewire, but I think I'll nuke any DE and move to dwm myself (and stay on Xorg) since I'm learning C anyways