I did the switch to full time linux gaming a few weeks ago.

Initially I was on PoP OS but I wasn't happy with it. I reinstalled everything on Cachyos and it has been very good so far.

Here are the main "hurdles" that I think I should not have encountered in my "liberation" :

• I activated FDE in cachyos but the LUKS decryption prompt was never on my keyboard layout so I could never decrypt with the original key. I should not have to handle keyboard layout issues when decrypting FDE. This would be fatal to any beginner.
• I still think the tinkering with proton is too involved. Some command line arguments should be activated automatically depending on your setup. Players should be able to anonymously opt-in to sharing settings for all the game they start.
• Mouse sensitivity is wonky on many linux distros for gaming. Mouse acceleration should not be a default if you target gamers. I dont care if original Arch has this default. 99% of FPS players avoid it.

That being said, leaving Windows makes me incredibly happy and I'm very thankful for the great opportunity the open source community has given me through great free software.

Way to ignore the BIGGEST point in my comment to hyper focus on a secondary point just for ego.

Fuck off with that. I am only participating in this conversation solely because I'm sick and tired of seeing influencers like Other Linus flounder and damage the reputation of Linux because they keep taking trendy bad advice spouted by people like you.

This is your key disconnect. You see the OS as an experience. Most people don’t. They see it as a tool to get want they want.

🙄

Quit reaching, you're only damaging your credibility even further.

It doesn't work better or worse on Ubuntu. The fact it (partially) uses Ubuntu libraries matters very little given that the libraries are 14 years old.... But I think the client now mostly relies on Debian 12 libraries to run since a year or two ago.

In this case, the DE is the main cause of issue, not the distro base.

That PUBG fails, is clear. You just won’t have a good time with anti cheat based games like PUBG, Fortnite and the like.

Wanna play those? Stay on Windows or get a console. Just how it still is.

And problems with capture cards I would not book in the „normie“ camp, which on a basic level is the goal of this video series.

Mmm, this is kind of what I'm talking about. I'm certainly not knocking Nobara as a distro or people who prefer it, but taken from their FAQ,

1. Will there ever be other Desktop Environment versions?
   No. The ‘Official’ modified KDE release layout was designed for myself and my father out of personal preference.

1. I heard Nobara breaks SELinux, is this true?
   No. We have completely swapped SELinux in favor of AppArmor (this is what Ubuntu and OpenSUSE use).

1. Is Nobara compatible with SecureBoot?
   No. Nobara ships with a kernel that has been custom patched and is built and hosted on COPR.

1. Can I upgrade from Fedora to Nobara using the Nobara repositories?
   NO. This is a big large huge NO. The Nobara install ISOs have a ton of packages that get installed which are specific to Nobara, and not installed on Fedora on fresh install.

1. Just how modified is Nobara aside from what I can see?
   Heavily.

1. This project is quite new, is it going anywhere? Is there anything to say it won’t just up stop development? Is it something that is recommendable to daily drive? (I am quite technical, and can troubleshoot my issues).
   As long as I am alive and using linux this project will continue. It started because I needed something both myself and my father could easily use from clean install without time consuming troubleshooting or extra package and repo installation.

It's been around since ~2022 compared to Mint in ~2006

These are exactly the kind of points that a casual, new user would stumble across and in attempting to troubleshoot things from a Fedora perspective could trip them up severely.

My point is that casual users are already averse to making the switch and they are likely going to do ONE install and it needs to be as vanilla and stable as possible. If they turn into Linux nerds who want to distro hop later, they'll find their way, but we need to keep things absolutely stock and simple.

I would if I could handle significant downtime on my computer. I absolutely cannot have my only device not working for some elements of my life at the moment, so I'm hesitant to just swap and hope. Someone else recommended testing live distros, though, so I may try that for a couple weeks just to see if anything goes wrong.

I also had some issues with hyprland and steam. That's why i changed back to KDE. Luke made a great choice to leave hyprland for a later day.

I was watching an lmg clips video about it last night, and personally found it very unreasonable how he said a game that supposedly worked without tinkering, actually needed tinkering because he had to use proton experimental and add a simple launch command. Maybe i'm an out of touch linux user but... what? Is he really saying it's that difficult to select proton experimental from a gui dropdown menu, and then copy paste a simple command? There are probably games out there on native windows that require more tinkering than that. If you literally want no tinkering at all, you're probably better of with a console, which is ironic considering linus is mainly a pc gamer.

I appreciate the advice! All my looking around so far has me thinking Mint or Bazzite, but I think Mint will end up being what I go with so I actually learn how to troubleshoot in case I need to move to something else in the future.

I'll look for a free drive and try and test this afternoon!

Yeah if it is a work laptop then your caution is warranted. The thing about linux is, eventually something will go wrong. However, with the slightest inclination and some internet searching skills you can always fix the issue. Windows and Mac like to fight you when you want to tinker with something, but Linux facilitates it.

I had different results. I work in IT and understand the comprehension levels of the average user. The top result was a distribution where the Wikipedia was in Portuguese. No update in 5 years. https://distrochooser.de/en/d5cf19cdf504/

I'm a fairly advanced user of gnu Linux distros at this point in my life. Fedora is no where close to straightforward for gaming. Bazzite is plug and play set and forget. Is it frustrating to deal with flatpaks and osm-tree instead of simply using a standard package manager? Sometimes, sure. But for an absolute beginner there really is no better option for gaming as a fresh convert from windows.

Audio problems and nvidia drivers can be an absolute nightmare on almost all major distros from Debian to Ubuntu, to fedora if you don't have an absurdly advanced grasp of the processes underlying.

Bazitte takes all of that out of the picture. It's absolutely not a meme distro. It's perfect for an average tech literate person.

I use arch btw, Debian, fedora, Pop, lubuntu, Ubuntu, and a half dozen other distros on a daily basis across a handful of devices. So I'm not daily driving Bazitte, but for gaming and general purpose computing there's no simpler distro imo and I'll die on that hill.

Part of the problem is that people have gotten lazy. I’d say the biggest advent of people losing touch with the actually tech is windows 7. It had everything at your fingertips. No need to look for drivers, little need for compatibility changes or added set up requirements. Couple that with nvidia automatically adjusting “best settings” for your rig on a per-game basis and you’ve got what we have now. People don’t want to learn and they’ve forgotten how we got here. Unfortunately, click and run seems to be the consumer de facto now and it isn’t going to go away.

Well that's just plain silly.

He's said a couple of times that he's trying to view it through the lens of a casual, non-technical user, and the fact that similar problems also exist on Windows doesn't stop them from being problems.

Lemme guess, he runs into a very minor snag and then runs rm -rf -no-preserve-root / because ThAtS hOw NoRmAl UsErS wOuLd Do ThInGs.

Apparently it is, given what happened in the video!

Linus's problems in the video stem from him installing an Ubuntu based distro. His problems on Discord have been resolved in newer versions, which Ubuntu and Pop!_OS don't ship with yet, while distros based on Fedora and Arch do. And guess what? I said to install Bazzite, a Fedora-based distro.

The other guy's (not Luke) problem with screen scaling / framerate is mosy likely due to the HDMI forum refusing to allow support for HDMI 2.1 on Linux, limiting his bitrate. HDMI can't do 4k/120+hz without that suppory

And the reason I'm calling you a prick is because you're going through and whining that nobody is trying Ubuntu, when Ubuntu is not the right solution for them. Ubuntu doesn't work for everyone's use case. Get over it.

He's a moron but yeah copying and pasting a command is beyond normies. They would want to get the command from LLMs for one thing, which would almost guarantee it wouldn't work.

Yeah, don't partition your drive just to dual boot Linux. While Bazzite has an install option for only patching the bootloader when Windows breaks it, having to run it after most Windows updates is still not something you should sign up for

I don't understand how these tech people can be so bad with researching things and then installing a distro.

we never tell newbies what to base their distro choice upon

I don't find that to be true at all

we as a Linux community need to stop recommending flavors of the month.

That's not my experience of what happens. In fact I think it's a problem that 95% of the suggestions I see are for Mint, and, unpopular opinion, I actually think Mint kinda sucks.

Think of him what you want,

Will do. He keeps damaging the reputation of the only real alternative to windows and he might be getting paid by Microsoft to do it. The last time he did this was fucking absurd. The terminal basically told him not to type a command unless he absolutely knew well what he was doing and he did it anyway. I will always maintain that if a user reads a lengthy and terrifying warning and then proceeds without any research, they have invited data and OS loss.

True, but I wish Linus had tried switching distros, or at least not using a distro he's already had issues with in the past. A lot of his problems are stemming from using an Ubuntu-based distro and COSMIC being a brand new DE that still has a bug of bugs to quash.

Hopefully in the next couple of weeks they do a collab with Wendel to go over what were the causes of their problems and final recommendations. Sure, the listicles for Linux distros are useless, but having a conclusion from trusted voices informed by people with a lot of experience (aka Luke and Wendel) would do a lot of good by cutting through the bullshit.

I advise against dual booting from one drive anyhow. Not because it doesn't work just fine in concept, but because windows literally nukes the boot data randomly sometimes. It's fucking insane but it's a real thing that happens. Seems like something you can only call malware but instead we call it windows.

It's been around since ~2022 compared to Mint in ~2006

A distro that's been around for 3-4 years is plenty of time to be up and running. Bazzite runs great and has been around a similar amount of time.

Another thing that people don't factor in: documentation gets outdated. When I was trying to set up my Ubuntu server, a lot of documentation on what I needed was 11-12 years old, and the syntax has changed since then. For newbies, this may as well just be "figure it out yourself".

Between this, his alleged mistreatment of employees, his problematic takes on unions and worker power, his incorrect reporting proven by other tech reporters, and all the staff I actually enjoyed watching leaving and starting their own channels…I dunno why anyone gives this fucking ass clown the time of day anymore.

Stay on Windows then, you corporate fuckboy! Enjoy XBox cloud gaming and never owning anything again.

I think the real point is that Pop!_OS (and most Ubuntu based distros) shouldn't be recommended for gaming.

That is 100% COSMIC jank. He chose Pop!_OS again and System76 has been annoyingly shipping a beta desktop environment on their stable distro.

I like COSMIC and System76, but this is an annoying decision by them and Linus does shitty research so he doesn't know he's running beta software and he'll associate this with Linux being janky again 🙄

PewDiePie has probably brought more people to Linux single-handedly than LTT ever did.

No, you fuck off.

You're the one going on about "the performance doesn't matter when you can't set up the gaming distro". For Luke and Elijah, setting up CachyOS and Bazzite went fine. When they did have issues, the specific distro choice wasn't the cause.

YOU'RE the one whinging about "why don't they recommend Ubuntu!" Linus going with an Ubuntu-based distro is the cause of half of his problems, and switching to Ubuntu itself wouldn't have fixed them.

Do I think the video was perfect? No. But your takeaway from the video is ridiculous

A useful video would be a bunch of people beating on stuff (off-screen or in an extended cut) to figure out what's actually easy and reliable for beginners, then presenting that information. It would get approximately 237 views, which is roughly a million fewer than the linked video has at this time.

What succeeds on Youtube is entertainment first and information a distant second. A video where everyone sat down in a quiet environment with no pressure, installed a reasonable Linux distribution, and had a smooth experience wouldn't be very entertaining.

I've got a laptop from 2012 that still works like new lmao. Not a chance that would be the case under Windows

Good luck getting Marathon to run on that without bugs. The distro won't be getting the needed driver updates for 6 months.

You're the one making it personal and lying about my motivations. Regardless of what you think of the merits of my arguments about the actual topic, everyone can see that you're being an uncivil asshole.

Yeah, agree that choosing the same distro again was kind of silly, but understand wanting to give it a second try. I was also disappointed by the decision though.

Was glad to see Luke choose CachyOS. I slapped it on a small gaming machine a couple of months ago and have been quite happy with it.

You might be right, I'm not even sure what his actual intelligence level is and I didn't express myself well. I just don't like the fuck. He was at his most charming when he did the video with Actual Linus™ and he still kind of got on my nerves. And unlike some others, I do not think his criticism of Linux is constructive. And unlike others, I do not find the gamer Nexus expose on him to be a dismissable hit piece, because to me it showed a shady corrupt business relationship with hardware companies and sloppy benchmarking. Not to mention the sexual harassment accusations, which I find credible.

I mean I get your point, but it seems like at the current point in time, "Gaming" distros also happen to be the distros that produce the least amount of weird issues and headaches for someone new to Linux, especially if you're on Nvidia. Bazzite in particular has been incredibly smooth sailing in a way I've seen no other distro achieve so far. And it does have a non-Gaming sibling distro if you don't want that stuff.

Oh no, not this clown again. Is he running out of content? For sure.

No one ever asked him about linux things, yet he still wishes to share his imbecile opnions with the world. What a joke!

Mint is the most similar environment for Windows to more easily transfer over and get used to?

Mint kernel version appears rather old - does it support the latest AMD GPUs out of the box?

The real problem with these videos is that Linus decides to try and emulate the average user, but then refuses to do even the smallest amount of troubleshooting "because the average user wouldn't do it". So it leads to a lot of moments where something doesn't work out of the box, there's a trivially simple solution that comes up as the first Google search result (if you ignore Gemini's output), but he doesn't bother and just throws his hands up (like the average user would, I guess).

It just gets frustrating, because their Linux videos end up being entertainment first, and educational... fifth, maybe?

I think it's fair to call out reviews that say:

"This works out of the box, and requires no tinkering at all. Anyways, here's what you'll need to do to get it to work."

Having to tinker with settings and commands is literally not what "requires no tinkering" means.

Maybe modern search engines are part of the problem here. A local computer geek can probably offer better advice (better "tech tips" if you will).

Try out some live boot disks then. Several flavors of linux will just boot up, and give you the option to install from within the booted OS. I forget which ones lwt you change things and basically treat them like normal, but some will even carry over any made changes right through the install (if you tell it to, anyways).

Then, you'll just have to identify any critical applications you need and see if they run on linux, or have any viable alternatives that do, or worst case try to run the windows flavor through Wine or proton or so.

If you need stability above all, I'd recommend avoiding the bleeding edge distros or the young ones that are changing a lot. It sounds odd, but I've been digging MX Linux a lot, and I've tried a good few flavors over the years. It's based on Debian Stable, so it's repos won't be the bleeding edge, but it has that classic Debian "Just Works" going for it. The only bugs I've had have been issues from Wayland that also affect other distros.

not them, but no, its you.

your the one bitching people use Linux differently than you

His entire OG staff is evaporating and he's letting them rip pieces off the boat they helped him build to do so. I honestly wish I could never see this dude's face or hear his voice again, but his slop is so ubiquitous it's impossible to escape.

But Zip Tie Tech is a fun channel that's come from the ashes of LTTs reputation.

They did use Mint in a previous video, and in the comment field on Youtube there's rumors he'll be trying Kubuntu since Pop was so buggy.

Elijah putting one monitor behind the corner of his primary monitor is giving me SUCH anxiety omg how has it not cracked yet!