The biggest issue for most casual users starting remains picking a distro, and to that end I think we as a Linux community need to stop recommending flavors of the month. Even Bazzite has come up against some recent drama and having to break down distro drama for a new users is an absolute deal breaker.
Based on their skill level and needs just get them into a bucket: Mint, Fedora, or Arch. They’ve been around forever, they’re stable, there’s plentiful documentation and there are no weird opinionated decisions buried in them that’ll go off like a landmine or confound troubleshooting. Install the Nvidia proprietary drivers, I’ve had less issues with those (until recently I dunno, we can revisit this point) but overall just everything simple and smooth for a transition.
Once people are on Linux they can start to come up with their own informed opinions depending on how well they take to the environment but at the same time there’s nothing wrong with starting and ending with the above distros.
(I actually don’t know much about Fedora, there might be a slightly better variant recommendation but it’s gotta be something analogous to Mint. I’m pretty adamant on vanilla Arch though, if that’s the route you want to go. Anyone who starts with Arch will be able to better determine an Arch variant down the road for themselves and are also more likely to do multiple installs. Doing so much as even a single reinstall may be a deal breaker for casuals).
deleted by creator
for a moment I’d like to disregard Linux.
fuck this bleached asshole and his bullshit. fuck his viewpoint on unions, fuck his viewpoint on worker rights, fuck his viewpoint on warranties, fuck his missinfo peddling of a company and fuck his company a 2nd time for allowing employee misconduct.
recall when GN called them out on their shit in private but they did not give a fuck? then when they got exposed did they finally get their panties in a knot. any1 else notice the typical corporate response? oh we just had a major controversy? time for the CEO to step down to a totally diff C suite position (trust me bro) and it’ll all blow over.
Linux ain’t the only thing to get bashed by this particular soyboy. any1 watch the GrapheneOS video? don’t bother. the thumbnail still depicts those that use it to be criminals (so did the title b4 they got backlash). I will judge a fucking book by its cover cuz fuck you.
now for our beloved Linux. most of PewDiePie’s career used to be shitposting, but then he built a damn PC and installed Linux on it w/o announcing it. and sm how this corpo cocksucking sleazebag despite being in the industry for alleged 20 yrs doesn’t know jackshit on how to operate a computer running a different operating system? hand me a laptop running FreeBSD and watch me figure that shit out in 3 days w/o having ever used it. oh right he’s a corpo cocksucking sleazebag.
deleted by creator
For anyone interested, in regards to the employee abuse claims. A 3rd party law firm was brought in for an investigation at the expense of LMG. 8 months later the results of the investigation were posted here:
https://xcancel.com/LinusTech/status/1793428629378208057
Some of the highlights are below:
In summary, as confirmed by the investigation, the allegations made against the team were largely unfounded, misleading, and unfair.
Or more specifically the investigation found that:
Claims of bullying and harassment were not substantiated.
Allegations that sexual harassment were ignored or not addressed were false.
Any concerns that were raised were investigated. Furthermore, from reviewing our history, the investigator is confident that if any other concerns had been raised, we would have investigated them.
There was no evidence of “abuse of power” or retaliation. The individual involved may not have agreed with our decisions or performance feedback, but our actions were for legitimate work-related purposes, and our business reasons were valid.
Allegations of process errors and miscommunication while onboarding this individual were partially substantiated, but the investigator found ample documentary evidence of LMG working to rectify the errors and the individual being treated generously and respectfully. When they had questions, they were responded to and addressed.
I am still a bit skeptical tho especially w the “at the expense of LMG” part. to me its kinda like “we investigated ourselves and found we did nothing wrong”. if the lawfirm is highly regarded then perhaps their word could be trusted. regardless thank you for the enlightenment. I stopped following LMG around the time GN dropped their nuke and have not kept in touch.
He picked PopOS again???
Look, I have nothing against people who prefer Pop. But the issue with Steam last time around gave me a very negative impression of it. A few months ago I organized a local Linux install party and tried giving it a chance. I could not get the damn thing to install, even after trying multiple ISOs. You can say “skill issue” but if you want a headache-free distro, which Linus very clearly does, my recommendation is to try something else. If Pop works for you, again, more power to you.
deleted by creator
Think of him what you want, but I think this nicely shows the problems that “gamers” will encounter when switching to linuxand gives a good view from outside the Linux community
He set himself up for failure again with PopOS.
Cachy and Bazzite are much better choices by the other team members.
I can tell I’m in a bubble because I was shocked Bazzite wasn’t the top recommended distro basically everywhere someone might search “Linux gaming distro”
Trying to go for a “Linux gaming distro” is the wrong thing to do in the first place, IMO. Even if they’re gamers, they’re switching the computers they use for everything. What they needed was a general-purpose distro and then to install Steam or whatever on top of that.
The notion of a “gaming distro” should be considered harmful for everything other than maybe running it on one of those Steam Deck knock-offs.
Hard disagree. Gaming is the task that needs the most complicated setup with lots of pitfalls – kernel version, Wine settings, GPU drivers, X11 vs. Wayland, even your DE can affect how many issues you’ll have.
IMO if you want to play any games at all, use a distro set up specifically for gaming, to let someone else do all that work for you.
For all other tasks you’ll do with your PC, a “gaming” distro will be just as good as any other.No, it seriously doesn’t! Here are the actual steps, unabridged and in full, that I go through to game on Linux:
- Install Kubuntu
sudo apt install steam- There is no step 3; it just fucking works.
You are posting FUD and misinformation. Knock it off.
You knock it off, there are so many small issues a distro like bazzite fixes that kubuntu won’t have patches for out of the box. Discord screen sharing, for one.
Then in steam you have to direct steam to use proton for almost every game with a Linux build because almost none of them actually work correctly.
Also, if you’re directing the average joe to use the terminal, it’s too hard. Seriously. It needs a polished, self explanatory GUI. If the app store version of steam isn’t good enough, then its not a good distro to recommend. Even then an app store might be too hard, many people are used to downloading apps from their website, and that problem hasn’t been solved by many distros, either.
Which is kind of the point of the video.
They explicitly said: they could get expert opinion and support.
But when you use a search engine as an everage joe to find what distro to install, popOS comes up a lot on those shit listicles sites.
Honestly, I think lots of people are hating on him just because. Pop is still highly recommended on a random Google search, and his reasons to pick it are legit. Plus he acknowledged that last time the issue was user error + unimaginable level of bad luck, and removing that there would be no reason for him not to use it. Also if you saw the WAN show he also installed Bazzite and Kubuntu on two other systems and got two other issues.
As much as I want to say he did something bad like last time, this time I don’t see it, his issues are legit and to dismiss them because he’s using an “unstable” (that is the default and recommended) DE or because he chose a distro that is in the top recommendations on every site out there is disingenuous.
On which website is Pop_OS! the top recommendation?
Tell me you didn’t even saw the video without telling me you didn’t even saw the video. But you want an extra one? This one, here’s the link to the pinned thread on this same community where the top 3 recommendations for beginner distros are Fedora, Mint and Pop: https://lemm.ee/post/37682729
Is watching the video a requirement to participate with the comment I wrote?
Not really, but this is a reply to most comments here about the video so without seeing the video and reading some of the other comments you are missing a lot of context. In the video Linus shows several different sites that recommend Pop, he even looks for recent sites written by people specifically because he got some bad comments about using listacle articles before. He also asks chatGPT, and while that’s not exactly reliable it is based on average messages online so it’s not fully random. Also, like I pointed out, the community we’re using to discuss this also lists is as recommended, which goes to show it’s not a fluke of the sites he used but that it is generally recommend broadly.
The fact that he asks ChatGPT should tell you all you need to know about his professionalism.
Besides, all top 10 websites that are returned by i.e. Google Search list either Ubuntu or Linux Mint as the best choice for beginners.In rhe video, in case you did not watch it, he made the point to use the distro any user coming from wondows was likely to choose. So asking chatgpt was an explicit and natural process in the selection.
But go on concluding shit about the video and its professionalism without watching it, you are doing great mate.
