- cross-posted to:
- linux_gaming@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- linux_gaming@lemmy.ml
Follow-up video to https://lemmy.world/post/32690521
Spoiler alert: the main reason he says the experience “hasn’t been great” is because shortly before posting the video his Linux install mysteriously broke and he had no idea why. Therefore, he recommended dual-booting Windows just in case.
Cue sea of comments explaining that the reason for the error he was getting was that Windows screwed up his bootloader (i.e. the problem was caused by dual-booting to begin with, LOL).
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average tech youtuber not knowing anything about tech
Hey, at least he’s up-front about it and didn’t type in
yes, do as I say!like Other Linus did.Complaining about Linus doing things like an inexperienced user when that is the whole point of the test is pretty stupid, honestly.
I would expect someone who knows just enough to follow troubleshooting using the command line but not knowing how powerful it can be would do the exact same thing in his position.
As I recall, the prompt was particularly clear about what was about to happen, hence the extra
yes, do as I say!response. Linus was either too stupid or too arrogant to realize that he was out of his depth and should consult someone with more experience.Ignorance and stupidity are very different things. This wasn’t a Chernobyl situation where the emergency scram button triggered a hidden flaw. This was a “PRESSING THIS BUTTON WILL IMMEDIATELY AND DEFINITIVELY NUKE, RUIN, DESTROY YOUR SYSTEM” situation.
Most people who has never dealt with Linux will ever understand that having to type a sentence signifies that it is an important message that needs to be read thoroughly. Its more likely for them to think its just a quirk of using Linux distros, such as using sudo.
Honestly, the average person would never figured that out unless they’ve had experience with it before. Most people can’t even read short error messages after something has gone wrong, let alone lines of text full of technical terms they have never seen before in the process of figuring out something as mundane as installing Steam.
I seriously think you guys are a bit out of touch with how non-technical people deals with their OS. The fact that you think its arrogance that made him not consult people instead of him playing the role of a non-technical person really says a lot about your own comprehension skills.
Do not pretend like Linus Sebastian is your tech illiterate grandmother. He’s a clown today, but he has had experience with computers in the past. Of all people, he should have known better.
No. Doing things because you’re inexperienced is one thing, but reading a very strongly-worded and scary message that explicitly told him that it was about to break his system and then doing it anyway is on another level entirely.
As much as I fucking cant stand him, I have to say… in that case, Most new users would do exactly what he did.
Computer users always get hit with big ominous warning messages that amount to nothing 99.9% of the time. IIRC the reason something happened that time wasnt because Linus ignored the warning message, but because of a known bug in that version of the distro that was known about and wasnt fixed in the installer for months, until the video came out, that caused the DE to be removed when uninstalling something else… Which is just pants on head and should have been fixed long before the video came out.
Besides, and I say this as a non-technical non-sysadmin linux user… the overwhelming amount of tech support for linux doesnt encourage knowing what commands do, it encourages copy and pasting… because almost all the tech support solutions I’ve ever found basically amount to “if you have X problem, copy Y command into terminal to fix it” with no explanation on why it works, just that it (hopefully) does.
Computer users always get hit with big ominous warning messages that amount to nothing 99.9% of the time.
This is yet another instance of blaming Linux for Windows’ bad behavior.
He said, on a topic, about a big ominous message on linux, that would have done nothing at all… if it wasnt for the bug known for months in the distro, that they refused to fix until it got bad press from a popular youtube video.
But yes, its windows fault. /s
Right, that’s my point: when Linux gives a big ominous message, it’s because it’s actually important. If the distro hadn’t had that bug, it wouldn’t have given the big ominous message.
Remember, the bug wasn’t the warning message itself. The bug was removing the DE when installing Steam, which the message correctly warned about. The warning message was appropriate and warranted.
It is Windows, and only Windows, that mis-trains users to ignore warnings because it issues so many spurious ones for benign situations.
I’ve been gaming on Linux on both Deck and Desktop for a while now and I like it, but I also have to admit that it’s not without issues. Thanks to Steam and Proton, most games really do “just work”, but some, especially non-Steam games or related tools like launchers, plugin/mod managers can cause issues and may need more effort to get running, which can be difficult for people with little Linux experience. I also recognise that not everyone wants to have to deal with that and I think that’s fair. And I get the impression that many Linux gamers underestimate their own skills and how much the average non-tech person would have to learn to be able to have a similarly good experience.
Updates can also just break games. I’s happened to me with Trackmania when the stupid Ubisoft launcher suddenly wouldn’t work anymore, or Blizzard games like World of Warcraft and Starcraft 2, which started having graphical issues. Slay the Spire, after a patch, always launched on the wrong screen and refused to let me move it to the primary one.
Disclaimer: I’m on a non-gaming focused, but popular distro (Fedora).
Slay the Spire in particular has a Linux native version. You shouldn’t have any issues with that.
Yeah I don’t know what’s up with that, but I’m not the only with this issue and funnily enough running the game with Proton fixes it.
The other two main TL;DWs are that:
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He justifiably complained about PVP games having non-Linux-compatible kernel-level anti-cheat.
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His benchmark testing showed a big performance difference between Windows and Linux on his system, which has an AMD Radeon 7900 XTX. Being an admitted noob, he didn’t notice that it was an unusual discrepancy and figured that worse gaming performance in Linux was “real,” but a bunch of folks in the comments are telling him that RDNA 3 drivers have a known issue that means the card probably isn’t running at full power and tweaking the settings can probably fix it.
tweaking the settings can probably fix it.
Which is another points against Linux. Stuff should work correctly out of the box. That’s what average user expects.
Oh yeah because spending half a day manually downloading and installing a zillion drivers and their bloat and rebooting between each install is peak ootb-functionality.
Meanwhile I was in CP2077 literally 5 minutes after booting a fresh install of Bazzite. On the exact same computer.
Cringe.
Stuff should work correctly out of the box.
That’s why Windows isn’t ready for mass adoption
Its not the fault of linux that the hardware manufacturer doesnt make functioning drivers tho…
Yes it is.
For the end user, if one platform has driver support and the other one doesn’t, then one platform works and the other one does not.
“It’s not my bug” is a thing engineers get to say to close issues on their backlog, but it doesn’t magically fix the problem for the end user if the other side says the same thing (or doesn’t care).
If you want people to use Linux, then Linux has to work, and that includes the third party drivers.
The user perceiving it as such, doesnt make it so. It makes a difference because if you acknowledge and make visible that it is AMDs fault, then they will be more likely to fix their shitty driver. Over all linux does have much better hardware support than windows, but with newer hardware the vendors are just oddly slow sometimes.
It does make it so.
I get so tired of shouting this from the rooftops in the general direction of FOSS devs and advocates. UX is the only thing that matters. If the user can’t use it, it doesn’t exist.
No, Linux doesn’t have “much better hardware support than Windows”. It is harder to set up and maintain, so it’s worse. It doesn’t matter if you can make it work. It doesn’t matter if you can make things work that don’t work on Windows. If I plug it in and it doesn’t go, then it’s worse.
This doesn’t make me mad because I want to defend Windows, this makes me mad because I really, REALLY want Linux to do well, along with other FOSS alternatives to enshittified commercial software, and this is an absolute brick wall blocker for that. I don’t know how FOSS spaces take away control from whiny engineers who think the current situation is functional, but somebody needs a UX equivalent of a Linus Torvalds shouting abuse at coworkers about how garbage their UX is (that everybody finds hilarious for some reason. Maybe the next step is getting some HR).
It is harder to set up and maintain
Its really not tho. Have you installed Windows 11 to a PC? Shit takes forever to remove all the ads, garbage and AI features. You literally have to edit the registry to get a usable system. Installing a popular linux distro takes like 5 minutes and then you just install whatever software you need. Any normal consumer device you plug in just works out of the box, no need to install drivers that are then again filled with bloat, ads and often even malicious code or vulnerabilities. Like ffs sake Windows 11 doesnt even function at all on a good portion of desktop computers in use today because of the TPM requirement.
Just last weekend i helped someone that never used linux before to switch. The actual install took less than 5 minutes. GPU drivers come preinstalled with the distro and work out of the box. Then another 30 minutes or so of installing and setting up all the programs they need. Another 30 minutes to copy all their old files over and explaining some general differences and thats it. Literally zero tinkering required and they are happily playing their steam games at peak performance.
Ofcourse you can get unlucky with your hardware which then involves a very annoying amount of tinkering, but when the baseline on windows is already fuckloads of tinkering then having to do tinkering sometimes is not at all a bad trade off.
I dual boot on most of my devices and I have PCs around the house going back to Windows 95.
I am also proposing that “just this week I installed Linux for my mom” becomes the next “year of Linux desktop” and is treated with similar derision, because man.
In all seriousness, this is delusional. All Windows devices out there work out of the box and come with Windows preinstalled, so there isn’t an installation in the first place, just a first time setup. Installing Windows the way I like it takes some tinkering, but MS’s assumption is that most normies don’t have a way they like at all and will happily take the default. They are right about this.
There is certainly more clicking on a Windows install in that you have to say no to a bunch of stuff, but it’s ultimately fairly equivalent these days.
The problem with Linux isn’t installing it (sweaty Arch users aside), the problem is what happens next. You can get lucky and have everything work, particularly with Bazzite and other distros that have a narrow focus and provide specific installers targeted to specific hardware, but if something in your PC doesn’t work out of the box you’re SoL.
In the example from this video the guy found out their AMD GPU was running about 25% slower than expected, so now what? And that’s before he reaches an ungraceful boot failure and is stuck out of the OS instead of going into an automated recovery process.
You have to troubleshoot on Windows as well, as you do on any computer, but the likelihood of hitting an issue in the first place is lower due to it being the baseline platform, and the paths to a resolution are also more streamlined. That’s the definition of harder to set up and maintain.
The sooner the Linux community gets over the delusional bubble they live in after getting their systems set up and fine tuned the faster a transition to Linux for more people will be. The delusional rah-rah isn’t helping.
I should add that in my experience Linux developers and maintainers are WAY less unrealistic about the current state of Linux in these areas than vocal online advocates. This is more a community problem than a development or strategy problem, although there’s some of both in there as well.
No, Linux doesn’t have “much better hardware support than Windows”. It is harder to set up and maintain, so it’s worse. It doesn’t matter if you can make it work. It doesn’t matter if you can make things work that don’t work on Windows. If I plug it in and it doesn’t go, then it’s worse.
Meanwhile all five generations of GCN are varying levels of abandoned officially on Windows while Mesa supports AMD cards going back to GCN1, and even more recently started to enable AMDGPU support by default on GCN1 and 2.
But yeah, as for Windows having better support, GCN1-3 are long since buried officially for that OS, and Polaris and Vega have a foot in the grave at this point as they’re curtailed to security updates only officially on Windows, contrasted against Mesa still actively supporting that older hardware. Also, can’t emulate RT on RX 5000-series and older cards on Windows, while you can on Linux.
And yes, I’m aware of R.ID modded drivers for those older cards in Windows, but for this context, I’m only counting official driver support.
You are listing edge cases. Nobody cares.
You buy a laptop, you install Linux and it goes. That’s the bar for mainstream usage.
If you have an older computer that no longer gets MS or AMD updates it’s cool that Linux can be installed on it and be marginally safer, but it’s disingenuous to not acknowledge that in that scenario unsupported Windows still works, by definition. For people on older hardware their older hardware is already working.
Linux can, at best, have a lighter footprint (and be less full of decades of leftover garbage) and make some forward compatibility available on very old devices, but it’s not unlocking hardware that wasn’t working because it didn’t have drivers. Windows does do that in general, and especially for newer or niche hardware. Lying to ourselves about this is not doing anybody any favours.
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