 So a few weeks ago Linus and Luke from Linus Media Group, which is the parent company behind the Linus Tech Tips channel on YouTube. These guys decided they were going to do a Linux challenge. They were both going to switch away from Windows to Linux on their home computers and there was a punishment. The one that switches back to Windows first is going to get punished in some way. So these guys have been trying out Linux and it's really great because this is huge news for the Linux community because Linus Tech Tips is the biggest tech-related channel on YouTube. They're not just the biggest tech-related channel. Linus Tech Tips is actually the 11th biggest channel on the entire YouTube platform. That's tens of millions of people that have never heard about Linux or considered using Linux. They're not going to hear about Linux for the very first time from the Linus Tech Tips channel. And while Linus and Luke's Linux challenge, I'm sure it's going to be very entertaining. It's going to be some fun content to watch. You know, these guys, they don't have that much Linux experience. Their Linux experience is rather limited. I'm not sure if they're the ones to properly introduce Linux to the world. I think it would be better for a seasoned Linux veteran to do that. And that's why I'm making today's video. I want to introduce you guys properly to the world of Linux. So what is Linux? Well, technically speaking, Linux is not a complete operating system unto itself. Linux is actually just the kernel. Now what is a kernel? Well, a kernel is the main component of an operating system. It's the core component. It's basically your core interface between your hardware and the processes that run on your computer. The kernel, it communicates between your hardware and the processes that are running. And that way, the kernel basically manages your system's resources as efficiently as possible. The kernel is so named because it's almost like a seed or a pit or a kernel of a fruit or a vegetable. Think of like a peach. Think of the pit of a peach. It's basically a big seed in the middle of that peach. And it really doesn't do much. Like if you had a peach that was nothing but that pit, it's kind of useless, right? And that's the same way with an operating system. The kernel by itself can't do anything. And the same thing with that peach. That peach with that pit, without the fleshy goodness around it, we really don't have much use for that peach, right? That's the same thing with our operating system. So on desktop computers and servers, we have the GNU utilities in conjunction with the Linux kernel. And that creates the operating system on our desktop computers. And because that's GNU utilities with the Linux kernel, sometimes people refer to desktop Linux as GNU slash Linux. But you can combine the Linux kernel with other suites of software and other core utilities to create other kinds of operating systems. For example, there are billions of phones around the world that use Android as their operating system. The Android operating system, at the heart of it, sits a Linux kernel. Linux actually runs on countless billions of devices around the world. We're talking about from computers to phones to cars to kiosks to TVs to microwaves to refrigerators. Linux actually powers most of the world's computing devices. So why use Linux instead of Windows or macOS? Well, back to specifically talking about desktop computers, why run Linux instead of Microsoft Windows? I could probably list a hundred different reasons why Linux is just plain better than Windows. But just to limit myself for sake of time, I'm only going to name a few of the biggest reasons why Linux is better than Windows. Number one, Linux is faster than Windows. That's just a fact. Linux is much, much, much faster than Windows, especially on older hardware. If you have a machine that's four or five or six years old and you're trying to run Windows 10 or the new Windows 11 on that machine, how long does it take for some of your programs to open? You probably click to open a program and it takes 30 seconds, maybe a minute. And sometimes when you're using the program, the program slow, menus take forever to load. And it's just painful. It's frustrating. And maybe if you thought the only operating system out there was Microsoft Windows, which is what many people think. They think everybody in the world uses Windows on their computer and everybody has to deal with these frustrations. No, Linux users don't deal with that kind of frustration because Linux is fast. Programs open instantly, menus open instantly, and especially on older hardware. Older hardware that Windows either struggles to run properly on or in some cases refuses to run at all on, Linux can run on machines that are five, 10, even 15 years old. Because of hardware that are so old that Windows simply will not install on those machines. Linux can actually revive those machines and it'll run like a champ. So number two, you have dozens of different desktop environments available to you on Linux. What's a desktop environment? That's your user interface. That's your desktop. It's what you see right in front of you. In Linux, the possibilities are endless. You don't like the desktop environment you're looking at. You can remove it, uninstall it, install a different one. On Windows, you have one desktop environment. You have the Windows desktop. That's it. If you don't like it, well, you better learn to love it because you can't remove it. You can't install a completely different desktop environment, a completely different user interface. That's just not available to you. But on Linux, customization is king. If you don't like any part of the operating system itself, you can swap out anything. Number three, Windows is huge compared to Linux. And when I say huge, I'm talking about the download size. I'm talking about the install size. I mean, when I install Windows in a virtual machine, it tells me I need like 60 or 70 gigabytes of disk space just for the base install. Not installing any extra programs, no games or anything, I need, you know, 60 gigabytes to install Windows. That's crazy. Linux, typically the Linux ISOs I download are almost always under 2 gigabytes in size and when they're actually installed, they typically install in 8 gigabytes of disk space or less. Number four, Linux is free and open source software. So Linux is free as in free of cost. Linux is also free as in freedom, meaning it respects you, the user. When we talk about free as in freedom, it means you can modify the source code. You can look at the source code. You can do anything you want to do with your operating system because again, it's your operating system. Microsoft Windows is not your operating system because it's not licensed under a free and open source license. Microsoft Windows is proprietary software, meaning when you sign up for Windows, you install Windows, you agree to the Microsoft End User License Agreement, the EULA. And part of the EULA states that you don't really own that operating system. You're kind of just renting that thing from Microsoft. That operating system is theirs. You can't look at the source code. You can't modify the source code in any way and that Microsoft reserves the right to check on you, to spy on you and everything you do on your computer, every keystroke you press on the keyboard. They could be monitoring that and they are monitoring that. Number five, Linux ships with tons of free applications. So when you install your Linux distribution, typically it'll install 30, 40, 50 programs out of the box for you. Your Office suite and text editor, your multimedia programs, video player, audio player, things like that, all of it is free and open source software. So it's free as in cost. It's also free as in freedom, meaning it's licensed under a free license. You can do whatever you want with that piece of software. And if you're a big proponent of free and open source software like I am, Linux is great because there are thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of free and open source applications available to you in your software center inside your Linux distribution. In fact, Linux has more free and open source software available than Microsoft Windows does. Number six, Linux is more secure than Windows and Linux desktop users don't even run any viruses because honestly, it's not like viruses don't exist in Linux, but they're so rare. I've never really met a desktop Linux user that ran a antivirus. Me personally, I've been a Linux user for about 13, 14 years, primarily a Linux user on the desktop. I've never run antivirus on any of my machines. Number seven, Linux respects your privacy. Windows spies on its users. It uses its users, data minds its users, monitors every keystroke. It knows exactly what files you're opening on your system. It knows what you're browsing inside Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge. It's really doing some nasty, nefarious things to you, the user, because in Windows, you know, you're not using Windows. Windows is actually using you. You are the product when you use Windows. When you use Linux, Linux is actually the product. You use Linux. So which Linux distribution should you install? Well, if you're brand new to Linux, so you've been a Windows user your whole life, you're just now hearing about Linux for the first time from Linus Tech Dips or from anybody else, which one should you install? Well, one of Linux's biggest strengths and also its biggest weakness is the fact that we have hundreds of Linux distributions. The reason we have this is because anybody can build their own Linux distribution. We've already talked about Linux is free and open source software. The kernel, all the applications, all the GNU utilities. Anybody can modify them, package them in any sort of way and create their own Linux distribution. And because of that, we have literally hundreds of Linux distributions out there. Now that can be really confusing to a new to Linux user, but I'm going to simplify this for you because right now I'm going to narrow down that list of hundreds of potential distributions down to three that I think are perfect for the new to Linux user. Number one, Linux Mint. Linux Mint is a very popular desktop Linux distribution. It's very easy to install, very easy to use. You don't need some high level of computer expertise to use Linux Mint and Linux Mint has three different desktop environments available to you. There are three main desktop environments, all three of them look very similar to the Windows paradigm, to the Windows desktop. Yeah, it has a panel at the bottom, kind of your start menu at the bottom left. It's really comfortable. If you're a Windows user, you would be very comfortable in any of the three additions of Linux Mint. Linux Mint is also very stable because it's what we call a static release distribution. Static release means that there are releases of Linux Mint every few months, every couple of years, and when that new release comes out, you will upgrade from your current version of Linux Mint to the new version of Linux Mint. So static release is very stable because your applications never really receive updates. The only updates you receive are security updates, bug fixes, things like that. But your actual applications, when you install Linux Mint version, whatever, that application, your Office Suite and text editors and things like that, typically, they're going to be on that version until you upgrade to the new version of Linux Mint that comes out next year or whenever. And another really great selling point of Linux Mint is the fact that they have a friendly and helpful community. So if you're new to Linux, I suggest strongly consider Linux Mint first. If you have any kind of issues, go to their forums. A ton of very friendly people there willing to help you. Number two, Manjaro. Manjaro is also very easy to install, very easy to use, just like Linux Mint. It has three main desktop editions, except unlike Linux Mint, I can recommend all three desktop editions of Linux Mint. I cannot recommend all three desktop editions of Manjaro, but I can recommend two of them to you, KDE Plasma and XFCE. Those desktops are very similar, very familiar to the Windows user. You guys are going to be quite at home in either KDE Plasma or XFCE. Manjaro also has a main edition called GNOME. I would avoid that one because it's very, very different than what you're used to inside Windows. Now, Manjaro differs a little bit from Linux Mint because it's what we call a rolling release rather than a static release. So a rolling release means all your applications get updates constantly. Every time there's a new update to anything, that update gets pushed to you. What this means is Manjaro never has a point release, a big release that you have to upgrade to like one major version of Manjaro to the next. You're always on the latest Manjaro. As long as your system is up to date, you're always running the latest Manjaro. Now, there are pluses and minuses to running a rolling release rather than a static release. The pluses are you get the latest and greatest software, right? And this is really important, especially for gamers when sometimes you need the latest and greatest kernel or video drivers to make your gaming experience better. That's fantastic. Now, the downside is because all of your programs are constantly being updated. That means there's a bigger chance that some things could break on you. But don't worry, breakages are rare. And usually when things do break, they're very easy to fix. I mentioned you don't have to be a high level computer expert to run Linux Mint. You also don't have to be a high level computer expert to run Manjaro. I will say you need a little bit more tech savvy to run Manjaro, because when things break, you may actually have to do a Google search to find how to fix that error. You may have to enter a command line or two to actually fix the problem. But it's typically not as scary as it sounds. If you're one of these do it yourself kind of people, like, you know, when you have problems, you tend to fix them yourselves. Manjaro is a perfect distribution for that kind of person. For somebody like if you're installing this on your grandmother's computer, then something like Mint would probably be a better choice than Manjaro. One final thing about Manjaro is they too have a very friendly and helpful community. If you have any kind of support questions, go to their forums. They'll be glad to help. Number three, Lubuntu. Now, Lubuntu is one I'm going to recommend for a specific use case. If you have older machines or underpowered machines, you need something that can run on older hardware. Lubuntu is fantastic for that. For people with newer machines, I would either choose Mint or Manjaro, but Lubuntu, if you have something that's five, seven, ten years old, I'd strongly recommend trying Lubuntu first because it runs a desktop environment called LXQt, which is really designed for underpowered machines. And like both Mint and Manjaro, it's easy to install. It's easy to use. You don't have to be a computer expert to use this thing or anything. You'll be right at home immediately. Windows users are going to be perfectly at home because the LXQt desktop environment actually looks like some older versions of Windows. I think Windows 98, Windows 2000 kind of look. It doesn't look that dated. It actually has a modern, fresh kind of look to it, but it's got that same kind of workflow as something like Windows 2000. Lubuntu is also a stable, static release model distribution. So you don't have to worry about things breaking because of packages updating. Also, being based on Ubuntu, which is its parent distribution, and Lubuntu, really, you'll find all kinds of documentation about it because there are so many Ubuntu-based distributions, so many desktop computer users use Ubuntu-based distributions, which Mint is also an Ubuntu-based distribution. You'll have no trouble finding documentation about any kind of problem that may arise. Now that I've recommended some distributions for you guys to check out, how do you actually try out these Linux distributions? Because you probably don't want to immediately just wipe out Windows and install Linux and hope for the best, right? You probably want to test things out a little bit. So there are several ways to test these things. The most common way is to use a USB stick. What you do is you download the ISO for a Linux distribution, burn it to a USB stick, plug the USB stick into your computer, reboot the computer, and you will boot into Linux, which will run off of this USB stick. It actually won't touch your hard drives, so Windows will never be overwritten or anything because you're not even touching the hard drives in your computer. Everything is running off of this USB stick. When you're done testing out that Linux distribution, unplug the USB stick, reboot, and you'll be back in Windows. Now, if you've never actually burned an ISO to a USB stick, you're probably wondering how to do that. Well, all you need to do, stick your USB stick into a USB port on your computer and then use a ISO burning or a disk burning utility. And the one I typically use, let me switch to my desktop, I use this program here called Etcher. This is Belina Etcher. It is available on both Windows and Linux. It may also be available on Mac, I'm not sure. But all I would do is I would plug in this USB stick and then you will select a file on your system, so flash from file. And if I go to my downloads directory, I actually have several Linux ISOs here, including Lubuntu, which I mentioned earlier. I could burn that to this USB stick. They take about, I don't know, five, 10 minutes for that ISO to burn to this USB stick while it's plugged into the computer. And once it's complete, you're ready to go. You're ready to test out things. Another common way to test out a Linux distribution is to install it inside a virtual machine. What is a virtual machine? Well, it's kind of like a fake computer. It's another way to install an operating system without ever touching your hard drive, without ever wiping out your existing operating system. And the one that I would recommend you guys try out first as far as virtual machine programs is a program called VirtualBox. VirtualBox is available on both Linux and Windows. And let me show you how to actually install something through VirtualBox. So let me launch my VirtualBox here. And what you need to do, go to Machine, go to New. So we're gonna create a new virtual machine. I've already downloaded the Lubuntu ISO. Remember I had the Lubuntu ISO in my downloads folder. So I'm gonna name this virtual machine Lubuntu. And then type Linux. Now, if it's Windows, you would, of course, select Windows, BSD, BSD. But Lubuntu, of course, is a Linux distribution. What is this based off of? Lubuntu's based off of Ubuntu, 64-bit. And then I'm gonna click Next. And then how much memory do I want to give this particular virtual machine right now? And by default, it's set to one gig. I'm gonna give it, I'll give it about six gigs. So I'll change that to 6192 megabytes, about six gigs of RAM. And then click Next. By default, it's gonna say, create a virtual hard disk. That's what you want if you're actually going to install Lubuntu inside the VM. And that's what I'm gonna do. So I'll create that. VDI is the virtual box disk image. It's selected by default. Leave that as the default. Click Next. Dynamically allocated for the hard drive. That's what you want. It's selected by default. Just leave it. Click Next. And then create the size of the virtual hard drive. By default, it's gonna choose 10 gigabytes. I'm gonna bump that up to 20 gigabytes just to give my virtual machine plenty of room in case I want to install some extra software. Now that I've created that virtual machine here, you see Lubuntu, it's powered off. Now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna right-click on it. Go into Settings. Because you do want to change a few settings before you get started. The first one I always change is System. I go into Processor. And I have a 12-core 24 thread processor. So it makes sense to give this thing more than just one core, by default. I usually give it two cores of my CPU, which is my thread ripper is actually a pretty beefy CPU. So two threads is actually plenty, just to test things out in a virtual machine. So I would change that. Then I would go to Display, Video Memory. You have up to 128 megabytes of video memory. You can give a VM. Go ahead and give it the max. 128 megabytes is actually not that much. So always just max it out. The next thing you need to do is Storage. Because we need to attach the ISO. We downloaded from the Lubuntu website. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to Add Optical Disk here, and then it's going to ask me where is the ISO. I'm going to go to Add, and then search my file system. In the Downloads folder, I have Lubuntu 2110 Desktop. And then Choose. And now that I've added the Lubuntu ISO there, we could actually go ahead and start the VM. One last thing I'll do is User Interface. I'm going to go down here. I'm going to tick off that menu system. I don't want to see it. I'm going to tick off that menu system, the bottom sys tray, that would appear in the windows typically. I just don't want that stuff to appear, because it's kind of useless information appearing on the screen. Then I'm going to click OK. Then let's go ahead and start the virtual machine. And this is my virtual machine of Lubuntu. It's going to boot up. All right, and we've logged into our new virtual machine of Lubuntu. So what we're looking at here is the live environment. It's just booting directly off the ISO. The same as booting directly off a USB stick. But if you wanted to actually install this properly inside the VM, you would double click Install Lubuntu and run through the installer. And the installer for all these Linux distributions is very easy. Typically, you click OK about three or four times, give it a username and a password, and in about 10 minutes, you're done with the installation. So just for the sake of completeness, I will run through this installation of Lubuntu. So American English is my language. I'm going to click Next. The Chicago Central Time Zone in the US is correct for me. I'm going to click Next. English US is correct for my keyboard layout. I'm going to click Next. And then what do I want to do with the disk? Erase disk and give the entire virtual machine to Lubuntu, or do I want to manually partition? Now that's useful if you're going to dual boot alongside another operating system. But I'm just going to run Lubuntu by itself in this VM. So Erase Disk is what I want. I'm just going to click Next. I'm going to create a username. DT is my username. I need to create a strong and complicated password for the DT user. So there's my password. Let's confirm that password. And then I'm going to click Next. And then it's going to give us a summary of everything we chose and everything looks good. I'm going to click Install. And away we go. That's the installation. I wait about five to 10 minutes, and the installation will be complete. How easy is it to install Linux? And other than trying out Linux on a live USB stick or inside a virtual machine, of course, you can always try out Linux on a test machine if you have more than one computer. Just be aware that computer hardware varies. So don't be surprised if you test things out on a test machine and they work perfectly. And then when you go to install it on your main production machine, things work a little differently. The next thing we should talk about is how do you install software on Linux? Because it works completely different on Linux than it does on Windows. So in Windows, typically you go and download software from various places on the internet and then install those programs on your computer. And that's very, very, very dangerous. That's why Windows is riddled with viruses and malware and ransomware and things like that is because you can't just trust any piece of software you find on the internet. That's not the way we do it on Linux. You actually have central repositories of software on Linux. A repository is a server that has all of the software there and it's curated by your Linux distribution, meaning you can actually trust everything in that repository or at the very least you can trust it far more than you can. Random pieces of software you go and download on the internet. So let me switch over to this virtual machine that we just finished installing Lubuntu. It took like five or 10 minutes to install this virtual machine of Lubuntu. And if I go into system tools, Lubuntu has the Muon package manager. Now this will differ from various distributions. Every distribution though, typically will have a graphical package manager. This is basically a graphical front end to that repository of software. So the tens of thousands of pieces of software that are available in the Lubuntu repositories, you could actually do a search for them right here. For example, if I wanted to do a search for Firefox, which is already installed, it's the default browser, but you can see if it wasn't, I could search for it. There it is. I could click on it and I could get that thing installed rather easily. I can also update the entire system. As for example, if I do check for updates, it will find all the packages that we have installed that have an update available and upgrade for us. So that is how this is handled generally in Linux. Again, this is far safer on Linux than it is on Windows, where of course in Windows, you're getting pieces of software from hundreds of different places and that's just not secure. Now other than the graphical software centers, I mentioned every Linux distribution may have a different graphical software center. So they all look a little different. They all function a little different, but you can always use the command line. So I could actually open a terminal. And if I wanted to, let me zoom in here a little bit, I could actually enter this command here inside any Ubuntu-based distribution. I could do sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade. And that would upgrade the system just like we did in the graphical software center, which you could do that here in the command line. As a matter of fact, the command line and the graphical user interface, they are actually running the same command. The only thing is when you have the graphical program and you click the button that says check for updates, what it's actually doing is it's running this command. It's just giving you a button to click instead of not making you type this, but they're basically doing the exact same thing. And the reason I mentioned the command line is because really the next thing we should talk about is the Linux command line because Windows users typically have this misconception that if you're gonna use Linux, you have to learn the command line. You have to learn shell commands. You have to be a nerd. And although most of us are nerds, myself included, you don't necessarily have to be a nerd to use Linux. You don't have to use the command line. It's actually completely optional these days. These days, if you want to live happily in Linux and never open a terminal, I mean, you never have to see a terminal unless you really want to. But I strongly advise you guys, if you're going to make the switch to Linux to become familiar with the terminal because it does allow you to do some things that you really couldn't do on Windows, much more powerful things than what you could do on Windows. So now that I've given you this brief introduction into Linux, maybe you want to learn a little more. Maybe you're interested and you really want to do a deeper dive into Linux. Well, if you really want to learn more about Linux these days, a great resource actually is YouTube. There are so many good Linux channels on YouTube. If you go to my YouTube page, and if you're not subscribed to me, please subscribe, check out some of my content. I've been doing YouTube for about four years now. I've made more than a thousand videos about various Linux related topics at this point. But if you go to my channels tab, I'm subscribed to about 100, maybe 150 different channels. And all of these channels are Linux channels or tech related channels that will occasionally talk about Linux. And these are great channels. All of these guys, they do fantastic work covering Linux as well as other free and an open source software. And I know I've learned a lot from these guys. So that's why I'm subscribed to all of them and it's also why I'm telling you guys to go check out all of those channels as well. Because again, they've helped me out a lot. I know you're gonna learn a lot from these guys as well. So now all that being said, if you're one of these new to Linux users or one of these people that are on Windows and you're really considering switching to Linux, let me go ahead and welcome you aboard. I think you're gonna love your time here. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this show. I'm talking about the following people. Gabe James, Mitchell Paul, Scott West, Akami Ellen, Chuck Commander, Gregory Kurt Dayo, Guy David Dillon, Gregory Heiko Lee, Maxim, Michael Mike, Nitrix, Erion, Alexander Peace, Arshon Fodor, Polydeck, Raver, Red Prophet, Steven and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys this episode, you just watched, it wouldn't have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. Each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen help support my work over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm just sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to help me out, please subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right guys, peace. I wonder if Linus is going to try out X-Monad.