 So, I'm not a big fan of reaction videos, but you guys have asked me to react to Linus and Luke over at Linus Tech Tips, their Linux gaming challenge where they switch from Windows over to Linux on their PCs, and Linus especially is having a bad time of it, and you guys want my thoughts on some of the problems that these guys are experiencing, and I think you guys want this because in many ways, me and Linus were kind of like polar opposites, right? I'm a free and open source advocate, I'm a Linux advocate, I try my best to lure as many people away from Windows and proprietary software in general over to Linux and open source software, right? That's my sole mission in life. Linus is a bit of a Windows fanboy, and even though he's trying this Linux challenge, watching him on camera, I can tell his heart's not really into it, right? That's not really his mission, and that's fine, but I do want to respond to a little bit of his latest video that he put out as far as the Linux gaming challenge part two, and some of the issues he was having. So I'm not going to play through the whole video, I'm just going to highlight some things that stuck out at me when I watched the video for the first time this morning. Try to apt get OBS, the industry standard for desktop capture and streaming in the terminal. Makes sense. On Debian. The Linux distribution that I was saying. Yeah. Come with apt, because apt is for managing packages on Debian and related OSs. That's right. Making life more difficult. The message that comes up when you try to execute the command doesn't say, hey, you should probably be using Pacman, you dunce. No. Tries to install some kind of dependency for apt, then just quietly fails and prompts you to do the same thing again when you try to use it. So let's start with him complaining about apt get not working on Manjaro, of course it doesn't, right? This is not a real complaint, it's not a legit complaint. This is one of the things where I'm not sure if Linus is actually trying to troll, like the Linux community or his audience or what he's trying to do here, because, you know, he uses Windows, he also uses Macs, I'm sure he's used Chromebooks in the past, right? You can't install software the same way on Windows as you can on the Mac, as you can on the Chrome OS, right? This is not the way it works. Same thing with these Linux distributions. They're really different operating systems. They have their own package formats, their own package managers, their own way of dealing with these things. So Debian, Debian-based distributions use Debian packaging format, the .deb extension on the DebPacks, and Fedora and OpenSusa package everything using RPM packaging. Arch has its own packaging as well, and all these distributions have a different package manager depending on whether they're based on Debian and Debian packages or RPM packages or in Arch's case, Manjaro's case, Arch packaging, right? So Pac-Man is designed to install Arch packages. It works on pretty much all Arch Linux-based distributions. Apt was created to install Debian packages, and that's the package manager you use on Debian-based distributions. It's rather simple, and I don't know, it's not even a real complaint, because you can seriously Google, just type in Google, Manjaro package manager, and the very first result will be a page from the Manjaro wiki talking about Pac-Man and giving you the basic commands to use as far as installing and removing software and everything in Pac-Man. Literally would have taken him three seconds to get the answer. So I don't even know why he's complaining about that on camera other than it seems like he wants to pile on Linux and the open source community. The other thing that he's complaining about I don't really understand his complaint on is the command not found message that he got, the error message he got when he did a sudo apt-get install OBS Studio on Manjaro. Because apt-get is not the package manager for Manjaro, meaning the apt-get program is actually not installed on Manjaro. That's why you get that perfectly succinct error message that says command not found, and it'll actually tell you command not found apt-get. If he'd actually read the whole error message, it'll tell you, hey, that program, that doesn't exist here. That's not the appropriate program you should be running, or if it is the appropriate program you should be running, you need to install it before you can use it. And then he complains that he's stuck in some kind of weird loop where sudo apt-get install OBS Studio was trying to install. He says dependencies for apt-get and he got stuck where he just couldn't get out of something. But if that's the case, why didn't you post a screenshot of that? I would have loved to have seen what that actually was doing because I can't replicate it. I don't think any of you guys that are running arch-based distributions can replicate it because when you do sudo apt-get install OBS on an arch-based distribution, all you get is the standard bash error command not found, right? That's all you get. It doesn't try to do anything. It doesn't try to install or remove software or anything. So I don't know what he's talking about here. I'm not saying he's lying. I think, yeah, he's probably sincere and honest in his videos, but I do think whatever error he got, he couldn't replicate. That's why he's not showing us the actual error in his video is because when he went back to try to replicate that error, he never could replicate it anyway. So I don't actually know what caused his problem. We would have needed more information in this case. Linus also said that he thought Manjaro should have told him when he tried to run apt-get, hey, use pacman instead. And I understand why he thinks that because I don't think he understands exactly what kind of programs he was interacting with. So when you're at the command line, you're inside a shell, right? And on Linux, the default shell is typically bash, but there's other shells. You could use ZSH fish. There's dozens of shells. But the default on most Linux operating systems is the bash shell. And in the bash shell, when you type something that doesn't make sense. So you type something and it's not an actual program that can be executed. It's going to complain. It's going to say usually bash colon command not found is the error message. And so bash is actually what's responsible for that error message. Why would the bash shell tell you, hey, don't use apt-get, use pacman? The bash shell doesn't care, right? The bash shell has nothing to do with Manjaro. The bash shell really, in a lot of ways, is kind of agnostic as far as your Linux distribution, as far as operating systems. The bash shell actually runs on all Linux distributions. It can also run on free BSD, open BSD, net BSD, all the various BSD operating systems. It can also run on all the Unix operating systems. And the bash shell can be run on Mac OS. As a matter of fact, now with the Windows subsystem for Linux, the bash shell actually runs on Windows as well. How is the bash shell going to know what operating system, you know, the hundreds of operating systems out there, which package managers and, you know, you tried to run this. So you were probably thinking that this work, the way it does on free BSD, but you're on Chrome OS. So really, you should have run this command. That's not something that the bash shell should be responsible for. At some point, you're running that operating system. You need to know how that operating system works, right? I mean, Windows doesn't tell you how Windows works, right? You had to figure it out. And if you're going to be a Linux user, you're going to have to do some of the work yourself. You're actually going to have to spend a few minutes reading. And this isn't hard stuff. Like literally, you could have Googled for three seconds and found out that the Manjaro package manager is Pac-Man. So the shell really doesn't need to tell you that you tried to use the wrong package manager on a certain Linux distribution. I mean, why the hell would it, right? This is basic stuff that you should already know when you install the operating system, basic, absolutely fundamental, basic stuff. And, you know, this isn't a Linux problem either, because, I mean, open up a Windows terminal, you know, go into the PowerShell and try to run sudo apt-get install OBS studio. See if it helps you out. And moving forward, he's going to talk a little bit about Nvidia issues. Encoder doesn't show up as an option, which appears to be down to Nvidia's poop-tastic drivers on Linux. Side note here, I always kind of assumed that the Linux community was grousing about Nvidia primarily for their locked down proprietary approach to things. No, not entirely. The actual quality of the product. Yeah. All right, so yes, we do not like Nvidia because everything with Nvidia is proprietary. They don't open source anything that is part of the problem when the Linux community has a problem with Nvidia. We also have a problem with it is that it's proprietary and half the time it doesn't want to work right on Linux. That's our problem with Nvidia. And he goes on to complain like the settings manager for the Nvidia settings program is kind of a gimped version of the Nvidia settings program because on Windows you got a lot more stuff to play with and things just work right. Yeah, because, I mean, that's the way Nvidia is designed. This Nvidia is really doesn't seem interested in Linux at all, unfortunately. So in this respect, I think Linus is absolutely right that Nvidia on Linux kind of sucks. Moving on to some pulse audio issues. When we solve though, we notice this is Luke here talking. Linux can be a little problematic. We couldn't seem to get it working at all at the start. I had an option for it, but it didn't work. And Linus didn't even have that. But a few days later, I tried it again for a different project and it worked just fine. I checked in with Linus and his did, too. Neither of us know what might have fixed it, but. That's cool. All right, so I saw he was in OBS, right? And some of his input choices were not there. You know, you couldn't find some of the audio sources that he was looking for. And then a few days later, everything was working as expected for both him and Linus. So this is a situation where I think that this was just a situation that you find yourself often in is a reboot of the system typically fixes a lot of problems. So, you know, things didn't work, but now they work. It sounds like the reboot was what was actually needed to fix that problem. Linux users, unfortunately, sometimes Linux users will tell non-Linux users, hey, we don't have to reboot on Linux because that's partially correct. You know, when we update our software, it typically doesn't require a reboot. But I found that that's not exactly the case. Anytime I install a new kernel, I'm always going to reboot the machine, whether it's needed or not. That's just something I found that is actually best best practice there. And another thing is, regardless of what I've done, if I haven't actually rebooted my machine for a while, and I keep a little widget in the panel for for my machines, as far as uptime. If I notice my uptime is, you know, more than two weeks since the last I'm actually rebooted the machine, especially being on a rolling release distribution, which I'm running Arco, which is an arch based distribution, Linus, of course, running Manjaro. I would suggest the same thing to him. It's been a week or two since you've rebooted just every now and then reboot your machine. And a lot of times that will solve some of those problems, those little bugs that you're having. You can't quite figure out what's going on and moving forward here. Ended up being the software that just doesn't exist. There are third party tools, for example, that allow key remapping keyboarding masters, evidently, a popular one, but have a manufacturer driver issues is used to reconfigure RGB lighting or the liftoff distance of your mouse or not going to happen. Then get ready to install Windows in a virtual machine. Pass. Yeah, don't do that either. All right. So I'm going to pause the video. So he's complaining that a lot of his peripheral devices don't work on Linux. So the problem here is you bought hardware that requires drivers to work. And if the manufacturer of that hardware doesn't write a driver for Linux, it's never going to work right on Linux. There's just that's not a Linux problem either. That's not something that Linux can fix or the Linux community can fix. We can't just write drivers for these products that some proprietary company made, right? That's not something that's feasible at all. So either a company supports Linux or it doesn't. That's that's not the Linux community's fault. That's that company's fault, right? And this is a situation where if they don't make the drivers for Linux, then don't buy that product. If you're a Linux user. Now, when you first switch to Linux, I understand because when I switched from Windows to Linux, there were things I had on Windows that no longer worked on Linux. And but you got to understand, this is a one time pain point, right? You're only going to experience this pain one time because once you switch from Windows to Linux from that day forward, now you know, only buy stuff that works on Linux. You know, it would be the same thing was switching from Windows to Mac as well, or, you know, Mac to Linux, you know, whatever you're switching to once you've made the decision. Hey, I want to be on that operating system at that point. You have to be a little wiser and some of your purchasing decisions. And moving forward to what I thought was one of the strangest parts of the video. But wait, there's a solution. All I have to do is follow these simple instructions to download a random script off GitHub and run it. So it looks like he has some kind of go Excel, or product of some kind. He can't get a driver for it because I don't like a driver for Linux, I guess. But he found some kind of script or some kind of hack to get that thing to work on Linux, right? So he found a script over on GitHub. No indication given whatsoever for how exactly to run a script. Even the process of downloading it was unintuitive. And I know GitHub is for developers and not for users, but it's really hard to hide behind that shield when it took me less than two days to run into a situation where I had to use it. OK, so there's a lot to digest here. So he can't figure out how to run that install script that he found on GitHub. That's not Linux's problem. That's not GitHub's problem either. Whoever put that script on GitHub should actually tell you how their program works, how to install it, and then how to run it. That's just standard practice. If they didn't do that, I'm sorry, but you should actually go file an issue on that person's GitHub and complain to them. You're complaining to the wrong people if you're complaining to either the Linux community or to Microsoft who owns GitHub because none of this has anything to do with them. Then he complained that he didn't know how to download the script from GitHub because when you right click on a link and do save link as from any browser, it doesn't matter, Chrome, Firefox, pick a browser. It saves wherever the destination to that link was, and which most of the time it's another web page, another HTML page, it's going to download that complete HTML page to your computer. And that's what he was getting. He was getting a web page downloaded. Every time he right clicked on that link and tried to save as, right? This is just the way web browsers have worked since the beginning of time. This has nothing to do with Linux, and I don't even know why he's complaining about it. I mean, literally, this is the way web browsers have always worked, and Linus obviously uses computers all day every day, right? He knows how web browsers work. He's trying to just make stuff up at this point and pile on to Linux, and I'm not gonna let him do that. Now, if you actually wanted to download the script, Linus, what you needed to do was you needed to get clone that repository. If you don't know what that is, I'm sorry, but again, this is one of those things. You're gonna have to do a little research, and this is not a Linux problem, because Git can work on many operating systems, right? Is it? Git has nothing to do with Linux, and I'm sorry you don't like Git, and you said GitHub is unintuitive. It's not user-friendly, and it seems like it's strictly for developers. Yes, that's what Git and GitHub are. Git is a tool strictly for version control, so it's for people working on software collaboratively and being able to work on different branches of a piece of software and then merge them all together. It's a way for people to develop software. That's what Git is for, and GitHub is kind of a front-end to Git. It's kind of like a Git hosting platform. So it's 100% absolutely for developers. It's not for grandma. It's not for your normies out there, but here's the thing. I think Linus knows enough about technology. He could wrap his mind around how to navigate GitHub. Again, I think this is one of those things, and I've experienced this in my computer life as well. Sometimes you get so frustrated. He looks like he's really frustrated here, and I think it's starting to show in the video, and I think that's unfortunate because he's gonna get a lot of backlash, I think, from the Linux community, from the open-source community. He may even get some backlash from Microsoft fanboys for the way he talks about GitHub in this case, which GitHub is a fine product. I think a lot of this is he's just not enjoying himself right now with this whole Linux gaming challenge, so now he's looking for anything to lash out at, and I understand that. One thing I will mention, because I've seen this on a couple of Linus's videos before, is he seems to think that GitHub is like Dropbox. He thinks it's some file-sharing service where you just go find a file and click on it, and it downloads a single file to your computer that people wanted to share with you. That's not what GitHub, that's not what GitLab, that's not what any of those Git hosting platforms are. They're not a file-sharing service. That's not what they're designed for, and they would be terrible at it even if you tried to turn it into that because that's not what Git the program was designed for. Now back to some of Luke's audio issues. My audio devices were just kind of screwy in OBS. My voice came across very unnaturally deep, and it sounded like my mic input had been duplicated. My voice just feels deeper now. I don't know if I've got something lodged or what. And yeah. Yeah, it's definitely been modulated down. This voice very, very deep, right? And I've actually experienced the same issue before in Linux, so audio issues on Linux. I complain about Pulse Audio, which is the default sound server on Linux. I've complained about it for years, and people think I'm making stuff up, but for most people, Pulse Audio is perfectly fine. Pulse Audio just works 100%, and it never fails most users when you don't have to do anything multimedia-related, right? As soon as you start plugging in a whole bunch of different inputs. Like I've got multiple cameras. Some of the cameras have microphones on them for audio, and then I've got one microphone hooked in today, but I can plug in as many as four microphones up in here. When you get that many inputs plugged in, Pulse Audio sometimes freaks out, and sometimes it just picks the wrong input. There have been many times I've tried to record inside OBS, and even though this mic should always be my audio input, right, it'll turn on the audio from the camera. And then I'll get some terrible nasally audio from the camera, and then I gotta go back and rerecord the clip because the audio from the camera is just garbage. And this is one of those things that Pulse Audio is kind of a mess. We're trying to get this taken care of, though. In the future, we're gonna start migrating away from Pulse Audio as the default sound server to something called PipeWire, which promises to be much better. We'll have to wait and see whether that's actually the case. Still kind of early days for PipeWire, but you're already starting to see some Linux distributions shipping PipeWire by default. And within, I would say two or three years, probably every Linux distribution will have migrated over to PipeWire. And let me skip ahead to Linus's final thoughts. Have at it, have fun, but just know what you're getting into. PC gaming already requires a certain amount of tinkering. I mean, there's a reason that more people game on consoles. You know, whether it's back down save files in some Vista era folder or... He's right. So if you're gonna do PC gaming, you're already signed up for tinkering, right? Because in many cases, you have to build custom machines and install new hardware, new graphics cards, extra RAM, you already have to play a lot with software, with drivers, with config files. You've already signed up to do a lot of extra work to really tweak your machine for maximum performance to run the games that you want to game, right? So he's absolutely right. And that's kind of the crowd, the gamer crowd. And I know he fits into that, which is part of my complaint with some of the stuff he said earlier in the video, like the Bash show, not telling him that Pac-Man is the package manager on Manjaro. And it's like, well, if you're one of these people that are the tinkers, the tweakers, right? You know how to dive a little deeper into things. And then you don't need to be handheld to that point, right? I strongly think though, that I think Linus was just frustrated and a lot of portions of the video. And if you asked him today, his thoughts on some of this, he probably would admit that as well that maybe he was a little harsh. Let's hear a few more of his thoughts here. Yeah, I think that's a good spot to leave on. Yeah, he's right. So he's saying, hey, PC gaming is already complex. But now when you do Linux PC gaming, you're adding even more complexity on top of the complexity that was already there. And yeah, I completely agree on that. But it's worth noting that I think that's a good spot to leave on. Yeah, he's right. So he's saying, hey, PC gaming is already complex. But now when you do Linux PC gaming, but it's one of those things, going back to how it's kind of unfair for him to blame Linux for driver problems for like his peripheral devices as RGB lighting on the keyboards and mice and things like that. I also think you really can't blame Linux for the complexity of gaming on Linux because blame the manufacturers of those games, right? The gaming companies, the people that actually develop these games should write their games to run on Linux. But most of them don't, right? They only write their games to run on Windows. Many cases that's it. No Mac, no Linux, right? And it's almost impossible for the community to do anything about that. Now, the fact that we have such a large company, Steam, that is really putting so much money and effort to kind of make this work because without Steam gaming on Linux would have never happened, right? But Steam wants to make it happen mainly because they wanna get away from Windows, right? They don't wanna be beholden to Windows and the Microsoft Store and all of that. Steam wants to do its own thing and it makes sense for them to base their products like the Steam Deck, for example, off of Linux, off of open-source software. So in a lot of ways, I'm really happy that we have Steam on Linux because Steam has made a lot of stuff possible on Linux that would have never been possible. Certainly stuff that wasn't possible five years ago and 10 years ago, we couldn't even dream about a lot of this stuff. But here's the thing, Steam shouldn't have to do all of this stuff. Again, these game manufacturers, they should be supporting Linux. And it's one of those things kind of like not buying non-Linux hardware, right? It don't go buy hardware that doesn't support Linux. I would also say as a Linux gamer, I wouldn't buy software or in this case games that don't support Linux as well. Now just briefly, I do wanna share my final thought on this. I understand that Luke and Linus, they're trying to do this Linux gaming challenge and in many ways what they're trying to do is they're trying to run Linux the way they would Windows, right? They're trying to do everything that they could on Windows exactly the same way on Linux and their different operating systems. This was never gonna work. These videos were always gonna turn out like this. They were always gonna be bad. One of the reasons why I really, initially didn't want to react to some of this is because I already knew how this was gonna go. You can't switch from Windows to Linux and think Linux is gonna be Windows or vice versa. If I switch from Linux back to Windows, I'd be miserable for a while because half the stuff I do on Linux, I can't do on Windows, right? Because they're different operating systems. It's completely different workflow, a completely different paradigm, completely different philosophies in many ways. And I would like to offer some friendly advice to Linus because obviously he's having a much tougher time of this than Luke is and you can tell on video it comes across that he's angry, frustrated and in many cases, his criticisms, half of the criticisms he had on this video are completely unfair. They had absolutely nothing to do with Linux or Manjaro, the Linux distribution he was running. He was complaining about things that are way out of the scope of Linux. And Linus being a media personality, he knows that that's the case, that he was a little unfair. Like if he went back and rewatched his take on all of this, he'd probably agree that he was a little harsh, a little angry. And I think sometimes as video content creators, especially sometimes when we're having a bad day that comes across on camera. So I would advise him that, you know, the next time he has one of these days where things aren't quite working right on Linux, you know, maybe taking a little bit of time before getting in front of a camera and starting to talk about it because one of the things, if you criticize proprietary software, it's not a big deal. Like if I say something negative about Windows, there's no Windows community that's gonna come after me and, you know, take my attacks of Windows personally because the community, there's no Windows community really, right? There's no community aspect to it. It's a proprietary piece of software made by a corporation and maybe people that work at Microsoft might take offense to it, but there's no community. But when you treat the open source community unfairly, we are a massive community. You're talking about millions and millions of people around the world that contribute not just to Linux but to free and open source software in general. And we generally, we know when somebody is coming after us and I don't think Linus has pushed it to that boundary, but he needs to be careful here because I've seen this many times in the past where the free and open source communities think they're under attack from someone and they respond in a big way. And I can tell you, hell hath no fury like the Linux community. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Devon Gabe, James Mett, Michael Mitchell, Paul Scott-Wess, Akamie Allen, Linux Ninja Chuck, Commander, Angry Kurt, Diokai, David Dillengrew, Heiko Koska, Lee Maxim, Mike Nitrix, Erjaun, Alexander Peace, Archive of the Door, Polytech Raver, Red Prophet, Steven, and Willie. These guys, they're my high steered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This episode you just watched would not have been possible. The show's 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, these are all my supporters 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, if you like this content and want to get more of this content, please subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right guys, peace.