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.
Honestly, I think he’s right on that one. No tinkering means no tinkering, selecting a proton version to force to use the windows version of the game and passing command arguments is tinkering. That is the difference between gold and platinum in protondb, gold means it works with tinkering while platinum means works oob. L4D2 is marked as Gold, so protondb agrees that some tinkering is required, his complaint that a Valve game in a platform Valve is pushing should work without tinkering is perfectly valid.
Oh yeah, i did agree with him that the review was silly by stating two opposites like that, but i did feel like he made it sound like the tinkering he ended up having to do was very involved, eventhough it just takes a few seconds, especially when a review like that has already figured it out for you.
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.
Linus is not at all a moron. The trouble with him is that he plays the role of a boulevard journalist. So he constructs bs narratives to have something to talk about, even when it makes absolutely no sense to create these little plot points.
It seems to have gotten to a point where he can not switch his style off. Seems to have gotten this way since he started LMG.
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?
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.
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 have not yet watched the video, but it also depends on how easy it is to find the needed settings and how authorative they are. Previously I was on Ubuntu trying to get Nine Sols working with a usable framerate. ProtonDB hat some comments about the needed settings, each comment saying something different, non of them giving positive results. And for using something like gamemode I first had to install it, which is just another step not provided by anything other than comments.
When I installed Bazzite on the same PC (which was torture in itself because I didn’t want to give it a full disk alone), everything worked out of the box for all my games. That tells me, that Ubuntu had no focus on making the experience for gaming better. Similar to Fedora 43 removing support for old Nvidia cards, while Bazzite still supports them. (I still debate myself on switching again from fedora because of all the hassle)
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.
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.
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.
Supposedly Linus switched to Kubuntu, but we’ll have to wait for part 2 to see how that turned out. But from the WAN show I don’t think it went well.
My biggest issue is that there is zero information of what everyone is actually running.
“I’m running Kubuntu”, cool, what version? LTS or STS? What kernel? What version of Mesa drivers? How did you even install the OS? Ext4? Manual partitioning? Are you using swap? Is steam installed via flatpak, snap, or the deb?
But nope it’s “lol I installed pop again, shits still broken, Linux sucks! I’m cursed!”
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.
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.
Honestly, I think he’s right on that one. No tinkering means no tinkering, selecting a proton version to force to use the windows version of the game and passing command arguments is tinkering. That is the difference between gold and platinum in protondb, gold means it works with tinkering while platinum means works oob. L4D2 is marked as Gold, so protondb agrees that some tinkering is required, his complaint that a Valve game in a platform Valve is pushing should work without tinkering is perfectly valid.
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.
Oh yeah, i did agree with him that the review was silly by stating two opposites like that, but i did feel like he made it sound like the tinkering he ended up having to do was very involved, eventhough it just takes a few seconds, especially when a review like that has already figured it out for you.
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.
Linus is not at all a moron. The trouble with him is that he plays the role of a boulevard journalist. So he constructs bs narratives to have something to talk about, even when it makes absolutely no sense to create these little plot points.
It seems to have gotten to a point where he can not switch his style off. Seems to have gotten this way since he started LMG.
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?
Have you met the average user? 😀
They click on ads that look like windows dialogs.
true and people forget how troubleshooting makes them smarter
Well said.
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.
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 have not yet watched the video, but it also depends on how easy it is to find the needed settings and how authorative they are. Previously I was on Ubuntu trying to get Nine Sols working with a usable framerate. ProtonDB hat some comments about the needed settings, each comment saying something different, non of them giving positive results. And for using something like gamemode I first had to install it, which is just another step not provided by anything other than comments.
When I installed Bazzite on the same PC (which was torture in itself because I didn’t want to give it a full disk alone), everything worked out of the box for all my games. That tells me, that Ubuntu had no focus on making the experience for gaming better. Similar to Fedora 43 removing support for old Nvidia cards, while Bazzite still supports them. (I still debate myself on switching again from fedora because of all the hassle)
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.
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.
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.
Supposedly Linus switched to Kubuntu, but we’ll have to wait for part 2 to see how that turned out. But from the WAN show I don’t think it went well.
My biggest issue is that there is zero information of what everyone is actually running.
“I’m running Kubuntu”, cool, what version? LTS or STS? What kernel? What version of Mesa drivers? How did you even install the OS? Ext4? Manual partitioning? Are you using swap? Is steam installed via flatpak, snap, or the deb?
But nope it’s “lol I installed pop again, shits still broken, Linux sucks! I’m cursed!”
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.