Quoting: Nevertheless

Quoting: Philadelphus

Quoting: Holzkohlen

Quoting: gradyvuckovicIt's easy to be disappointed by the first episode of this series and view it as a disaster.

I found it to be absolutely hilarious. I don't care about petty squabbles. No distro is perfect, linux is not perfect, but that is not why any of us use it. I also find it funny how the linux community as a whole seems to behave like a corporate PR department, thinking of this in terms of a PR disaster.
I for one am excited for the rest of this series. I had a blast watching the first one.

Yeah, from my point of view it was a cautious success, and left a nice supportive comment on the video (which I'm sure will be lost among the 7,000 others) to let them know there are those of us cheering them on in their attempt. It's easy to overlook with Linus's situation, but Luke gets Linux Mint installed, gets Steam installed, and runs a game with no issues. In the first episode. His experience was basically boring (seeing as how no one is really talking about it), which is really encouraging! Meanwhile Linus manages to bork his first choice within fifteen minutes, yes, but instead of giving up for the day (an action I wouldn't blame anyone for doing at that point) he gives it a second go and gets a second distro installed. Sure it's got a sound bug, but that's probably something he'll be able to fix after a good night's sleep and a few hours of Googling, and will probably be straightened out in the second episode.

The overall tone was quite levelheaded and even, with no one smugly proclaiming Windows' superiority or Linux's inferiority, and no one angrily swore off Linux for life. I suspect (or at least hope) that with the public challenge to keep them using Linux for a month, by forcing themselves to stick with it they'll get over the initial hump of difficulties everyone new to Linux encounters and get into the smooth sailing regions well before the time is up. I'm sure they'll probably try playing some AAA games that don't work or maybe some complicated streaming setup that fails or something, but on the whole I expect the overall experience to be pretty painless after the initial few days.

Quoting: F.UltraI just wish they would get out of their "nobody should ever have to use the terminal mindset. The terminal is perhaps the thing that I love the most about Linux...

Stephen Hawking said that, when he was writing A Brief History of Time, his publisher told him that for every equation he put in the book he would lose half his readership. He ended up including only a single equation, and the book became a phenomenal bestseller.

I suggest a corollary: every time you require use of the terminal, you lose half your potential user base. Let's face it, the majority of computer users are only barely comfortable handling a GUI in the first place. Requiring such people to use the terminal is like requiring people who are barely comfortable with arithmetic to solve non-linear partial differential equations. I absolutely agree that the terminal is one of the best parts of Linux, and people should be able to use it as much as they want; but I also believe that people having to use will probably see Linux's fraction of desktop usage never break a few percent. (This is where different distros come in; you can have a range of distros from "never need the terminal ever" to "doesn't have a window manager", and that's fine as people can self-sort according to their comfort level as long as there are beginner-friendly distros for them to start off with.) So I don't think that's an unreasonable point of view for a new-to-Linux user...

Incredible how much almost no one notices that Mint had almost no issues (aside from having to unplug the second monitor during installation. A problem common to Linux, and a solution which even non technical users can come up with). I guess Mint is not a big enough challenge to be noticed much anymore.. ;-)

Indeed. If one were a Mint chauvinist, one might argue that the moral of the whole episode is, if you're going to install Linux and you don't want hassles, use Mint.
Of course I'd have to admit the downside is, yes, you'll have a nice desktop, smooth, everything working, easy to adapt to . . . but it will not, without tinkering, have the most bleeding edge stuff to help you run the games that only just started working on Proton and such.

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Quoting: TrainDoc

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: NezchanAmusing to see an NFT group decrying the "attention economy" when so much of its own economy relies heavily on attention-getting stunts.

Well after all, how can an NFT be worth anything if nobody is paying attention?

My basic reaction here is something like "This sounds like a dumb company that exists to do dumb things, so it's good that $300,000 of their money will be going to things that are actually good and useful instead of them doing things with it themselves."

200% it's not actually their money and is actually VC money.

No doubt. This in no way changes my opinion, except now it extends to the dumb VC that exists to fund dumb things, so it's good that $300,000 of their money . . .

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Quoting: NezchanAmusing to see an NFT group decrying the "attention economy" when so much of its own economy relies heavily on attention-getting stunts.

Well after all, how can an NFT be worth anything if nobody is paying attention?

My basic reaction here is something like "This sounds like a dumb company that exists to do dumb things, so it's good that $300,000 of their money will be going to things that are actually good and useful instead of them doing things with it themselves."

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The thing we should keep in mind is this: Linus owes us nothing.
There he is, he has a stated goal of setting up a Linux desktop and getting to the point of running a game on Steam. He installs a Linux desktop, tries to install Steam, and it won't, and he tries, not very astutely, to install Steam a different way, and that last attempt borks his install.
And he is in the entertainment business, and has already mused publicly about the rough nature of the arc he expects: Episode 1, pissed off with things being different and being unable to make things work; Episode 2, things feeling much better, gotten used to it; Episode 3, overall conclusions and stuff. Along those lines.

And Pop!OS hands him on a silver platter this decidedly entertaining "not working" stuff at the core of his stated goal, to rant about entertainingly. What's he supposed to do, shut up about it? Bend over backwards to tone his response down to be more boring?

Really, he doesn't owe us that. He's not our publicist. We can bitch that he should have done stuff differently, but the fact remains that if Steam had just installed properly in the first place, as it should have, it would have been a quite different video.

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Quoting: Whitewolfe80

Quoting: Comandante ÑoñardoThey can blame the IC shortage, but PROTON is not ready and a lot of big games won't run.

That only matters if your target audience doesnt understand that and the fact that most of the big tech channels have already promised videos on how to install windows on it when it launches i dont think thats much of a concern to the mainstream market.

"Big tech channels" is relative. I heard someone earlier saying Linus Tech Tips video about problems running Linux got 1.1 million views; also that he's one of the biggest tech channels. There are, what, over 100 million users on Steam? Most people buying one of these do not watch tech channels, big or otherwise, and are not going to install nuttin' on their new little gaming box except games downloaded from Steam.

So it will be good if Proton is running games well. A couple extra months could make a significant difference.

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Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: GuestAlso, who actually ignores warning messages and proceeds regardless?

People wanting to prove a point. The less cynical answer: "Windows people that are conditioned to ignore things like UAC and just click next->next->next regardless".

Linus strikes me as being in that sweet spot where he knows a lot about computer tech stuff in general, which makes him confident, but doesn't actually know enough about Linux to justify his confidence in that specific setting. So he can confidently make a big mistake. If it was me, I don't have a ton of knowledge, so I don't have the confidence, but I do know enough to know that screwing up on the command line on Linux can have big results. So I wouldn't have done what he did.

To be fair, in his case not having Steam would be almost as serious as not having a desktop--the main point of him having a desktop was to play games on Steam, so if the desktop won't let him install Steam it's kind of pointless. And it was a fresh install with no personal files on the hard drive, 'cause he'd switched to a brand new one--the "hardware guy" approach to security. So risking things going wrong was a small penalty, and potentially getting Steam by running that risk was a big reward. So where for most people, installing one package would be way less important than the chance of screwing up their system, he could be like "Sure, why not?"

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Quoting: sudoerMeanwhile everything seemed to work fine for him with Manjaro, which he should have chosen from the get-go, because of newest kernels, newest drivers, for newest hardware,

Well, maybe, but everything also went fine for his challenge buddy with Mint, which has neither newest kernels nor newest drivers. There are a lot of distros and I don't think it's valid to claim he "should" have chosen Manjaro.

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I dunno about being a Beholder. When you're a Beholder, people will kill you just to get the beauty in your eye.

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I get the feeling that the future of Linux desktops involves a whole lot of GTK, but not all that much actual Gnome.

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Quoting: GuestWhich controller? I'm sure you can buy a replacement if you're willing to attack the casing a little bit.

--He say attack casing.
--Uh, Grond, I don't think the nice man meant . . .
--He say! He say fix problem, attack casing!
--No, Grond, that's not
--RRRAAAAAAAAAA!!!! DIE CASING!!! AARRGGHHRHRH!
(Smash, crunch)

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