Quoting: damarrin

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: BielFPs

Quoting: dubigrasuBad timing indeed, sadly what a missed opportunity for Pop!_OS (God!...this name!) to show its value. (as a side note, I felt so vindicated when Linus agreed that it has a "spectacularly stupid name").

I am also one of the people that are bothered with those silly names, "Pop!_OS" and "MariaDB" for example make it looks like those are pet projects made by one person, rather than serious solutions.

How influential is this Linus guy in general (outside US/UK)? I never watched anything from him, but judging by how many people are talking about this video makes me thing that this could unfortunately scary new user out of trying a linux distro (or worse, advocating against it).

The video have 1.1M views and then it was first released on their own paid platform so unable to know how many views it had there.

At least there is one comment thread with over 1024 comments with "wow didn't know linux sucked this hard".

Yeah, there are a lot of comments like that there, as if they only saw that one part of the video. Some are possibly MS employees who work on their image, a lot are undoubtedly people who’d never try Linux anyway because they’re happy to remain on the winning team.

I'm not cynical enough to believe that there are actual MS employees making comments on that video. It's more likely salty edge lords and the "we are on the winning team" crowd that you speak of.

What bothers me more are the thousands of comments there on people claiming to have tried Linux, something failed and when they reached out for help on forums or subreddits they where met with hostility and snark from Linux users. Then again they never ever give links to said posts so it's hard to know if it did happen, if it did happen but understandably so due to context or if it's just made up.

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Quoting: damarrin

Quoting: MohandevirIt's just sad... Bad timing. The problem is solved, I read? Took what? Couple of hours to get a fix? How much time would have been required, on Windows, to get a fix for a similar issue? Next tuesday patch? Next month? I must admit that I never witnessed a Windows update bricking a PC or generate a BSOD, either... :huh:

But it's Linux, it doesn't have that margin. It must be nothing less than perfect, accross the board, on all distributions simultaneously, to convince mainstream users.

This is something that happens across various industries, not just OSs. I recently had a conversation about this regarding rowboats of all things. Once a company/product is “market leader” in the minds of the people they can do pretty much anything and people just shrug and learn to live with that. Any competitors, however, must constantly be perfect and any slip up is met with ridicule and serves only to reinforce peoples’ conviction it’s futile to struggle against the status quo and keep using the leader’s product. It’s a very curious psychological construct.

The age old, "No one is ever fired for buying IBM".

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

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?"

Of course, my main issue here is that he actually says in the video at 10:15 "removing essential packages, what are you talking about". Could be that he just said it out loud and not really processed it, I cannot speak for what went on in his mind at the time :) it's just that he have talked alot before they made these videos that a problem with Linux is that "you have to use the console to fix everything" which is why I lean more towards this being "oh this gave me a good example of showing that Linux does required the terminal and why it's so dangerous to do so".

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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".

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Quoting: BielFPs

Quoting: dubigrasuBad timing indeed, sadly what a missed opportunity for Pop!_OS (God!...this name!) to show its value. (as a side note, I felt so vindicated when Linus agreed that it has a "spectacularly stupid name").

I am also one of the people that are bothered with those silly names, "Pop!_OS" and "MariaDB" for example make it looks like those are pet projects made by one person, rather than serious solutions.

How influential is this Linus guy in general (outside US/UK)? I never watched anything from him, but judging by how many people are talking about this video makes me thing that this could unfortunately scary new user out of trying a linux distro (or worse, advocating against it).

The video have 1.1M views and then it was first released on their own paid platform so unable to know how many views it had there.

At least there is one comment thread with over 1024 comments with "wow didn't know linux sucked this hard".

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Quoting: x_wing

Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: berarmaThis is a distraction move. Where's the news about the Steam package being fixed and the reason it was published without being tested? Because that's the real issue.

A distraction move? No. Where's the news? This is it. I don't follow Pop for such issues personally to know if a package breaks, no one notified us, and now it's all solved so we've reported on it with details that we have.

TBF, the chances of getting into the same full UI removal was fixed but, as I mentioned, we are not sure if packages installation testing was implemented. I mean, it's cool to make it difficult to break the UI but it would be also cool to never get into an scenario were a user can't install a package.

And it should be easily scriptable and AFAIK debbuild by default does these kind of checks so I wonder if they or launchpad have disabled that.

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Quoting: scaine

Quoting: phrogpilot73Had he updated Pop first - he would have likely had no problems.

Sadly not the case here. They admitted that a weird 32-bit library issue was inadvertently linked to the "default desktop" package which caused the issue. It would likely have been fixed within a day regardless of Linus stumbling into the issue, but the timing was just incredible and it tripped them up in this case.

My only frustration in Linus' approach here was the irony that he'd have had better luck sticking to the "Windows Way" and just downloading Steam from the SteamPowered website. But one of the core messages for new users of Linux is often "don't do that". Certainly true of drivers at least.

The whole thing is frustrating, tbh. Even if lessons were learned for PopOS, the sad fact is that Linus' viewers have already drawn their conclusions about Linux based on his experience. That video will live forever as a spectacular failure of Linux to engage with a "normal" person. Normal is in quotes there, of course, because a) There wasn't much normality about Linus' set up, and b) Linus is an entertainingly stubborn, impatient and highly critical person. Anyone trying Linux in good faith and with reasonable expectation would have a better experience.

Actually I do think that the package was fixed at the time he made the video, it was just that the faulty package was included on the install ISO so had he updated this would not have happened. Really frustrating is that the GUI actually did show this, the error shown was "This can be a temporary problem so try again later".

While this was a legitimate fault of Pop!_OS and the blame fully lies with them, going by what happened in the video I'm quite sure that Linus was fully aware of what the outcome would be but continued on (aka pretending to be clueless) just to prove a point. AKA I'm not saying that he faked the video, just that he run with an opportunity when it showed itself.

And as a side note, what every one forgets to mention here is that his machine was not bricked, it was just the desktop that where gone and he could have put it back without having to reinstall by some "apt install pop-desktop" or what the package is called on pop. Now compare that with Googling "windows update bricked my computer" which yields over a million hits but still this little incident made all the Windows fanbois all wet.

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Quoting: fenglengshunConsidering today's release of Linus and Luke's Linux challenge, I think this is a good step seeing how much of a mess Gnome became while Linus only wanted to install Steam.

That lies entirely in the hands of Pop!_OS, they decided to release an ISO with a version of steam having a dependency on a version of the pop-desktop package that wasn't included in the disc so apt uninstalled the entire desktop.

Then let's face it, Linus did that deliberately, or rather he choose to take advantage of the situation to prove some kind of point.

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Quoting: rustybroomhandleI don't like this. Already if you use Gnome, but maybe you like Ark, you cannot drag files from Ark to Nautilus. We love all the choice, but we're half forced to use "pure" desktop environments to ensure a consistent experience. Mixing apps from different desktops mean loads of additional bloat and applications that look like they do not belong together.

AFAIK drag-n-drop should work between Qt and GTK applications. It's not that one of these are using Wayland and the other X11?

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Noticed that they had a bundle on Steam which included Camp Sunshine, however since that one is not Linux native and is created by RPG Maker MV one have to use an older version of Proton (4.2-9 was the newest that I could use before it refused to even open a game window) and disable the libglesv2.dll with "WINEDLLOVERRIDES=libglesv2.dll=d %command%".

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