How to install Linux instead of Windows 11

[Eonfge]

Hey Anthony and the LTT-Team,

 

Thanks for making this video. It's a cool introduction to Linux and I hope that people don't just find it entertaining, but also a bit informative. Even if many choose to stay with Windows, knowing about alternative systems is always beneficial. Who knows what the future brings.

 

That said, I do wish to express  some constructive criticisms, so please allow me to comment on a few elements.

 

• I would have explained a bit about Flatpak. Pop OS is a great distribution that comes with Flathub bundled, but that has its own strengths and weaknesses. Steam comes in both a native and Flatpak version for example, and explaining the difference will be important: Flatpak is like Android, all applications properly sandboxed and contained, but it also isn't compatible with later versions of Proton for now.

 

• You should not recommend gamers to use Wine Stable. Wine Stable is mostly aimed at business applications and as such it's trailing behind on a slow release cycle. Instead, get Wine Unstable to play the latest non-Steam games. Also, show the audience an application like Lutris, Q4Wine, MiniGalaxy or Bottles. These are graphical applications to manage game installations and they can perform 95% of all management related tasks.

 

• Third up, showing how to compile an application is not really representative of an average user's experience. I understand that many games care about Shadow Play, but perhaps this should be added to an in-depth article. I compile a lot of code, so that others won't have to. Issue created upstream to address this problem :P

Now let's hope that my many links don't trigger the spam-protection bots.

 

Kind Regards and feel free to ask any follow-up questions,

 

Eonfge

Package maintainer on Flathub. The B-roll was literally scrolling past packages that I maintain ;)

[ImAyaanKhan]

3 hours ago, GabenJr said:

Windows 11 is about to make a lot of people feel left behind, but there’s one operating system that’s recently been getting better and better for new and old hardware…

 

 

Check out Pop!_OS: https://pop.system76.com/
Grab BalenaEtcher: https://www.balena.io/etcher/
Grab Rufus: https://rufus.ie/en/
Get nvidia-patch: https://github.com/keylase/nvidia-patch
Get obs-nvfbc: https://gitlab.com/fzwoch/obs-nvfbc

While I really love the video, I'm wondering why there was no showcase of Ventoy (https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy)- it's a really nice tool that I really can't live without

[Sandro Linux]

Hope Anthony one day does "How to dual boot Gentoo and Arch Linux (plus installing openbox in Arch)"

[Sandro Linux]

Also from the background of the thumbnail, is it just me or did anyone else expect the video to be about installing Ubuntu because that background looks like the gradient ubuntu uses

[Shadowblade9461]

Hey all, I've tried to dabble with linux in the past and steam games worked fine, but I mostly just play HoTS (Heores of the storm) with my buds. And for some reason I just couldn't get wine to run it. I know its not popular anymore but it's really all we play, anyone have any luck playing blizzard games on linux in the last year? I probably tried around christmas last year

[Alexeygridnev1993]

2 hours ago, Eonfge said:

Hey Anthony and the LTT-Team,

 

Thanks for making this video. It's a cool introduction to Linux and I hope that people don't just find it entertaining, but also a bit informative. Even if many choose to stay with Windows, knowing about alternative systems is always beneficial. Who knows what the future brings.

 

That said, I do wish to express  some constructive criticisms, so please allow me to comment on a few elements.

 

• I would have explained a bit about Flatpak. Pop OS is a great distribution that comes with Flathub bundled, but that has its own strengths and weaknesses. Steam comes in both a native and Flatpak version for example, and explaining the difference will be important: Flatpak is like Android, all applications properly sandboxed and contained, but it also isn't compatible with later versions of Proton for now.

 

• You should not recommend gamers to use Wine Stable. Wine Stable is mostly aimed at business applications and as such it's trailing behind on a slow release cycle. Instead, get Wine Unstable to play the latest non-Steam games. Also, show the audience an application like Lutris, Q4Wine, MiniGalaxy or Bottles. These are graphical applications to manage game installations and they can perform 95% of all management related tasks.

 

• Third up, showing how to compile an application is not really representative of an average user's experience. I understand that many games care about Shadow Play, but perhaps this should be added to an in-depth article. I compile a lot of code, so that others won't have to. Issue created upstream to address this problem

Now let's hope that my many links don't trigger the spam-protection bots.

 

Kind Regards and feel free to ask any follow-up questions,

 

Eonfge

Package maintainer on Flathub. The B-roll was literally scrolling past packages that I maintain

A problem of a Flatpak version is that you cannot, for example, change some config files for the games manually, which is sometimes necessary in order to make them work under Proton. So, this one is to be avoided if at all possible, IMHO. Plus, Flatpaks are much heavier than deb packages as they bundle most of the dependencies instead of relying on the ones installed system-wide.

[Emily Young]

2 hours ago, Eonfge said:

Hey Anthony and the LTT-Team,

 

Thanks for making this video. It's a cool introduction to Linux and I hope that people don't just find it entertaining, but also a bit informative. Even if many choose to stay with Windows, knowing about alternative systems is always beneficial. Who knows what the future brings.

 

That said, I do wish to express  some constructive criticisms, so please allow me to comment on a few elements.

 

• I would have explained a bit about Flatpak. Pop OS is a great distribution that comes with Flathub bundled, but that has its own strengths and weaknesses. Steam comes in both a native and Flatpak version for example, and explaining the difference will be important: Flatpak is like Android, all applications properly sandboxed and contained, but it also isn't compatible with later versions of Proton for now.

 

• You should not recommend gamers to use Wine Stable. Wine Stable is mostly aimed at business applications and as such it's trailing behind on a slow release cycle. Instead, get Wine Unstable to play the latest non-Steam games. Also, show the audience an application like Lutris, Q4Wine, MiniGalaxy or Bottles. These are graphical applications to manage game installations and they can perform 95% of all management related tasks.

 

• Third up, showing how to compile an application is not really representative of an average user's experience. I understand that many games care about Shadow Play, but perhaps this should be added to an in-depth article. I compile a lot of code, so that others won't have to. Issue created upstream to address this problem

Now let's hope that my many links don't trigger the spam-protection bots.

 

Kind Regards and feel free to ask any follow-up questions,

 

Eonfge

Package maintainer on Flathub. The B-roll was literally scrolling past packages that I maintain

Valid points! These excursions to the terminal were meant to be mini exercises to introduce the concept of the terminal and what it can be used for, while also providing a useful thing that they might benefit from at the end. As for wine-stable, this is true - I was going to use staging instead but changed my mind at the last minute, with the rationale being that Wine outside of Lutris and Steam usually just involves running random Windows executables.

 

As for Flatpak, I did originally want to talk more about packages, but this seemed like a bit more of an advanced concept vs just using the Pop!_Shop as-is, as it has options for Flatpak and .deb already, and the typical install button behaviour is to install a Flatpak. I'd like to do more tutorial-style videos like this to get deeper into these concepts in the future, and hopefully that's something we'll get to do before too long. This video predictably isn't doing amazing, but there's long-term value in how-to guides like this.

[gudvinr]

For modern systems with decent UEFI support (which is probably the case for any system with motherboard from since 2012) you don't even need to "burn" ISO to usb flash drive. It is enough to just extract ISO to FAT32 drive with GPT and that's basically it. 

Linux disks nowadays already come as bootable UEFI drives.

 

I use Arch, BTW.

[ntoskrnl]

At 6:50 (https://youtu.be/_Ua-d9OeUOg?t=410). I'd love to have a source for that desktop background, that's too damn adorable

[Nayr438]

@GabenJrI have one suggestion for any Linux Video geared towards gaming via Proton or even Lutris. You reference Wine which is listed in the video as (optional) and not really needed, when really wine-staging along with all of its optional dependencies should be pulled for anyone who plans to utilize Proton or even Lutris Wine Builds.

The reason is fairly simple, while Proton and Lutris both ship with bundled runtimes, they can and do utilize some Native Libraries, "gnutls lib32-gnutls" is a great example as without it some games and even launchers such as Origin will have Network Connectivity Issues when not present.

 

In many cases when bug reports are filed against a title in Linux for Proton or Lutris, where it works for some but not others, its usually related to Wine and its dependencies.

 

For Ubuntu based distros, following the guide at WineHQ is enough to satisfy this, so long as you use "sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-staging", I would however grab staging over stable as that's what Lutris and Proton builds are based on.

 

For other Distros, GloriousEggroll keeps a nice Wiki page to reference anything you may need. While it seems to be mostly geared towards custom Wine/Proton Builds, it's still relevant to the packaged runtimes. It's also extra relevant for Arch based Distros where Steam(Native) and Native Proton builds are available.

I actually just had to help someone recently with another Networking Issue which just resulted in a crash for a game because Manjaro either didn't ship samba or it was removed by the user at some point, which is one of those optional WINE Dependencies.

 

As to how much of this applies to the unofficial Flatpak however, I couldn't comment as I don't utilize them or fully know how they work.

 

I just thought I would bring this up as its often over looked and never mentioned.

[Erdna111]

Hello ltt team,

I really enjoyed this video and the production quality as always was great.

I feel like this has potential to become a great series my suggestion would be "how to setup a dual boot system" and "how to breathe new life into old technology with Linux".

Cheers.

[Luscious]

At last we get a Linux video... right when the sun sets on CentOS LOL

 

Curious in your matrix of distros where CentOS (and the newer Rocky Linux) fit in??? I've been toying with the idea to try these two except I don't want to hose my current install and don't have a spare boot drive and sata port handy.

 

Also, it would be nice to learn how to install Windows (7 and newer) as a VM on top of Linux, how to assign devices and if need be run it in a sandbox to limit internet connectivity. I have a project in mind where I would install two instances of Windows as a VM on a dual socket GPU server running 24/7 and just split resources evenly between them (CPU/RAM/GPU/SSD). I'm sure it's been done, I just have no clue where to find a video or tutorial on it.

[hishnash]

11 hours ago, iLikeBananas said:

I have a question, Anthony says that we should use FAT32 as file system. Because while NTFS supports file sizes over 4gb, FAT32 is overall more compatible. Does this mean that FAT32 does not support files over 4gb? What if I have a 10GB file, am I not able to save or open that file?

This is just for the installer that is on the USB stick not for the OS once installed, when it does the installation linux will select a much better file system format ext4 or one of the other common options that are all orders of magnitude better than NTFS. 

[RickyCow]

What desktop environment is Anthony using in his home rig? I really dig the one he showed in the video and would like mine to look like that.

[zzy]

I use the following equips and software everyday and I do want to know whether I can transition to linux:

• Scarlett 2i4
• RTX 3070 / GTX 1080
• Voicemeeter potato
• OBS Studio
• foobar2000
• Nvidia Broadcast
• EOS Webcam
• League of Legends
• Starcraft 2
• Steam - sounds ok.

I do love linux and i have a basement tower running ubuntu with Iot stuff and docker, and I really love to switch to Linux on my main PC if the support is there. It really sucks that many items I need does not support linux.

[YellowJersey]

And Linus (no, not that one) said unto the community, "Let there be distros. Go forth and multiply." And lo, there were enough distros to placate the multitude until the 7th generation.

 For those coming specifically from a Windows environment, I highly recommend Mint. (I run the MATE desktop, but keep in mind that I am a weirdo and most people prefer Cinnamon). I switched around 2015 because I wanted out of the data collection in Windows 10 and I've never looked back. 99% of what I do (mostly web surfing, video streaming, word processing, spreadsheets, exciting stuff) is on Linux and it works as well and usually better than Windows. I actually really hate having to use Windows 10 on my work computer. I first installed it on a 2008 Lenovo T500 and got another 5 years out of it. My current daily driver is a Lenovo T530 and she's still going strong, despite coming up 9 years old. I don't do any gaming, though, as I'm more into retro console titles on my old consoles.

 

 I do keep a Windows 10 partition, but that's only for photo editing (which I haven't been doing much of lately because I've been lazy and haven't been going out to shoot).

 But yeah, if you're looking for something that looks and feels familiar coming from a Windows environment, I cannot say enough good things about Linux Mint.

[WolframaticAlpha]

15 hours ago, YoungBlade said:

I'm still rocking straight Ubuntu after 12 years.

 

I know people think Ubuntu is the most boring distro and that it's "for beginners" and that "real Linux users run Arch/Gentoo/LFS" or whatever, but I've yet to find another distro that just works out-of-the-box on all of the myriad of hardware I want it to run on with no issues. I've been running it since 8.04 and I've loved seeing it mature into a user-friendly, but still powerful, OS.

idk but the only advantage that I saw in arch was that of the AUR. Adding PPAs with ubuntu is very annoying. PPAs break left and right with each release. Canonical royally screwed up with Mir, Snaps and PPAs

[WolframaticAlpha]

2 hours ago, zzy said:

I use the following equips and software everyday and I do want to know whether I can transition to linux:

• Scarlett 2i4
• RTX 3070 / GTX 1080
• Voicemeeter potato
• OBS Studio
• foobar2000
• Nvidia Broadcast
• EOS Webcam
• League of Legends
• Starcraft 2
• Steam - sounds ok.

I do love linux and i have a basement tower running ubuntu with Iot stuff and docker, and I really love to switch to Linux on my main PC if the support is there. It really sucks that many items I need does not support linux.

Scarlett 2i4: SHould work (1) Focusrite Scarlett 2i4 2nd gen : linuxaudio (reddit.com)

RTX 3070 / GTX 1080: Will work. You should use PopOS since nvidia driver management is MUCH easier.
Voicemeeter Potato: You can try in wine

OBS Studio: Works

foobar2000: Many (better) alternatives such as DeaDBeef

Nvidia Broadcast: Alternatives, but you shouldn't switch

EOS webcam: Should work

LOL: Lutris works

Starcraft2: Lutris works
Steam: Works

Voicemeeter potato and broadcast won't work. You should use the tool that does your work. If it is windows, then so be it.


Also, if you do switch to linux, actively look for alternatives. More and more programs are being written for linux, but there is still work left. 

[WolframaticAlpha]

3 hours ago, RickyCow said:

What desktop environment is Anthony using in his home rig? I really dig the one he showed in the video and would like mine to look like that.

He is using a tweaked KDE

4 hours ago, Luscious said:

At last we get a Linux video... right when the sun sets on CentOS LOL

 

Curious in your matrix of distros where CentOS (and the newer Rocky Linux) fit in??? I've been toying with the idea to try these two except I don't want to hose my current install and don't have a spare boot drive and sata port handy.

 

Also, it would be nice to learn how to install Windows (7 and newer) as a VM on top of Linux, how to assign devices and if need be run it in a sandbox to limit internet connectivity. I have a project in mind where I would install two instances of Windows as a VM on a dual socket GPU server running 24/7 and just split resources evenly between them (CPU/RAM/GPU/SSD). I'm sure it's been done, I just have no clue where to find a video or tutorial on it.

Just use SUSE

[Leslieann]

16 hours ago, iLikeBananas said:

I have a question, Anthony says that we should use FAT32 as file system. Because while NTFS supports file sizes over 4gb, FAT32 is overall more compatible. Does this mean that FAT32 does not support files over 4gb? What if I have a 10GB file, am I not able to save or open that file?

It's only for the USB installer that you use Fat32, the operating system will use EXT3, EXT4, BTRFS or something else which supports 4gb+ file sizes.

If it's your only stick for file transfers, reformat it after install and transfer your large files.

 

14 hours ago, ImAyaanKhan said:

While I really love the video, I'm wondering why there was no showcase of Ventoy (https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy)- it's a really nice tool that I really can't live without

Ventoy is handy, but it can be fickle with certain distros, Arch based distros in particular.
For new people it's better to use a way you know will work rather than something inconsistent and turns them away before they even begin.

[KaitouX]

2 hours ago, Leslieann said:

Ventoy is handy, but it can be fickle with certain distros, Arch based distros in particular.

For new people it's better to use a way you know will work rather than something inconsistent and turns them away before they even begin.

balenaEtcher and Rufus also have issues, in my experience more often and a lot more frustrating than Ventoy, because if it doesn't work you need to do the entire process from the start again, while on Ventoy you can just drop 5 different distros at once in the drive and even if one doesn't work you can still test others. It's also much easier to test out different DEs, as you can just add multiple versions of the same distro and go back and forth between the versions without having multiple drives or having to use Rufus/Etcher every time.

In my experience with Ventoy, only 1 distro actually didn't work, every other worked, but some required to switch to legacy as they wouldn't boot on UEFI mode in my setup or vice-versa.

[Tarun10]

I've already tried an Ubuntu dual boot on my laptop and while it was very easy to install and clean, it was a bit of a hassle booting back and forth because I use MS Teams for school. However, I'd still like to mess around with distros for fun. Any recommendations for a more advanced distro that is more customizable or involves more terminal commands? Anything that will fit on a 50GB partition should be fine.

[Senzelian]

Installing Linux was never an issue for me. It's what comes afterwards that bothers me the most about it.

 

At the moment Anthony went into adding sources in the app store, or when he was saying that the version of wine in the appstore was outdated and that I now have to use the CLI to get it to work, he lost me. Sure, always having to open a browser window to download and install a program isn't optimal, but at least the software is up to date and I'll always be able to find it with Google. And then again, how often do I install new software?

 

And then needing to check whether games run well, or that I have to fumble around with the UI, because I'm not a fan of how it looks, is just the cherry on top.

 

And I own a smartphone, so what do I care about privacy. 

 

Edit:
I like his outgoing statement tho. Just use what you want to use. 

[gudvinr]

12 hours ago, zzy said:

I use the following equips and software everyday and I do want to know whether I can transition to linux:

• Scarlett 2i4
• RTX 3070 / GTX 1080
• Voicemeeter potato
• OBS Studio
• foobar2000
• Nvidia Broadcast
• EOS Webcam
• League of Legends
• Starcraft 2
• Steam - sounds ok.

I do love linux and i have a basement tower running ubuntu with Iot stuff and docker, and I really love to switch to Linux on my main PC if the support is there. It really sucks that many items I need does not support linux.

Since everything else already covered, I wouldn't do that again.

 

Voicemeeter potato - if I understand what it is, Cadence/Catia is a way to go. If distro of choice supports PipeWire, you should be good.

It would probably require some time to figure out and depending on your use-case can be not what you're looking for.

 

However, you can forget about Nvidia Broadcast. There are tools with somewhat similar functionality but I guess their quality is subpar at best.

 

Since you have multiple GPUs, you can run Linux as host OS and only boot Windows with second GPU in virtual machine. It is not an easy way, but doable with some reading. Many folks do that who can't give up software they need. Don't forget to backup Windows partition to safe place beforehand though.

[Radium_Angel]

1 hour ago, Senzelian said:

when he was saying that the version of wine in the appstore was outdated and that I now have to use the CLI to get it to work, he lost me

You, and every other "average joe" on the planet that just wants it (to steal a phrase from Apple) "Just Work"

I've been involved with Linux since the very early days and while they keep adding on shiny coats of paint (a new UI) the core is still mired in CLI hell.