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My opinion on Linus and Luke's Linux challenge

Not sure if this is the right place to post this but here goes...

So I watched the latest WAN Show and during the show Linus and Luke did a poll to see what distro they should use. I just wanted to say I personally think they should use Arch Linux. I know someone will call me a fanboy or whatever but I seriously think it's what's best suited for both of them if they actually do plan on daily driving Linux. The main reason I think they should use arch is because both of them tend to be what I would consider power users. Arch is a very power user friendly distro and if the point of the challenge is to learn linux and see if you can daily drive it then what better distro to use than the one that you setup yourself. You can pick your own desktop environment and all the accoupling packages. Plus the arch wiki is by far one of the most useful linux documents out there and it all directly applies to arch (and other distros).

You guys could have the first challenge being getting through the arch installer and getting to a working desktop. it's really not that hard and I'm sure Anthony could give you guys some tips like how to use and setup sudo on your user accounts. it also offers the most vanilla experience out of all the distros imo and I think that will make it easy to start with something basic and over the course of the challenge try and make your arch install your own. I'm almost certain Linus will want to use KDE or maybe GNOME and most other distros come skinned pretty ugly out of the box and I think that might be a bit of a turn off for Linux and Luke. maybe not but I know a lot of people don't like how Linux looks as it's not always flashy.

I also think it would be a good reason for them both to dive deeper into Linux and learn how it works. Maybe they can both come out of this more experienced linux users than they were before. Arch is great and if they need any pointers I'm sure the arch community will help them out.

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47 minutes ago, Unboxious said:

I'm just going to throw my hat in real quick for Bedrock Linux. It's kind of a weird choice, but in my eyes it makes a lot of sense. One of the biggest problems new Linux users run into is software that hasn't been packaged for their OS. With Bedrock Linux, you can have all of the packages for Ubuntu, Arch, and Fedora all on one OS.

 

Edit: I also think it would make great video content because the whole idea of the thing is so wonky.

I'm the founder and lead developer of Bedrock Linux.  While I'm certainly happy to see it mentioned in a positive light here, my recommendation for Linus and Luke would be against trying Bedrock for this venture at this point in time.

 

Fundamental to its nature, Bedrock is more complex than other distros.  There is more to learn, more that could go wrong, and more to wrestle with if something does go wrong.  It's perfectly manageable for adequately experienced Linux users, but not necessarily for everyone, and certainly not for those who are framing trying out even user-friendly oriented distros as a challenge.

 

Moreover, please consider how small Bedrock's community is.  This is concerning not only for Linus and Luke directly, should they run into difficulties and require more community assistance than Bedrock's small community can offer, but also raises concerns that attention from such a large media source would flood and overwhelm the tiny Bedrock community.

 

If Linus and/or Luke end up enjoying Linux and sticking with it, and if the Bedrock community grows to the point where it could handle such an influx of attention, the possibility of it being covered down the road may be worthwhile.  However, both my preference and recommendation would be against it at this point in time.

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Let's face the facts here, both Luke and Linus are newbies.

 

I would give them only two choices to pick from.

 

PoP OS and Manjaro.

 

The AUR is a very powerful tool and would make it very easy for them to find the packages they need without having to hunt for repositories or worry about building from source. This makes Manjaro very difficult to not recommend. Manjaro also has the advantage of having them pick their DE of choice up front whereas PoP they would need to add it after installation.

System specs:

4790k

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a few HDD's

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2 hours ago, Terryv said:

Let's face the facts here, both Luke and Linus are newbies.

 

I would give them only two choices to pick from.

 

PoP OS and Manjaro.

 

The AUR is a very powerful tool and would make it very easy for them to find the packages they need without having to hunt for repositories or worry about building from source. This makes Manjaro very difficult to not recommend. Manjaro also has the advantage of having them pick their DE of choice up front whereas PoP they would need to add it after installation.

Pop!_OS inherits the hardware enablement and performance characteristics of Ubuntu, for better or worse. This tends to be a problem when using newer hardware (Ryzen 5000 / Radeon RX 6000, etc.).

 

Obviously as a rolling distribution, Manjaro handles hardware enablement better, but the reliance on the AUR can cause issues too. Among other things, the AUR has varying degrees of quality since there's no review, QA, or safety checks there. Additionally, the AUR is intended for Arch and Manjaro is not exactly Arch, and that can cause issues. With the AUR being mostly build recipes, it means you need to have lots of build-time stuff installed on your system to use them, and that may be undesirable. Debugging issues caused by the Arch/Manjaro delta and AUR packages is not fun and can be a real pain. I would personally not recommend such a distribution for a new user over something like openSUSE Tumbleweed, which has a more consistent user experience and some quality standards for packages enforced by the openSUSE Build Service and OpenQA.

 

For what it's worth, Fedora does something similar with its Koji build system, Bodhi update system, OpenQA system, and various other things to validate every update to release.

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Several threads on the topic merged.

F@H
Desktop: i9-13900K, ASUS Z790-E, 64GB DDR5-6000 CL36, RTX3080, 2TB MP600 Pro XT, 2TB SX8200Pro, 2x16TB Ironwolf RAID0, Corsair HX1200, Antec Vortex 360 AIO, Thermaltake Versa H25 TG, Samsung 4K curved 49" TV, 23" secondary, Mountain Everest Max

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Asus Zenbook UM325UA, Ryzen 7 5700u, 16GB, 1TB, OLED

 

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I distro-hopped for many years, but always returned to Ubuntu (Kubuntu most of the time because I prefer KDE over GNOME). Because:

1) Ubuntu is the biggest distro for desktop users out there. More users = more community support, more chances that someone used the same version of Ubuntu as you did and encountered exactly the same problem;

2) a lot of things can be done via GUI if you prefer it;

3) it's not a rolling release. Which means the kernel will be a bit outdated, but there chance that the next update will break things is greatly diminished;

4) both apt and snap are curated repositories (unlike AUR), so, again, more stability;

5) as a mainstream distro, well-supported by Steam.

 

PopOS is a good choice too as it is basically Ubuntu with extra tweaks and polish. I just don't like their desktop choice 🙂

 

Mint is also Ubuntu-based, but they decided to remove snap for "political" reasons, which can makes things more difficult (i.e. you couldn't even install Chromium from the repos for a while, and I'm not sure if it changed).

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3 hours ago, Conan Kudo said:

Pop!_OS inherits the hardware enablement and performance characteristics of Ubuntu, for better or worse. This tends to be a problem when using newer hardware (Ryzen 5000 / Radeon RX 6000, etc.).

I'll argue against this.

 

When I got my 6700xt, manjaro didn't support it on a fresh install while pop did.

 

It was weeks later that Manjaro updated to a compatible default kernel.

 

System specs:

4790k

GTX 1050

16GB DDR3

Samsung evo SSD

a few HDD's

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I have been daily driving PopOS for 2 years now as the win7 support was sunsetted.   I will admit to having to boot windows to play pubG with friends on a weekly basis, but I'm looking forward to moving that over also.  The update in steam to allow my library to naturally port a lot of games to Linux was a real watershed moment in terms of ease of "windows style - it just works".    I do struggle with file system BS (permissions) with steam directories especially if I'm trying to share the drive with both windows and Linux for the steam library. 

 

For daily tasks it works great.  Discord, PIA, etc all update with a simple click of a button.  As for gameing,  Getting anno1800 up and running was some hoops as well as Boarderlands 3.   Support is better now that what it was then.  Sound and print drivers for my old legacy printers that just work in windows is a has been a challenge in linux, but I have to remind myself that it was still infinitely easier than it was in the early 00's when I tried going Linux the first time.

 

Plug and pray for bluetooth, usb mics, etc has mostly worked.  However see my above comments about sound drivers as a source of headache. 

On the flip side sound for OBS etc is much easier as you don't have windows constantly borking your sound settings you configured between a capture card, discord output, mic input, game output, stream mix etc.

 

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13 hours ago, flindeberg said:

TLDR; SteamOS 3.0 is pacman-based, therefore the obvious distro choice for a gamer is pacman-based. This essentially means Manjaro for most users, and the rest can manage on their own. 

I'm not sure I follow that logic? SteamOS 3.0 is Arch based, sure, but that doesn't give an Arch based distro any benefit in using Steam. At the end of the day you're still able to install Steam on a variety of distros and there's no reason to believe Arch/Manjaro/etc would give any tangible benefit.

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7 hours ago, Jaesop said:

I'm not sure I follow that logic? SteamOS 3.0 is Arch based, sure, but that doesn't give an Arch based distro any benefit in using Steam. At the end of the day you're still able to install Steam on a variety of distros and there's no reason to believe Arch/Manjaro/etc would give any tangible benefit.

Eh? I think you must have misread what I wrote, my perception is that pacman-based distros will have an advantage as they have an easier time leveraging the work of Valve done for SteamOS (i.e., the Steam Deck). This means, in practice, that all distros which directly can pull the modification made for SteamOS will have an advantage for things like EAC and BattleEye support. Look at the Valve AUR-repository, there are components there which are horrendously complicated to port to deb:s and rpm:s without horrendously breaking dependencies. 

 

And in extension, the best Linux distro for gaming, hands down, will be SteamOS when released publicly; as it by default will have a decently new kernel (required for 5/6000 Radeon cards), contains a modern enough MESA-driver stack (the best on for Radeon cards, IMHO) and a new enough kernel to allow Wayland on Nvidia-cards (probably with the correct kernel parameters as well so users don't have to mess with them, see for example https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/kernel_parameters for the current hassle of getting Nvidia to work with Wayland). 

 

My point, explicitly, is that the base distro is not important, the package manager is. And in this case it means Debian (and derivatives like Ubuntu, PopOS, Mint, etc), Fedora (and the entire RHEL-family), Gentoo, etc, will have one hell of an uphill battle when it comes to user-friendliness as SteamOS (and similar, I think the Manjaro-team will work on being as easy to use as SteamOS) as SteamOS will just work regardless of hardware (graphics card, processor, number of displays, etc).

 

Have you tried modern hardware on a Debian-based LTS distro?

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43 minutes ago, flindeberg said:

Have you tried modern hardware on a Debian-based LTS distro?

Why would you consider an LTS distro for that purpose? It's the exact opposite of what they're made for.

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Asus Zenbook UM325UA, Ryzen 7 5700u, 16GB, 1TB, OLED

 

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What about endeavourOS over manjaro? manjaro has historically had some problems over the years whether it be regarding the distribution itself or the team behind it.

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3 hours ago, Kilrah said:

Why would you consider an LTS distro for that purpose? It's the exact opposite of what they're made for.

I have no idea. And indeed. 

 

Several contributors to this thread make the case that Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and derivatives (inc PopOS) are good for gaming. At least one user made the case that RHEL is good for work and gaming (kernel 4.18! That is Vega 10 as the latest supported GPU-family unless RHEL goes out of tree to backport drivers). Kernel 4.18 is comparable to using 3 year old graphics drivers. 

 

2 hours ago, Firecatmon said:

What about endeavourOS over manjaro? manjaro has historically had some problems over the years whether it be regarding the distribution itself or the team behind it.

Technically they are quite similar, AFAIK for a new user Gnome on EndeavourOS is comparable to Gnome on Manjaro (i.e., gamemode support by default, decent selection of CPU governor, etc). How does EndeavourOS handle Nvidia drivers by default? Does EndeavourOS deliver LLVM-kernels by default? 

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Fedora is indeed nice. Will need some theme packs and tweaking to make it look as nice as ubuntu and all the others though. They use vanilla gnome look which is very eye soaring. 

Sudo make me a sandwich 

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On 10/2/2021 at 3:30 PM, Conan Kudo said:

As someone who uses and helps develop Fedora Linux, I was really sad and hurt to hear @LinusTechcompletely laugh off Fedora Linux as if it was ludicrous. As one of the folks who helps develop Fedora Linux and uses it as a daily driver specifically for desktop and gaming, I was really shocked to hear that neither Linus nor @Slick would even consider it.

 

In the past year alone (with Fedora 33 and 34), we've done a ton of work around the desktop and gaming:

And with the upcoming Fedora 35 (releasing at the end of the month, beta out now), we've got a bit more in the pipe:

Even with that, there's more coming down the pipe in the future, as Red Hat and the community work with folks like Valve, NVIDIA, and others to make the desktop and gaming awesome. Christian Schaller (the manager for the Red Hat Desktop team), wrote a blog post about what his team is working on for improving Fedora Workstation. He's written plenty of blog posts about the state of things and where his team is working to move things.

I wish they would consider using Fedora Linux, because I think we've done a stellar job trying to make an awesome easy to use Linux desktop and I think they'd love the stuff we've done to make gaming on Linux awesome.

Thanks for working fedora. It is an awesome distro.

 

 

(i am a debian diehard tho, and dpkg>rpm, just needed to get that of my chest :))

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4 hours ago, flindeberg said:

At least one user made the case that RHEL is good for work and gaming (kernel 4.18! That is Vega 10 as the latest supported GPU-family unless RHEL goes out of tree to backport drivers). Kernel 4.18 is comparable to using 3 year old graphics drivers. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a very odd exception. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux kernel and graphics stack gets backports from the latest kernels every release.

 

Here are a couple of examples:

In CentOS Stream 8 leading up to RHEL 8.5 (which is likely releasing at the end of this month, since RHEL is on a six month release cadence for minor releases and three year cadence for major releases), it looks like the kernel graphics subsystem was backported from kernel 5.12 and Mesa was updated to v21.1.5. That basically brings in Ryzen 5000 and Radeon RX 6000 graphics support.

 

The only reason this is an exception is because Red Hat employs a huge chunk of the Linux kernel developers across all the major Linux subsystems and does the work in the Linux kernel and Mesa projects for the greater community and then they turn around and backport it to RHEL for their customers. Nobody else does this to this extent. SUSE does kernel and Mesa upgrades for every other SUSE Linux Enterprise point release (15.2, 15.4, etc.).

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42 minutes ago, Conan Kudo said:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a very odd exception.

Jesus, it is very odd. Just went through the RHEL 8.* "patch notes", and holy darn the work needed for all that backporting. 

 

I've never seen RHEL outside of very locked down environments with absurd stability requirements. Does this mean they are trying to sell RHEL as a desktop alternative for ordinary computers, or is it more geared towards workstations with performance requirements near where the scheduler and memory management of the NT-kernel breaks down? (i.e., where Windows is not an option)

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14 minutes ago, flindeberg said:

Jesus, it is very odd. Just went through the RHEL 8.* "patch notes", and holy darn the work needed for all that backporting. 

 

I've never seen RHEL outside of very locked down environments with absurd stability requirements. Does this mean they are trying to sell RHEL as a desktop alternative for ordinary computers, or is it more geared towards workstations with performance requirements near where the scheduler and memory management of the NT-kernel breaks down? (i.e., where Windows is not an option)

Generally, it's targeted towards high-performance workstations in various industries (audio/video production, live performances, HPC, VFX/CG, etc.), but those requirements tend to align pretty nicely for gaming too, since you tend to get the latest high-end hardware and you need it to perform very well. Because of this, Red Hat works with Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA very closely to ensure their hardware works on RHEL.

 

In particular, the HPC and VFX industries standardized on RHEL over a decade ago and that has continued to drive a huge chunk of Red Hat's interest in improving the desktop stack. Recently, Red Hat has been getting into the automotive space, starting with infotainment and going further out. That has added additional drivers to improving the desktop Linux stack.

 

Red Hat does this work because their customers demand interface stability for application longevity. That is, application releases in these industries take a long time and they need to work for a longer time to come (as in potentially for a decade or longer). In many ways, RHEL provides Windows-like backwards compatibility for commercial software vendors to rely on.

 

A nice effect of this is that applications built for RHEL also tend to work on Fedora too because Fedora is where RHEL is forked from.

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I think for Linus good choice would be a distro with KDE Plasma desktop environment due to is similarity to Windows. First choice Kubuntu. KDE plasma has tray icons and uses X11. Gnome (Ubuntu, PopOS etc.) uses wayland by default and has no tray icon for steam for example. Wayland gives me dark gamma in CS:GO. I base my recommendation on having distro hopped various Ubuntu versions and flavors, trying mint, Fedora, arch, and others.

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2 hours ago, AlpacaTechTips said:

I think for Linus good choice would be a distro with KDE Plasma desktop environment due to is similarity to Windows. First choice Kubuntu. KDE plasma has tray icons and uses X11. Gnome (Ubuntu, PopOS etc.) uses wayland by default and has no tray icon for steam for example. Wayland gives me dark gamma in CS:GO. I base my recommendation on having distro hopped various Ubuntu versions and flavors, trying mint, Fedora, arch, and others.

For setups with multiple displays you would be stuck on 60 Hz with X11 (in practice, the problem is quite complex). Also, KDE / Plasma defaults are not in favour of gaming as full screen detection does not exist in the same manner (technically KWin notices, but by default there are no changes to how notifications, scheduling etc are handled). Most Gnome flavours of modern distros do a good job of ensuring gaming friendly governing of both CPU and GPU. I have yet to encounter a KDE based flavour which does that. 

 

Both the Gnome-flavoured versions of PopOS and Ubuntu come bundled with the KStatusNotifierItems-plugin, so I don't know where your information about tray icons is coming from? 

 

A modern computer practically requires Wayland and a rolling release distro to not limit modern hardware (or RHEL or similar distro which backports the entire graphics stack). Wayland for any form of decent performance with a high-end display (refresh rate, VRR, HDR (soonish) etc), and a rolling release to have a semi-up-to-date kernel which supports your modern hardware. 

Edited by flindeberg
clarification
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You seem more knowledgeable than me, I have used Gnome in fedora and arch and there I did not have the steam tray icon, and the last Ubuntu versions I've only used live, because I did not like them - so no installing of steam and checking that. So I'm wrong about that. Still, I use single monitor and with wayland I have had problems with video players, gamma in CS:GO and some other problems I can't recall right now( maybe less FPS in cs:go in fedora 32 when I used it?), once I switch over to X11 everything has worked fine for me.

 

Anyways I still think KDE Plasma will be better for Linus in Kubuntu or other KDE plasma distro.

 

I like gnome and gnome flashback(even more than gnome) for their visual style and sometimes use them ( I have arch with kde and gnome) ,but have problems with power saving where monitor will go black but not turn off and some other niggles. Multitasking or using multiple windows open and doing stuff with them at the same time is easier for me in plasma than in gnome.

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So I have been seeing the clips from WAN show around them daily driving Linux. I am wondering when they are starting (if they have already) as I was planning to follow along. 

 

The last time I daily drove Linux was Ubuntu (back in 2019) looking so far at posts here and on the clips video the majority seem to be suggesting Pop, Ubuntu or Fedora.

 

Myself I was looking at Pop or Fedora since I haven't daily driven either, my only two worries for Fedora are: 

 

1. The "Alpha" nature of the OS could mean high potential for things to break in very strange and unknown ways

2. How gaming on Fedora will work (or work at all) 

 

Anyone who daily drives Linux could you provide some suggestions or things to research before I start? 

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Linus and Luke should be allowed to switch Linux distros to help them find the one which works best for them. They are also encouraged to ask for help on forums.

It would be nice to see video of them solving various issues which come up while preparing their dream Linux environment. Basically everything that helps them stay on Linux is good.

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Linus mentioned that they plan to do a small video series on it (at least that was my impression from the WAN show clip)

 

Switching between distros may prove to be more difficult, unless they spend a good amount of time using a distro (2 - 3 months per distro) 

 

I am planning on following along myself with the last time using Linux (Ubuntu) being back in 2019. 

 

Currently my top 3 options are: 

Pop

Fedora

Ubuntu

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