Linux HATES Me – Daily Driver CHALLENGE Pt.1

[WolframaticAlpha]

2 minutes ago, Ashley MLP Fangirl said:

Yes. MDN, react docs, read the docs etc are similar. The archwiki is not reason enough to switch to manjaro. The aur is in my opinion a much more significant reason to switch.

[AaravD]

1 hour ago, Ashley MLP Fangirl said:

LOL why did Pop remove your GUI? i've used Pop a number of times and i've always had issues with it but never like that lmao. 

 

points to Linus for going with something Arch based for gaming, Arch is typically MUCH more up-to-date than anything Ubuntu based, meaning he should(tm) have an easier time getting games to run in Wine, as the one manjaro ships with is much newer than the one Mint is theoretically using (unless they backport, idk i've never ran Mint). 

 

interestingly i've found over the last month or 2 of trying to game a bit more that Linux gaming is much further than it was even a year ago. Overwatch for example i've gotten to run completely smooth, even faster than Windows probably because of my hardware configuration (check signature), linux just handles that stuff better typically. 

I know how it removed and anyone who has been using linux for ~1mo will know this

 

at 10:38 on the vid it said 

"This Will Remove The Following Packages"

And GNOME, Pop Desktop and Pop Session were in the category of will uninstall

 

So linus, PLEASE READ THE WARNINGS

[Ashleyyyy]

Just now, AaravD said:

I know how it removed and anyone who has been using linux for ~1mo will know this

 

at 10:38 on the vid it said 

"This Will Remove The Following Packages"

And GNOME, Pop Desktop and Pop Session were in the category of will uninstall

 

So linus, PLEASE READ THE WARNINGS

i know how it happend, just not why. issuing an install command should never do that, i know that and i have 8-9 years of linux experience. 

[WolframaticAlpha]

My advice to new users about distros is to use a few different distros before switching to find out what you like. Use a vm or the virtual environment. Burn your hands a bit.

Everything won't be a 1:1 copy of windows, else it would suck. If you hate it, then go back to windows. Just keep an open mind while trying it, and also don't go with an obscure distro.

And read things if you are in the terminal. A lot will be garbled nonsense, but read the paras before prompt.

[quantum-]

4 minutes ago, Ashley MLP Fangirl said:

any evidence for that? i've been using rolling distro's for years and the only time they've broken for me is when i did it lol

In fairness, my comment about rolling release distros being too unstable was primarily about new users, but I'll admit that wasn't clear. I've had a number of issues with Arch package dependencies not lining up because some have been updated while others haven't. I had to pin a certain version of a library for a few months because another program (which I relied on daily) wouldn't work with a newer version and the package maintainer hadn't gotten round to updating it.

[WolframaticAlpha]

3 minutes ago, Ashley MLP Fangirl said:

i know how it happend, just not why. 

The PopOS Steam package was broken for a short time. This was just bad timing. The pop maintainers must be ruing the day.

[bp_]

What really hurts here (and I mean this empathetically) is seeing someone as obviously smart and capable and bright as Linus not actually represent the average person, but rather embody the Dunning-Kruger effect. I don't mean this as a personal attack or an insult; cognitive biases are just part of the human experience.

 

Still, it was super avoidable. All Linus had to do was stop at the stop sign:

 

 

Yes: as a new user you don't know that it is highly unusual behaviour; behaviour so unusual, the error message has no idea what could have happened and speaks in really vague terms of what could or may have happened. However, as someone who is genuinely new at computers, I argue that this would have been where you would have stopped and asked someone. I guess the real missed opportunity here would've been for Linus to actually try and reach out to the community he has been kind of strawmanning on the WAN show for the last few weeks, and see what the human interaction would've been like.

 

Had Linus even just sat on this for a day, Ubuntu would've checked for and installed updates, and this wouldn't have happened. Of course, you can't do that if you're on a tight video making schedule, but that's not a constraint your average new user would operate under...

 

Instead, as D&K predicted, Linus didn't know what he was doing, and he didn't anticipate the distances which apt-get was willing to go to make sure that steam could be installed while maintaining every remaining package compatible with every other package. Linus didn't recognize all of the unusual alarms and bells that were ringing, and didn't know what those packages that were being removed did. Linus instead persevered, and now everyone looks stupid.

 

I hope the takeaway here for would-be adopters is the simple but painful truth: even if you aren't new at computers, you are still new at Linux. You're at risk of making rookie mistakes, and you should be wary of anything going sideways.

 

The other funny thing is that this experience would probably have been a lot better on a distro that didn't try to make installing Steam easy. Pop_Os! trying to polish this usecase is what caused the disaster in the first place.

 

Now, is there any excuse for the ISO shipping with a broken Steam package? Unfortunately the reality is that, from a cultural point of view, proprietary software is a second class citizen on Linux; after all, if it breaks, all you get to do is keep both halves while the original developer fixes things up (a wait that historically speaking ends up being rather fruitless). So the steam package was most certainly not tested as thoroughly as (say) the Thai language package for LaTeX. This is going to be true of every Debian-based distro.

 

I've never used anything other than Ubuntu so I do wonder if the tradeoff for something Arch-based is going to pay off...

[Ashleyyyy]

2 minutes ago, quantum- said:

I've had a number of issues with Arch package dependencies not lining up because some have been updated while others haven't. I had to pin a certain version of a library for a few months because another program (which I relied on daily) wouldn't work with a newer version and the package maintainer hadn't gotten round to updating it.

interesting. you can use either Snap or Flatpak on Arch to fix that, as those packages include the dependencies etc. kdenlive for example is broken rn from pacman on gnome, runs fine using flatpak. 

[RollTime]

This series, imo, has a fundamental problem that prevents it from broadcasting the right message:

 

Linus is trying to review Linux.

 

This series is supposed to be about a newbie's experiences. Linus runs into a lot of problems, some of which are his fault and some of which are not. However, he's not presenting any of these issues as they are. He's complaining about them, as would a reviewer highlighting issues with a product. This is understandable, given LTT's focus as a channel and Linus' background. The thing is that in order to review something, you need to know a lot about it. Linus does not know a lot about Linux, by his own admission. So why is he trying to present his experiences as though they're features of a product? Why is he trying to style himself as an authority?

 

I think this series would be so much better if Anthony was presenting. As someone who really does know a lot about Linux, he should be analyzing what happens to Linus and Luke and presenting it through the lens of someone who can speak with authority on the subject. That would turn this from a rant into something informative and helpful. Right now, I see this video as akin to the Verge's PC build- something crafted by someone clearly inexperienced who is attempting to present as an expert. So let's bring in an expert.

 

Linux does have a lot of issues which can hamper the user experience. However, "I did a thing I was warned not to do several times" is not an issue with Linux. Linux gives you great power and great responsibility. Don't delete system32. The funny thing is that he probably could have fixed his issue by simply reinstalling the removed packages, a 20 min fix tops.

 

I'd also like to complain about Linus' weird standoffish opposition to the command line. The CLI is well documented and quite simple to use once you've gotten past the learning curve (which can be difficult, I'll admit, but you have to start somewhere). For many things it's easier than a GUI would be, so nobody has made a GUI for it. Complaining that there's no way to do something while ignoring the way most people do half of the things is patently ridiculous.

 

Finally, Linux is not a free clone of Windows. It's a different platform and you need to approach it differently. Linus saying that Linux "doesn't do x thing in this way" is a result of him trying to apply the "Windows way" to Linux, which is guaranteed to fail. Imagine someone coming from a paper filing system making a video about Windows. They might complain about any number of things not working the same way or some part of their workflow breaking. They might wonder why it needs to be so complex. The thing is that this isn't Windows' fault. They need to learn how to use the system first, and then they might discover how they can use this new workflow even more efficiently than their old one. The existence of a learning curve is not an indictment of an operating system. Yes, Linux takes work to learn. So does Windows. Windows doesn't get a pass because it's the default.

 

so ends my <rant>. This isn't intended to flame anyone or insult Linus. I have a lot of respect for Linus as a tech reviewer. I just take issue with this series and the message it's sending, about Linux and Linus both.

Edited November 9, 2021 by RollTime

[Helpful Tech Witch]

16 minutes ago, Arch User said:

Who is the new guy in this video?

what new guy?

[quantum-]

Just now, Ashley MLP Fangirl said:

interesting. you can use either Snap or Flatpak on Arch to fix that, as those packages include the dependencies etc. kdenlive for example is broken rn from pacman on gnome, runs fine using flatpak. 

Oh no it's fixed now, and there are programs with similar problems that aren't available as Snaps/Flatpaks (CLI stuff mainly). One current issue I have is that I'm using a version of libxml which is newer than the version on the community branch because another tool (latexmlmath) requires it.

[Helpful Tech Witch]

11 minutes ago, Ashley MLP Fangirl said:

i know how it happend, just not why. issuing an install command should never do that, i know that and i have 8-9 years of linux experience. 

it should do that.

knowing APT, it probably said:

$User> sudo apt-get install steam

	Are you sure you want to do this? The following packages will be removed
    	Pop!_GUI
	The following packaged will be installed
    	Steam SteamDependancies

	[y/n]

$User> y

	Are you sure? These folowing packages are marked critical and may be required for Linux to run. The contunue type:
	"Yes, do as I say"

$User> Yes, do as I say

	Removing packages:
    Pop!_GUI

and that wouldve been as far as it got

 

 

This is 100% why every " How to setup thingx on linux" guide starts off with

run 'sudo apt-get update'

run 'sudo apt-get upgrade'

run 'sudo apt-get update

[RollTime]

2 minutes ago, HelpfulTechWizard said:

This is 100% why every " How to setup thingx on linux" guide starts off with

run 'sudo apt-get update'

run 'sudo apt-get upgrade'

run 'sudo apt-get update

And why the "default" install command on Arch is

pacman -Syu <package>

Keeping your system up to date is a must.

[plurus]

 

1 hour ago, Kilrah said:

Yes the issue was not updating the OS before trying to install steam. But that's the whole point of this section being illustrative of the problem, you install your OS, you don't get a prompt to install updates, you try to install steam, you run into a weird error, you google for that error, and what you find is "force install it", not "your repos might be out of date, update and retry".

 

It doesn't say "this will delete your DE", it says "it might break things" but with zero information as to what/how/why or if it actually will or not... and forcing this is actually the "correct" solution in some cases, leading to that being found in searches.

Actually, go look at the video again, the warning does say that essential packages were getting yeeted.

 

[mrchow19910319]

1 hour ago, HelpfulTechWizard said:

yea, I knew that DE issue was going to happen

when those packages showed up in the terminal error I knew it was inevetible.

 

The real question is why dafaq did installing steam force the DE to uninstall itself?

who the fuck knows.... 

[mrchow19910319]

meanwhile the issue I am facing when using GNU/Linux OSs...

 

 

[Kilrah]

19 minutes ago, plurus said:

the warning does say that essential packages were getting yeeted.

Yes, but when I for example want to uninstall steam from Ubuntu it'll also tell me that "essential" packages like libc:i386 will be removed and I have to do the same confirmation, while nothing else uses them and the whole i386 architecture was there only because of steam...

 

You've kinda got to guess whether it's actually bad or not, but yeah in this case it would have been really suspect... still if you don't find the correct solution when searching you don't really know what else to do...

[Master Disaster]

Not gonna read through 4 pages so apologies if someone has already explained this before me.

 

The problem seems to come from Pop using a custom library (if you freeze the video you can see the offending library is libgbm1) to handle GPU buffer allocation. Installing Steam apparently overrides this with the default library and in doing so breaks several dependencies with Pops DE which gets uninstalled as a result.

 

Honestly, this is a Pop issue, not a Linux issue. They should be shipping the Steam Runtime package and not the Steam Native package. The former is essentially Steam but with static versions of all its dependant libraries self contained, the latter uses system installed libraries.

 

Honestly though, they probably should just be using the default library to begin with.

 

33 minutes ago, mrchow19910319 said:

who the fuck knows.... 

^^^^^^^^^^^^

[Ein0r]

The video was entertaining. But not a video that convinces me of trying Linux myself. I'm just not resilient enough to deal with this type of setup and troubleshooting. There are still a few more interesting videos to come , although I doubt they'll change my opinion. I think I'll keep wearing  my "OS floaties" and begrudgingly update to Win11 at some point, with outdated hardware.

[qlum]

Just zooming out from the specific issues here, these problems take me back to when I first actively started to use linux back in 2010 or so.
Messing up the closed source AMD drivers, reading crappy forum posts. Major ubuntu / mint version upgrades breaking your system. Still sad to see that on distro's aimed at less experienced users, the same issues still occur. Installing steam, should at least be handled in a way that does not break the distro.

At some point I just got so fed up with distro's breaking on me, while being poorly documented, that I just switched to Arch.
Never really looked back on my main system, and at work at least. Granted, it is not the first step, but it sure did help me in the end.
Still doesn't stop Plasma from breaking on what they call exotic display setups, though. (home setup nvidia + 4 monitors, work setup with gpu + igp with 5 monitors).

[MultiGamerClub]

insert salty linux issues i have experienced myself.

[BaidDSB]

Ya after seeing this i decided  i dont have time to deal with Linux's bullshit.

 

Long Live windows i suppose.

[Leslieann]

As others have said, it takes time to learn a new os... It's even worse for power users.

You spent how many years learning how to do everything on Windows and become an expert on it, now you jump onto a new system expecting to be as much a power user and you really don't know what you're doing so you get into trouble and frustrated just as Linus did.

 

 

Which beings us to the other major problem.

With Linux you have option to return to Windows, it's easy to get annoyed and just say screw it and go back to Windows. The reason Windows-Mac and Mac -Windows users can change is because they just bought a new computer, they can't just easily toss the other OS on it and go back to what they know so they tough it out. Without being invested you aren't going to give it full effort to make it stick. I truly believe this is why most people fail when converting to Linux.

 

 

 

All that said, as Luke said on WAN show, Linux gets out of the way.

I don't think most people realize just how invasive Win10 has become. I don't mean spying and such, I mean just day to day interruptions. If you really want a shock, load up a fresh install of Win10 and set it up as your system currently is you'll be amazed just how much it interrupts a new user before it settles in. Better still, fire up Win7 and see how little it bugs you, it's shocking just how much Win10 is in your face making suggestions and distracting you. If you use an adblocker, going back to Windows after Linux is like disabling your adblocker.

[BondiBlue]

1 hour ago, Arch User said:

Who is the new guy in this video?

I genuinely hope that you're joking with that question...

[Giganthrax]

I absolutely loved the video and I'm looking forward to the next installment.  

 

The one thing that kinda surprised me is that Linus never thought of just going to the Steam website and downloading Steam from there (you can get a .deb file, which basically works the same as an .exe file in Windows). Since Valve is a reputable company, there are no security risks. 

 

Same goes for Discord and many other well-known programs. Installing them this way is not only easier, but also ensures that you'll get the latest version.