A KDE Developers Response Videos To LTT's Linux Challenge

[duncannah]

1 hour ago, Paul Thexton said:

Yep. I have a recent anecdote on that. I have until recently been a Windows free house. Only Mac / Linux here, but I wanted to put Windows 10 on an Intel NUC that I have.  Literally every guide I followed to create a bootable USB Windows installer failed, which were a mix of good old fashioned dd approach or manually copying files + expanding that weird >4GB file. All resulted in either getting errors during installation or wouldn’t boot at all. 

I went through this just two days ago. Use this, run this command, etc... Took several tries with lots of searching, and it would just get stuck at the loading screen.... the problem was that there were too many drives installed...   Not to mention the bootloader is awful to deal with...

[Video Beagle]

On 12/7/2021 at 8:05 AM, Uttamattamakin said:

I share the bias of this dev has in thinking that the best way to go for a mostly consistent experience is to go full on into KDE.   If I knew Linus and he had asked me.  I'd've said Boss.  Look at the distros that Nvidia recommends for using CUDA.  Go with standard Ubuntu but the Kubuntu flavor of it.  Then just don't mess with the command line or listed to any fool who tells you to.   Other than KDE NEON which is Ubuntu LTS with the latest stable KDE Plasma as the only GUI ... Kubuntu is the most solid linux experience. 

omg....I got dizzy reading this paragraph.

I don't doubt that every word is understandable if you're in the know, and it's probably sage advice...but my g-d is it confusing to someone who's just curious about "how do I use linux?"

[Dredgy]

20 hours ago, D-reaper said:

That's great for a TV. But for general computer use, it can be a pain. I can't say much for 10. I've used lite mods of it from Team OS to make it bearable.

It was phenomenal for app launching I thought - it could display all my games, all of the Office Suite, all of Creative Cloud, all of my development tools. Everything was in easy reach. It was the thing I loved most about Windows 8 and I used it on Windows 10.

 

In fact, its removal in Windows 11 (that and forced grouped task buttons) is what’s making me consider switching.  I am running Xubuntu at work with no issues and loving it, but since at home I’d need Adobe CC I’d likely have to switch to Mac, and no Mac can currently match my PC spec for spec (though the M1 Max might make this moot). Since Windows 11 is basically crappy MacOS at this point there’s not much point staying on Windows,

[rikitikitavi]

14 hours ago, tikker said:

Blame capitalism I guess? We've realised decades ago that making stuff that lasts doesn't make money, so we started selling style instead. I do believe you can't support it all forever. XP and after have all followed the same patter of ~5 years mainstream support, followed by ~5 years extended support.

Or profit like game industry of today - free app with support for years to come, only pay for skins and dlc. I mean why not go for a $.99 Win10 treasure pack with a .05 chance to get a Win11 skin lol

[Uttamattamakin]

6 hours ago, Video Beagle said:

omg....I got dizzy reading this paragraph.

I don't doubt that every word is understandable if you're in the know, and it's probably sage advice...but my g-d is it confusing to someone who's just curious about "how do I use linux?"

 

Most of it isn't linux specific. 

 

KDE is just a Desktop Environment.  By default it looks a lot like windows but you can customize it.  Put the start button, notifications, or anything else WHEREVER you want. 

 

CUDA:  Linus and company review Nvidia GPU's all the time and are fluent in the language of "Cuda cores".  Well. CUDA the programming language which runs on those cores, and the dev tools for it are written for certain flavors of Linux.  This pretty much defines which distributions are to be taken seriously.   All else is just a hobby. 

Ubuntu is a popular easy to find help with linux flavor, Kubuntu just has the KDE desktop on top of it.   Just about everything that will work in Linux will work in Kubuntu.  If it does not work then it's hardware that is hitting Craigslist. IMHO and IME. 

[LAwLz]

7 hours ago, Radium_Angel said:

Which is fine, but I wasn't talking about 1000, but I can see where that might have been construed.

You're wasting time even in environments smaller than 1000. Even SMBs shouldn't be doing this manually.

Not only does it waste time (because running a script takes 1 second, and clicking around in menus takes several minutes), but it also leaves room for errors. It's just an extremely outdated way of doing things. 

[Sauron]

On 12/7/2021 at 4:22 PM, 8tg said:

This whole Linux challenge they’re doing isn’t going to help Linux by showing weak points to developers, Linux developers have 2-3 brain cells to share between them, they’ll just argue that their system is better and you’re not using it right.

I find it wildly entertaining that you'd blame a developer for being unable to affect what developers of unrelated projects do.

 

If Windows' UI is garbage, which it is, you either have to live with it or pray that it will be better next release. On Linux at least you get a choice.

[Paul Thexton]

11 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

I use ventoy, pretty handy, just drop the iso onto the drive and thats it.

ventoy didn't turn up in any of my searches, clearly my google-fu let me down on that occasion. I've made a note of it to try it out next time it's relevant, thanks

[LAwLz]

3 hours ago, Dean0919 said:

What's the most popular things people do in their computers? It's browsing the Internet, playing video games or working in softwares like photo and video editing which pretty much means Adobe products. Except browsing the Internet, both video games and Adobe products are on Windows systems (Adobe also on MacOS). So for most users Windows is the most popular OS because of their needs.

This is the many problem with any discussion regarding Windows vs Linux. Terribly defined audience.

No, running Photoshop is not "the most popular things people use their computers for". 

 

Windows 10 has 1.3 billion users.

 

How many subscriber do Adobe have? 22 million... So at best, 1.7% of Windows users use Adobe software. Even if we assume that there are 22 million Adobe pirates out there, that's still only 3.2%.

96.8% of users do not use Adobe products on their computers (except maybe Reader but there are a ton of alternatives to that on all OSes).

 

Most people do not play games either. Mobile and console games are vastly more popular than playing games on PC. Hell, I'd argue that the PC gaming market is slowly dying and have been for the last decade or so.

 

If we are talking about what the average user does on their computer, then it's basically things like web browsing, maybe editing some word/excel document, and maybe print something. That's it, and Linux is good if not better than Windows for those tasks. 

 

 

The things you described might be what YOU do on your computer, or maybe what a big portion of users of this forum does on their computers, but it is not in any way shape or for a good representation for what the average user does on their computer.

Like I said before, Linux is a good if not better alternative than Windows to 90% of users. if you belong to that last 10% then that's fine, you should probably stick to Windows, but this constant "Linux doesn't run Photoshop so therefore the average user can't switch to Linux" annoys me so much. 

[Master Disaster]

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

or like Linux distros have infinitely maintained and supported old releases.

OFC the die hards understand the difference between point releases and rolling releases plus for most of the required libraries and services its possible to add custom repos to pull older versions (then you get in the dangers of running static libraries and dynamic libraries at the same time but that's another topic). All the major stuff is covered, you can pull old versions of the entire GNU stack including GCC, you can pull old kernels direct from kernel.org, you can pull old python from custom repos, perl, php etc etc. Granted they're no longer maintained but they're not totally gone if you need them.

 

Also LTS is a thing.

[leadeater]

16 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Hell, I'd argue that the PC gaming market is slowly dying and have been for the last decade or so.

Possibly but I don't think so, desktop PC sales have actually been back on the rise and discrete GPU sales have been on an ever increase all time rise for a few years now. Definitely was a slum around 2015 though, don't know the specific year it started trending up again though.

 

Industry data analysis I could find also shows increases as well:

 

 

The ratio is changing due to more rapid growth in the mobile market but since the total market revenue increases the specific PC gaming revenue is increasing not decreasing.

 

2017: 121.7 * 0.27 = 32.85Bn

2020: 165.9 * 0.21 = 34.84Bn

2021: 180.1 * 0.19 = 34.22Bn

 

I think it just appears that way due to the growth of other segments being so much faster, relative comparison bias. Though if you mean in relative terms then it's shrinking while also increasing in general year over year revenue wise. So the importance of PC gaming relative to others is decreasing. Just many ways to look at it really.

[LAwLz]

44 minutes ago, Dean0919 said:

You misundestood my post accidentally (or deliberatelly to fit your narrative). I never said that that most people use Photoshop in their computers. Be more attentive. I said most users either browse Internet, either play video games or work in Adobe or video editing programs. It's mostly those 3 things people do. Out of from those 3, only web browsing is provided by Linux. Video games and working in graphics/video editing softwares is favored by Windows and Mac, so Linux is useless for those tasks.

 

Also average users at home don't have printers & I assure you more people play games in their computers at home than printing documents.

My point is that why even bring up things like Photoshop when it's such a minor and niche market? It seems like you deliberately brought up things that Windows is better at and then went "look, windows is better at these things so therefore most people shouldn't switch". 

 

PC Gaming and Photoshop, which are two out of the three things you bought up as a measuring stick, are niche things most people don't do. 

I might as well say most people browse the web or run a web server, so therfore Linux is better than windows. It's similar to the argument you presented.

 

By the way, there were almost 100 million printers sold in 2019 alone. 

That's more than the lifetime sales of the 3 best selling PC games of all times.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/541347/worldwide-printer-market-vendor-shares/

 

I think you have a very incorrect world view which makes you draw the wrong conclusions and make incorrect generalizations. 

[Curufinwe_wins]

5 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

My point is that why even bring up things like Photoshop when it's such a minor and niche market? It seems like you deliberately brought up things that Windows is better at and then went "look, windows is better at these things so therefore most people shouldn't switch". 

 

PC Gaming and Photoshop, which are two out of the three things you bought up as a measuring stick, are niche things most people don't do. 

I might as well say most people browse the web or run a web server, so therfore Linux is better than windows. It's similar to the argument you presented.

 

By the way, there were almost 100 million printers sold in 2019 alone. 

That's more than the lifetime sales of the 3 best selling PC games of all times.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/541347/worldwide-printer-market-vendor-shares/

 

I think you have a very incorrect world view which makes you draw the wrong conclusions and make incorrect generalizations. 

While I'm not going to disagree with your overall conclusion, I'm really not sure that is the right measuring stick to be using...

 

https://financesonline.com/number-of-gamers-worldwide/

 

Take that 3B total, note that by segment revenue (assume equal per unit pricing, which is probably wrong but makes it easier to analyze) PC gaming is 23% of that total, that suggests on the order of 700M active PC gamers worldwide.

 

 

Separate statistic directly estimated by statista has total number of pc gaming users worldwide at 1.9B users (I think this is probably an overestimate).

 

https://www.statista.com/statistics/420621/number-of-pc-gamers/

[Lightwreather]

btw, for Photoshop, Photopea exists as an alternative, and as far as I can tell it's basically a clone

[Forbidden Wafer]

7 minutes ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

Photopea exists

*looks for it*

*gets shocked how similar it looks and that it actually works*

Noice

[Sauron]

1 hour ago, Master Disaster said:

OFC the die hards understand the difference between point releases and rolling releases plus for most of the required libraries and services its possible to add custom repos to pull older versions (then you get in the dangers of running static libraries and dynamic libraries at the same time but that's another topic). All the major stuff is covered, you can pull old versions of the entire GNU stack including GCC, you can pull old kernels direct from kernel.org, you can pull old python from custom repos, perl, php etc etc. Granted they're no longer maintained but they're not totally gone if you need them.

 

Also LTS is a thing.

You can get old stuff, just like you can keep running whatever old software you were using on Windows 7. I was talking about continued security updates and new software being released for it. LTS releases of Linux are only supported for a few years and even the most stability-oriented distributions aren't maintained and supported forever.

[leadeater]

41 minutes ago, Dean0919 said:

At some point no matter what you still have to deal with terminal, copying & pasting codes you don't understand & it's just a headache.

I really don't think that is a given. Take a home user that has the requirements of web browsing, email (web client or application), document editing (web client or application), printing (because why not throw it in there anyway), internet banking (yea web browsing but worth mentioning anyway). There's a great deal of people like this in the world with requirements very similar to that. Given those requirements you'd never have to use the terminal, I simply cannot think of a situation that would necessitate it.

 

Much of the issues people bring up about Linux happens at a very extreme probability curve and really only starts to apply when trying to use applications like OBS, Wine, Coding IDE's or other such applications in such a group that have more complex integration with the system and hardware as well as having various other customizable plugins for these applications. If you never go anywhere near these types of applications then the chances of needing to use the terminal is extremely slim.

 

Even then Windows is just as capable of breaking it's Windows Update database/catalogue and the only proper way to fix that is using CMD/PowerShell as well as deleting or renaming system files and folder. Also good luck if you ever corrupt your user profile, unless you know to create a new account (or boot to safe mode) to use to fix the original you'll never fix it, not ever.

 

Also there are a lot of professionals that use Final Cut Pro, Davinci Resolve, Cinema 4D, Corel AfterShot Pro and others I forget but it doesn't matter, Adobe isn't the be all.

[LAwLz]

39 minutes ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

While I'm not going to disagree with your overall conclusion, I'm really not sure that is the right measuring stick to be using...

 

https://financesonline.com/number-of-gamers-worldwide/

 

Take that 3B total, note that by segment revenue (assume equal per unit pricing, which is probably wrong but makes it easier to analyze) PC gaming is 23% of that total, that suggests on the order of 700M active PC gamers worldwide.

 

 

Separate statistic directly estimated by statista has total number of pc gaming users worldwide at 1.9B users (I think this is probably an overestimate).

 

https://www.statista.com/statistics/420621/number-of-pc-gamers/

Dude, there are a lot of things wrong with this.

 

1. I think you have accidentally quoted future projected numbers and not today's numbers. For example the article predicts that in 2021 there will be 2.81 billion gamers. That "3 billion" number you quoted is projected for like 2023. 
2. The numbers are totally out of whack with everything else I have seen. I mean, do I really have to dispute the claim that 3 out of 4 Americans are "gamers"? If we remove people that are too old or too young to be classified as "gamers" (I don't think 3 year olds can be called gamers, and I doubt many 80 year olds are PC gamers either) then essentially every single person in the US is a gamer according to that link.
3. It entirely depends on what you classify as a "gamer". 
4. You can't look at revenue and extrapolate that as number of users. PC gamers are far more likely to spend more money on games than someone playing a free game on their phone. 

 

 

 

Remember 1.3 billion is the total amount of Windows 10 and Windows 11 PCs that exist. Not users, but PCs. 

According to Statista, the average UIS citizen has access to 2.12 computers. Let's say the average PC per user is 1.5 just to be on the safe side. That means there are a total of 800 million people using Windows 10 or 11 PCs. So 800 million is the maximum number of PC gamers that can exist assuming every single person who has access to a computer is also classified as a PC gamer.

 

The statistics are all over the place. That's why I posted numbers that are straight from the sources. Microsoft's official numbers for Windows users, and Adobe's official numbers for their users.

[LAwLz]

11 minutes ago, leadeater said:

I really don't think that is a given. Take a home user that has the requirements of web browsing, email (web client or application), document editing (web client or application), printing (because why not throw it in there anyway), internet banking (yea web browsing but worth mentioning anyway). There's a great deal of people like this in the world with requirements very similar to that. Given those requirements you'd never have to use the terminal, I simply cannot think of a situation that would necessitate it.

 

Much of the issues people bring up about Linux happens at a very extreme probability curve and really only starts to apply when trying to use applications like OBS, Wine, Coding IDE's or other such applications in such a group that have more complex integration with the system and hardware as well as having various other customizable plugins for these applications. If you never go anywhere near these types of applications then the chances of needing to use the terminal is extremely slim.

 

Even then Windows is just as capable of breaking it's Windows Update database/catalogue and the only proper way to fix that is using CMD/PowerShell as well as deleting or renaming system files and folder. Also good luck if you ever corrupt your user profile, unless you know to create a new account (or boot to safe mode) to use to fix the original you'll never fix it, not ever.

 

Also there are a lot of professionals that use Final Cut Pro, Davinci Resolve, Cinema 4D, Corel AfterShot Pro and others I forget but it doesn't matter, Adobe isn't the be all.

One of my biggest problems with the "Linux challenge" series is that neither Luke nor Linus are your average user, and they are trying to use Linux to pretty much exclusively run Windows-only programs. It's a very, very atypical situation in more ways than one and as a result the experience is obviously wonky, yet people seem to think "this is what would happen for the average user".

 

The entire series is basically "let's try and hammer in a nail using a screwdriver", and the reaction from people seem to be "I knew screwdrivers were bad. I only use hammers because it's the best tool and nobody should use screwdrivers".

[leadeater]

10 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

One of my biggest problems with the "Linux challenge" series is that neither Luke nor Linus are your average user, and they are trying to use Linux to pretty much exclusively run Windows-only programs. It's a very, very atypical situation in more ways than one and as a result the experience is obviously wonky, yet people seem to think "this is what would happen for the average user".

 

The entire series is basically "let's try and hammer in a nail using a screwdriver", and the reaction from people seem to be "I knew screwdrivers were bad. I only use hammers because it's the best tool and nobody should use screwdrivers".

Well the challenge was actually specifically could a gamer make the switch, it wasn't actually supposed to look at a more average user. It's near as much worst case as you can get. As expected the issues got in the way of the production and some of the game stuff got push back a video and general applications brought forward so in that respect it makes the series appear a little different to the intended outset.

 

LTT is a PC gaming community foremost so is more topically relevant than can you switch if all you do is web browsing, would also make for a very short and boring series. "Episode 1: Yes it works" Run time ~5 Minutes.

[Paul Thexton]

2 hours ago, LAwLz said:

If we are talking about what the average user does on their computer, then it's basically things like web browsing, maybe editing some word/excel document, and maybe print something. That's it, and Linux is good if not better than Windows for those tasks. 

 

Probably add watching YouTube videos to that list as well.

 

I know you can use FireTV Sticks or whatever to do that, but YouTube's FireTV app interface is horribly clunky to navigate unless you've got a pre-prepared "watch later" playlist (which you probably compiled on a PC)

 

I wonder if Amazon / Netflix / Apple actually release any info about what devices people use to access their VOD services? For me the obvious choice is exactly a FireTV or equivalent, but then I'm "old" now in terms of tech and there's been a trend of graduates coming in to work where I do who flat out "don't own a TV" - which I don't think I'll ever be able to compute. But apparently sitting and watching a 3 hour movie on a laptop is a thing.

[jagdtigger]

2 hours ago, Paul Thexton said:

Probably add watching YouTube videos to that list as well.

I think its fair to say its included in the "web browsing" category.....

 

2 hours ago, Paul Thexton said:

Netflix

Dont think that many uses that with linux with their BS policy limiting anything that is not IE/edge/their app to 720p.....

[Lightwreather]

5 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Dont think that many uses that with linux with their BS policy limiting anything that is not IE/edge/their app to 720p.....

I suppose it's now a good thing that Edge is now on Linux? I'm not sure if it would work tho

[jagdtigger]

2 minutes ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

I suppose it's now a good thing that Edge is now on Linux? I'm not sure if it would work tho

Highly doubnt it... I would bet my bottom dollar on it that those incompetent fools mark it as unsecure platform similar to what they do with rooted/non factory SW on phones  .

/OFF

God damn it this topic made me itch for a distro hop again.... *sigh*

[Uttamattamakin]

3 hours ago, leadeater said:

Well the challenge was actually specifically could a gamer make the switch, it wasn't actually supposed to look at a more average user. It's near as much worst case as you can get. As expected the issues got in the way of the production and some of the game stuff got push back a video and general applications brought forward so in that respect it makes the series appear a little different to the intended outset.

 

LTT is a PC gaming community foremost so is more topically relevant than can you switch if all you do is web browsing, would also make for a very short and boring series. "Episode 1: Yes it works" Run time ~5 Minutes.

By that same token one could claim that the experience of this user who was a programmer on Mac OS for years is a counter point.  He  moved to Linux and for him it was smooth.   Granted at the level of program would use Mac OS (which has similar command line tools and is POSIX just like Linux) it might be less of a challenge.    That said this person seems to have taken the conservative approach I mentioned.   Some of Linus's choices are the reason for his troubles. 

LTT related because he's doing this on a Framework laptop.  Which also speaks to a point I have made many times Linus in particular has a computer that is 100% applied unobtainium.  HEDT Threadripper, 3090 GPU working with it over TB3 .  A more average computer would have a better experience due to fewer random errors.  This shows how.  

Lets just average these two perspectives and get to the truth.  It can be really hard for a gamer to get Linux to behave.  For office work, or coding, or really production work Linux is just fine.   Windows is for fun, Linux is for work.