The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Side of Linux - Linux Challenge PT. 2

[Elijah Horner]

I know we are WAY late on uploading Linux Challenge PT. 2.... Sorry about that. But in this video Linus, Luke and Elijah all break down the issues and the positive that happened within the first week of swapping over to Linux. Whether that was Linus picking PopOS, Luke swapping desktop environment, or Elijah trying to play some games. Each had highs and lows, also so people dont keep asking me, PT 3 was filmed the SAME DAY as this one so ideally you will see it soon!

[vonKordke]

One of the issues is the linux community itself and below is plenty of written evidence:

[GarlicDeliverySystem]

Guys, I got you covered: 

 

 

Grab a seat, have a snack, and enjoy the show.

 

Got some beverages as well, to deal with all the salt:

 

For the more daring folks who want to try something new:

Yes, the flavor is 'pine tree'.

[Ha-Satan]

RE: NTFS. Yeah, you can use it on Linux, but it sucks dog balls. You're probably pretty much always better off backing up your data and reformatting to EXT4.

[Ha-Satan]

1 minute ago, GarlicDeliverySystem said:

Guys, I got you covered: 

 

 

Username checks out, deliver me the garlic bread rolls

[Dutch_Master]

6 minutes ago, GarlicDeliverySystem said:

enjoy the show

Can I have some soda? The genuine stuff, not the corn-syrupy cr@p?

 

 

 

 

HTH!

[GarlicDeliverySystem]

1 minute ago, Dutch_Master said:

Can I have some soda? The genuine stuff, not the corn-syrupy cr@p?

got you, edited the buffet

[GuiltySpark_]

34 minutes ago, vonKordke said:

One of the issues is the linux community itself and below is plenty of written evidence:

Comedic timing is spot on with this comment.

[Uttamattamakin]

36 minutes ago, vonKordke said:

One of the issues is the linux community itself and below is plenty of written evidence:

You should've been there in the late 90's early 00's for the KDE Vs Gnome Flame wars.  

As to their comments about sacred Holy Linux.   INFIDELS! There is no true OS but Linux.  Just kidding. 

The one thing I would point out with this challenge is that Luke likely built his computer with Linux in mind.  Imagine trying to run Mac OS or another old skool UNIX type OS on hardware that is hostile to it.  Linus seems to have realized this by replacing HTPC with one that is not Linux hostile.   

i.e. putting say Sun/Oracle Solaris on a commodity computer and being surprised if some things don't work the way they do on a Windows PC... and VICE VERSA.*

I stick with and AMD APU for my processor so that I know I will have one display out that is 100% compatible.  For a long time while I have a passed through (to a VM) 3080 and a 1080 I used just for CUDA.  Only in the last six months were Nvidia's drivers good enough with Wayland to use the 1080 as my main monitor. 

Funny thing is there was a time in the early 00's when Nvidia's drivers for Linux were MUCH better.  Then they decided to lock everything down in a way that Linux does not like.  While AMD's driver is just baked into the Linux kernel. 

*Anyone remember Win Modem's and Win Printers of the late 90's or early 00's?  Those worked by using CPU cycles, on CPU's of that era, to simulate the hardware.  They were totally incompatible with Linux until a way was found to put the drivers in a "wrapper" that allowed Linux to use them.   For printers the hack was to buy one that supported Adobe Post Script (or post script emulation)... which is ironic considering Adobe does not support Linux user space applications.   

There even was a official Linux Adobe reader at one point in time....for a long time.

[vonKordke]

21 minutes ago, Uttamattamakin said:

s that Luke likely built his computer with Linux in mind

I've replaced my rtx 3080 in my AM4 Ryzen PC to 9070xt in order to switch to linux about a year ago. I still have Windows on my other ssd, but I haven't booted it for many months now. Game is not compatibile? My wishlist have hundreds that are.

I'm using Bazzite and it has typical linux community problems (criticized their decision to remove Discover in favor of bazaar even for existing installations, calling it stupid and got banned for using foul language), but compared to windows problems, these are minor and amusing.

[SaperPL]

2 hours ago, vonKordke said:

One of the issues is the linux community itself and below is plenty of written evidence:

200% agreed with this one. The SteamOS subreddit for example is a place where you ask about if/how to run SteamOS and there's hundreds of people coming to tell you that you don't want SteamOS, but Bazzite, Cachy or Nobara because they have better hardware support and desktop experience before they even ask you if you need something more than the console environment known from Steam Deck and if you're willing to grab radeon card for your build to have a hassle-free console setup.

 

I was testing SteamOS few times on 9060XT and it runs flawlessly in comparison to Bazzite, which I tried recently and I realised why so many people argue that the desktop environment in it is important - that's because if you're not on radeon but on nvidia, the gamescope from SteamOS runs terrible and you're better off with running desktop + steam big picture, and when you do that, you're still somewhat anchored into the desktop-like behaviors of the system by being able to quickly jump back and forth in and out, but that's not really a console experience.

 

@Elijah Horner about the GIMP - did you check out Krita? It seems like more robust fork improvement over GIMP

[smcoakley]

4 minutes ago, SaperPL said:

@Elijah Horner about the GIMP - did you check out Krita? It seems like more robust fork? of GIMP

Krita is not a fork of GIMP, its just a different app.

 

Krita is mostly focused on digital painting, while GIMP is a more general-purpose image editing tool, so they aren't directly comparable. Though I agree that generally Krita is more polished for its intended use-case while GIMP is... not that. GIMP is definitely the weak link in Linux-compatible Adobe suite alternatives, and I say that as someone who has used Linux and GIMP for a decade.

[Thomas53]

One rarely mentioned advantage of Linux over Windows is that you can still run a modern, up to date OS on 366 hardware. Try THAT with Win11. 

[Lurking]

I think that was a great challenge and they showed very well how even technically capable people can struggle. 

 

I found it entertaining, but also could see myself running into similar issues.

 

There are still way too many pitfalls a noob can fall in. Some hyped distros aren't that great, packaging chaos, and over-promising by distro makers and fanboys. 

 

I do like the Universal Blue distros very much, they are the only user friendly distros IMHO. But they would have been better off not offering a beta to begin with. Or offer the beta in a completely different section of the website. A distro either is ready for prime time and can be offered to normal users, or it is beta and should be hidden away (so only developers or actual testers use it, not some random noobs).

 

And instead of harking on the LTT team, the community should learn from that and help making things easier. Blaming the user shouldn't be the first reaction. 

[Potatoes__]

I am super confused with Luke having NTFS issues though and now feel like I've been spreading propaganda on this topic 

 

I ran pretty much all my (Steam and non-Steam) games from NTFS drives for about a year and had zero issues apart from Civ VI and some I/O speed penalty. May it depend on the NTFS driver used? I was running ntfs-3g up until Fedora 44 moved to a newer driver, which had some unexpected troubles with permissions and instead of fixing them I just decided to finally move to EXT4.

 

It's a topic worth digging into, because reformatting drives and moving over your files back and forth is possibly the second most annoying thing after software compatibility for Linux newbies. If there is a relatively headache-less way of using NTFS drives for games it should be explored and exploited.

[Lurking]

2 minutes ago, Potatoes__ said:

 

It's a topic worth digging into, because reformatting drives and moving over your files back and forth is possibly the second most annoying thing after software compatibility for Linux newbies. If there is a relatively headache-less way of using NTFS drives for games it should be explored and exploited.

+1

Especially in dual boot you need data both OS can use. I read exFAT may work better, but may have other problems. 

 

Less an issue for games, IMHO. More important for actually non-recoverable data 

[Thomas53]

9 minutes ago, smcoakley said:

Krita is not a fork of GIMP, its just a different app.

 

Krita is mostly focused on digital painting, while GIMP is a more general-purpose image editing tool, so they aren't directly comparable. Though I agree that generally Krita is more polished for its intended use-case while GIMP is... not that. GIMP is definitely the weak link in Linux-compatible Adobe suite alternatives, and I say that as someone who has used Linux and GIMP for a decade.

GIMP was NEVER designed as a replacement for Adobe's Photoshop.  It was designed as a FOSS raster graphics editor.

[smcoakley]

41 minutes ago, Thomas53 said:

GIMP was NEVER designed as a replacement for Adobe's Photoshop.  It was designed as a FOSS raster graphics editor.

I wouldn't want to say that GIMP is designed to replace Photoshop, agreed. But in practice it functions that way when people ask, "What can I use instead of Photoshop on Linux?" Maybe we are putting the comparison onto GIMP unfairly, but people do it often anyway.

[Bramimond]

On the topic of Gimp, I've been using it for as long as I use Linux which is now over twenty years and as an image editor for editing some family photos or whatever it is completely fine.

 

The issue with Gimp is that it markets itself as a tool for professionals and I never heard any of those professionals talk favorably about it. On the other hand, it actively tries to alienate average users, for example by having the save function default to it's own useless format instead of letting you save to jpg or something else that would be useful. No, instead you should export. 

 

Gimp is better than nothing, but it's really not a great experience.

 

 

Also, trying to draw a circle in Gimp is hilariously unintuitive.

By the way, the meme above was created using ImageMagick, I wouldn't punish myself doing this kind of stuff in Gimp.

 

[Aeternalis]

I really appreciate you all doing this video series (and the previous one) because your large platform is only going to be a benefit even with the complaints/issues you all have. Even bigger props putting up with the shitty comments on the videos from people who refuse to consider your perspective. Your work is going to be useful to linux more than people want to believe.

 

The issues with Cosmic are something I entirely blame on S76 and not Linus. It's not ready and they're not responding to github issues or community feedback. I got my start on pop os and it's super annoying how S76 was making their own desktop to get away from Gnome only to do one of the things that makes gnome annoying to deal with.

 

I'm surprised that Linus had issues with OBS because of wayland. Does anyone know why the dialogue to choose a capture method didn't pop up? It works on my fedora install as well as an ubuntu VM. I made sure to try native on both, as well as snap in the ubuntu VM and all of them worked. 

 

Regarding Elijah's problems: 

 

I almost wish Davinci Resolve would just discontinue their linux version, almost every time I see someone try it, it absolutely never seems to work properly. The installation issue wasn't an immutable thing, you just almost never install stuff from an installer file immutable or otherwise. Shrug.

 

GIMP does suck, I agree. It's downright infuriating when people want to pretend it's a suitable replacement for photoshop. It's not meant to be a replacement for PS, but I don't even think it's good at what it IS designed to do. Krita is far more usable in my experience.

[Aeternalis]

1 hour ago, Thomas53 said:

One rarely mentioned advantage of Linux over Windows is that you can still run a modern, up to date OS on 366 hardware. Try THAT with Win11. 

1. They're discontinuing support for that arch soon

 

2. Who is doing this? Remember, the kernel has a policy of continuing to support a use case even if it's only 1 person using it. 

 

3. How is this an advantage, really? The advantage is being able to use old, but still usable, computers. NOT fossils. I've happily run linux on old hardware that struggles on windows both in the past and today, but I'm not going to be delusional and say that it's meaningfully an advantage in favor of linux that you can "run it" on a CPU arch that was discontinued almost 20 years ago.

[MAGIC FTW]

 

2 minutes ago, Aeternalis said:

I'm surprised that Linus had issues with OBS because of wayland. Does anyone know why the dialogue to choose a capture method didn't pop up? It works on my fedora install as well as an ubuntu VM. I made sure to try native on both, as well as snap in the ubuntu VM and all of them worked. 

Honestly this confused me as well. since I've tried OBS on Arch, Ubuntu and even Bazzite with no issues. 

 

 

5 minutes ago, Aeternalis said:

GIMP does suck, I agree. It's downright infuriating when people want to pretend it's a suitable replacement for photoshop. It's not meant to be a replacement for PS, but I don't even think it's good at what it IS designed to do. Krita is far more usable in my experience.

Agreed. Krita and Darktable are my preferred options for what id do in photoshop (doodling and adjusting photos)

[gelbphoenix]

3 hours ago, Elijah Horner said:

I know we are WAY late on uploading Linux Challenge PT. 2.... Sorry about that. But in this video Linus, Luke and Elijah all break down the issues and the positive that happened within the first week of swapping over to Linux. Whether that was Linus picking PopOS, Luke swapping desktop environment, or Elijah trying to play some games. Each had highs and lows, also so people dont keep asking me, PT 3 was filmed the SAME DAY as this one so ideally you will see it soon!

Don't know if y'all wanted to include the article which said that Cosmic is in beta or just missed that others (and I after that was mentioned and corrected my comment) noted that Cosmic is in a stable release?

Source: (Link to System76's blog post is in the comment.)

 I – and I have to be clear about this – didn't mean this comment on this post in the LTT Forum as an attack on anyone. I (and maybe anyone else in the Linux and FOSS community) am happy that you – LTT and LMG folks – try to use Linux. It's interesting to see how y'all succeed (or not) and it shows that Linux has to get better.

 

@Elijah Horner I have to ask: For your problems with Poppy Playtime, did you look at protondb.com for help?

 

For another desktop would I also ask if anyone of you three – Elijah, Linus and Luke – have tried the Cinnamon desktop (maybe even with Linux Mint).

[Elijah Horner]

6 minutes ago, gelbphoenix said:

@Elijah Horner I have to ask: For your problems with Poppy Playtime, did you look at protondb.com for help?

 

No, cause the game had just come out so there was not much help on Proton at the time. Instead my Chat helped me troubleshoot and thats how we found out about the video codecs

[Alexeygridnev1993]

You keep complaining about Linux users being salty about videos like this. But how can one not be salty? Pretty much all Linux issues are caused by a severe lack of development resources as most Desktop Linux developers and developers of other open source projects are unpaid or severely underpaid (and there is a severe shortage of maintainers to the point that many critical Linux packages end up being orphaned because their only maintainer steps down and moves on). Windows issues, on the contrary, are created by Microsoft completely on purpose to harvest more of your data to sell to the advertisers / force you to use their stupid AI / lock you down in their ecosystem / whatever; they could be resolved in a matter of weeks should Microsoft decide to do so. Yet you are comparing the two as if they were on completely the same level, like Windows vs. MacOS or iOS vs. Android.

 

And the fact that users refuse to tolerate even a tiniest bit of discomfort to vote against Microsoft with their wallets is ultimately the reason why Windows is such a mess these days. Why would Microsoft ever stop effing their users harder and harder if those users are not even doing the bare minimum to resist?

The same can be said about Adobe. They get away with pretty much anything as the users are just scared of the inconvenience of transitioning to alternatives.