Follow-up video to https://lemmy.world/post/32690521
Spoiler alert: the main reason he says the experience “hasn’t been great” is because shortly before posting the video his Linux install mysteriously broke and he had no idea why. Therefore, he recommended dual-booting Windows just in case.
Cue sea of comments explaining that the reason for the error he was getting was that Windows screwed up his bootloader (i.e. the problem was caused by dual-booting to begin with, LOL).
I miss the Barnacules Jayztwocents live stream days. Can’t even watch Jay anymore because of the click bait, trying to appease teenage boys as a grown ass man thing he’s trying to do.
channel name JayzTwoCents
look inside
tfw opinions aren‘t even worth a penny
I tried nothing and I’m all out of options.
I unsubbed from that channel. Every title is clickbait. I’m not going to watch a video that is like “this is a game changer”, no idea what it’s about, no idea if it’s relevant.
Thank you for including the spoiler. This tech vlogger’s irresponsible headline would normally have earned a downvote from me.
So a tech youtuber didn’t both to do the very basics of research before trying and failing at something? Color me surprised.
deleted by creator
How does that help anything? The channel is trying it out, a channel that is objectively more technically skilled than the average PC gamer. So if they can’t make it work, or can’t make it work seamlessly enough, then there is an issue. It reinforces the image that gaming on Linux is difficult, which frankly, it is.
His install is broken because Windows breaks the dual booting, and Microsoft has refused to fix it for a decade already…
I hate that the Linux community is so quick to fall into blame mode.
That user has an issue using Linux. It’s an issue that’s not uncommon and it does stop that user from using Linux.
As an user, does it matter who’s at fault that his Linux install isn’t working as expected?
Say you buy a brand new Fiat, and 5 kilometers out of the dealership the transmission just dies.
Are you going to say “Using this car sucks” or are you going to say “The subcontractor that made the clutch mechanism in that transmission sucks”?
If your car dies, you are not getting to work today. This sucks. You don’t care who is at fault, using an unreliable car sucks.
To get back to Linux: If some beginner goes through the trouble and fails, it’s very little help to call them out for being a beginner or to aim the blame.
OOP’s assessment is correct: Linux is nice, but there are pitfals for people who aren’t versed in all the things that can go when using Linux. And yes, this one was caused by Windows, but that really doesn’t help a novice user who’s Linux won’t boot anymore.
fix what? that’s a feature.
the idea that you can just jump to linux with zero research needs to go
- no you can’t have every game and program you’re used to
- no you can’t translate windows or mac knowledge
- yes you have to know what partitions, desktop environments, distros, and other bunch of terms mean
- yes you may have to type terminal commands (no one complains about ipconfig when figuring out whether it’s ISP or DNS problem)
- yes there are a bunch of shit tutorials online with copy-paste commands that don’t work
Honestly, in that case, don’t expect mass adoption. Simple as that.
If the idea is to keep Linux as a niche, then that’s fine. But if you/the community want Linux to rival Windows/Mac, than these are the exact bullet points that must change.
A lot of Mac knowledge can translate. I learned the basics of bash on Mac OS X. I also kept my boot partitions on different drives before I switched to Linux only(I was never Windows only or even Windows Primary).
For the life of me I cannot fathom why that crowd doesn’t just switch to an Apple ecosystem when leaving Windows. The entire design philosophy is intended to cater to non-tech savvy people, and to keep them that way. Not saying every Apple user is non-tech savvy, but it is built to be stupid simple to use for anyone.
This YouTuber’s “I can install Linux but abandon it because I can’t figure out why it won’t boot anymore” mentality shows his own limitations.
Buy an Apple if you want to leave Windows, but have no interest in becoming proficient enough to use Linux as a main driver.
Tbf none of the points you listed are negative to me. I mean how boring would linux be if it was just go to [random site] and paste the commands into the terminal? There would be no brain training involved, no way to get better at computers.
Most people use an OS to do things, not to do an OS.
It’s like with cars: There are some car nerds who tune their own engine control parameters and replace broken transmissions and engines themselves.
But for most people a car is used to get to work (or other places) not to play with them.
And while there’s nothing wrong with using an OS as a hobby because you love debugging things, it would be strange to expect that everyone wants to play with an OS instead of using an OS to accomplish something.
I want to make sure I am understanding what you are intending to communicate correctly. At first I thought you were basically saying, “normies need to get good”. But in reflection you could be attempting to say, “Linux advocates are communicating unrealistic expectations which lead normal people to frustration and disappointment.” Or is your intent something else?
I’m not OP, but I agree with the latter.
Go in expecting to need to learn some stuff, and you’ll probably need to learn less than you expect. Set aside a couple hours for the setup process, you probably won’t need it, but you might. Figure out where to go for help before you start. Leave yourself a backup plan in case you don’t finish.
Linux is pretty easy to use these days, but it’s a new thing and will take getting used to. Expect the worst and be pleasantly surprised when things work out.
This is what burned me. I was promised that Unraid would be easier than windows. Dozens of people all promising me that I would have fewer issues, and I would never need to touch the CLI, and it would take me an afternoon to set up. I have spent 200+ hours on this thing. It’s finally where I want it to be, but if I never, ever touch another Linux OS again I will die happy. If I had gone in with different expectations I would have had a VERY different experience. I wouldn’t have thought that every issue I faced was me being dumb. I have since learned that my experience is totally normal, and I’m pissed off at the people who lied to me.
Yeah, Linux is definitely oversold.
I get where people are coming from, if you say it has a learning curve, fewer people will try it, and a lot of those people would’ve had a fine experience. But those that have a rough time will convince others to not bother.
I think it’s much better to undersell it and have people be pleasantly surprised.
And the next part of the equation is that when you go online to ask for help, people tell you you are a noob and it’s a skill issue.
Well…
100%. I’m not sure if it would have put me off, but I wouldn’t be as bitter as I am now.
What lunatic recommended Unraid to you, lol? Setting up Linux mint is easier than installing Windows. And it‘s free, reliable, open source and not stuffed full of bloatware and subscriptions. Please give it a try if you ever need a new OS
I have 15 HDDs and like unstriped RAID. My options were SnapRAID on Windows or Unraid. TrueNAS only offers striped RAID, and I am not aware of an unstriped RAID feature in Mint.
bit of both i guess? “normies need to get good” could be diluted into “do your research before going to linux”, which in most sensible online discussions is already the recommended way: test things out in a VM, try out different DEs, practice configuring things, finding alternatives to your current workflow, etc etc. it’s a harder sell than “just switch to linux” but IMO it’s absolutely necessary
but my comment is more of a reaction to influencers not doing that at all and making le funny challenge of jumping to linux blind and breaking shit because it’s good content and “trying out linux” is still trending
problem is they must be getting this idea that “linux is so easy and fun and seamless and you don’t have to research anything” from somewhere, which i do think is probably way more from people in their audience hyping up linux and not necessarily the wider linux community but these voices gotta be out there
The main issue I see is that a ton of people (influencers but also users) tend to massively downplay the difficulties you might encounter when using Linux.
Every thread where someone asks whether they should try Linux is full of people claiming that it’s super easy, super seamless, much less issues than using Windows, you’ll never need to touch CLI and so on.
But mostly these are users that are already quite good with Linux (or users who just about managed to install Linux a week ago and haven’t seen anything yet). These good users have difficulty understanding how difficult easy things are to regular users.
I encountered this when making an open source physiotherapy game console for kids with cystic fibrosis.
A big issue with CF therapy is that pretty much every therapist is doing something slightly differently, so the therapy needs to be configurable. For that I made a very simple .ini file to configure the therapy. Every single person I showed that to went into instant panic mode.
I then made a simple WebUI where people can configure the same thing, but instead of a text file there are now separate text fields for each value. And suddenly everyone gets it instantly and has no difficulty at all using it, even though all that changed was going from a text file with
key=valueto a Web UI with[label for key] [text field for value].
Linux is easy if it comes pre-installed, pre-configured and with first-party hardware support both by the laptop manufacturer and each and every component in there. And first-party OS support by the device manufacturer. Like ChromeOS and Steam Deck.
If that’s not the case it will be difficult for normie users. Same as installing Windows on hardware not primarily intended to run Windows or making a Hackintosh. Both of these experiences suck just as much.
As someone who games on Fedora as my main OS, we need to stop pretending that Linux gaming is all sunshine and rainbows.
Yes, fuck Windows, and it probably did fuck his boot loader, but it doesn’t invalidate his other poor experiences he had with the OS.
Hell, I don’t think that even that was necessarily an invalid experience just because it was caused by Windows. Dual booting is a thing people have to do, especially if they want to play the games that just don’t work on Linux. Even if you don’t like the games personally, they are huge and a lot of people want to play them. Even my main Linux group dual booted recently to play the BF6 beta.
Being elitist and calling people stupid because they had a bad experience will do nothing but hurt Linux gaming. Instead of calling JayzTwoCents stupid because he dual booted for a valid reason, explain alternatives that he could have done to prevent the issue. If we want to grow as a community, we need to provide actual helpful feedback, not by being toxic.
The real problem is people refusing to learn a new workflow. Which is why anyone would need Windows and dualbooting. Yes you can’t tun every software on Linux that you can on Windows and vise versa; which is the whole damn point. There is software which lets you do the same thing just in a different way - but no one wants to explore the option, if it doesn’t look and work exactly the same, people run away.
I play on Linux. I can count on one hand what games won’t launch. One of them was my main game and their decision to drop Linux off a cliff last year has just grown my hatred for them and Microsoft, which I think is a much healthier and normal response than to submissively bend-over backwards and rush to install Windows which is exactly what they were counting on like we’re some kind of sheep; like all the dual booters out there licking boots.
You know most people play games as a fun leisure activity. Telling them that they need to do a ton of work just to participate is going to be a hard sell except to a relatively small group of people. That is a large factor in why so many people buy consoles.
Not to be a contrarian, but this notion that what people need is a frictionless existence, and anything but. Could and should not be expected. Has already led us to a situation were the new generations, in the first time in history, are dumber an less technologically adept.
We need to change this idea. And start asking people to put in some effort.
You have missed my point. People are already putting in effort at their jobs. When they do get time to relax they don’t want to be required to do a second job.
If this was a car community you would be telling me that everyone needs to know how to do their own oil changes. If this was a baking community you would say everyone needs to make their own bread. A gardening community would say growing vegetables.
These can be valuable and rewarding skills, but just because it is important to you doesn’t mean it should be required of everyone.
Haven’t you seen the folks on linkedin? They are bragging about letting AI do their job.(Im not talking about the manual labourers and such.) Just today I learned that doctors using AI to identify cancer are getting worse at identifying it themselves. And yes you should know how to change your oil, bake your own bread and grow your own vegetables. You should also know why the sunset is red and that snails don’t die from eating poisous mushrooms because a liver is required to metabolise it.
Haven’t you seen the folks on linkedin? They are bragging about letting AI do their job.
You do know that there is more than one other person on the internet?
And yes you should know how to change your oil, bake your own bread and grow your own vegetables. You should also know why the sunset is red and that snails don’t die from eating poisous mushrooms because a liver is required to metabolise it.
Yeah, you are a hero who knows it all, gotcha.
Oh no, I have to tinker a bit to play video games, the HORROR!
Being a contrarian doesnt mean you are correct by default.
The other two main TL;DWs are that:
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He justifiably complained about PVP games having non-Linux-compatible kernel-level anti-cheat.
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His benchmark testing showed a big performance difference between Windows and Linux on his system, which has an AMD Radeon 7900 XTX. Being an admitted noob, he didn’t notice that it was an unusual discrepancy and figured that worse gaming performance in Linux was “real,” but a bunch of folks in the comments are telling him that RDNA 3 drivers have a known issue that means the card probably isn’t running at full power and tweaking the settings can probably fix it.
tweaking the settings can probably fix it.
Which is another points against Linux. Stuff should work correctly out of the box. That’s what average user expects.
Stuff should work correctly out of the box.
That’s why Windows isn’t ready for mass adoption
Average users can’t even remember to set their proper monitor resolution/refresh rate in windows or in games.
Or enable XMP/Expo profiles for RAM.
Or enable RE-BAR / Hypervisor support.
Smooth brains around’.
I helped my mom with her windows install when the update half a year ago nuked keyboard support (I had to use the onscreen keyboard just to login). Before thar I had to forcefully install the correct wifi driver as well to get it working properly. This is was running from their factory installation. Stuff working correctly out of the box is a problem on both platforms.
Its not the fault of linux that the hardware manufacturer doesnt make functioning drivers tho…
Yes it is.
For the end user, if one platform has driver support and the other one doesn’t, then one platform works and the other one does not.
“It’s not my bug” is a thing engineers get to say to close issues on their backlog, but it doesn’t magically fix the problem for the end user if the other side says the same thing (or doesn’t care).
If you want people to use Linux, then Linux has to work, and that includes the third party drivers.
The user perceiving it as such, doesnt make it so. It makes a difference because if you acknowledge and make visible that it is AMDs fault, then they will be more likely to fix their shitty driver. Over all linux does have much better hardware support than windows, but with newer hardware the vendors are just oddly slow sometimes.
It does make it so.
I get so tired of shouting this from the rooftops in the general direction of FOSS devs and advocates. UX is the only thing that matters. If the user can’t use it, it doesn’t exist.
No, Linux doesn’t have “much better hardware support than Windows”. It is harder to set up and maintain, so it’s worse. It doesn’t matter if you can make it work. It doesn’t matter if you can make things work that don’t work on Windows. If I plug it in and it doesn’t go, then it’s worse.
This doesn’t make me mad because I want to defend Windows, this makes me mad because I really, REALLY want Linux to do well, along with other FOSS alternatives to enshittified commercial software, and this is an absolute brick wall blocker for that. I don’t know how FOSS spaces take away control from whiny engineers who think the current situation is functional, but somebody needs a UX equivalent of a Linus Torvalds shouting abuse at coworkers about how garbage their UX is (that everybody finds hilarious for some reason. Maybe the next step is getting some HR).
No, Linux doesn’t have “much better hardware support than Windows”. It is harder to set up and maintain, so it’s worse. It doesn’t matter if you can make it work. It doesn’t matter if you can make things work that don’t work on Windows. If I plug it in and it doesn’t go, then it’s worse.
Meanwhile all five generations of GCN are varying levels of abandoned officially on Windows while Mesa supports AMD cards going back to GCN1, and even more recently started to enable AMDGPU support by default on GCN1 and 2.
But yeah, as for Windows having better support, GCN1-3 are long since buried officially for that OS, and Polaris and Vega have a foot in the grave at this point as they’re curtailed to security updates only officially on Windows, contrasted against Mesa still actively supporting that older hardware. Also, can’t emulate RT on RX 5000-series and older cards on Windows, while you can on Linux.
And yes, I’m aware of R.ID modded drivers for those older cards in Windows, but for this context, I’m only counting official driver support.
You are listing edge cases. Nobody cares.
You buy a laptop, you install Linux and it goes. That’s the bar for mainstream usage.
If you have an older computer that no longer gets MS or AMD updates it’s cool that Linux can be installed on it and be marginally safer, but it’s disingenuous to not acknowledge that in that scenario unsupported Windows still works, by definition. For people on older hardware their older hardware is already working.
Linux can, at best, have a lighter footprint (and be less full of decades of leftover garbage) and make some forward compatibility available on very old devices, but it’s not unlocking hardware that wasn’t working because it didn’t have drivers. Windows does do that in general, and especially for newer or niche hardware. Lying to ourselves about this is not doing anybody any favours.
It is harder to set up and maintain
Its really not tho. Have you installed Windows 11 to a PC? Shit takes forever to remove all the ads, garbage and AI features. You literally have to edit the registry to get a usable system. Installing a popular linux distro takes like 5 minutes and then you just install whatever software you need. Any normal consumer device you plug in just works out of the box, no need to install drivers that are then again filled with bloat, ads and often even malicious code or vulnerabilities. Like ffs sake Windows 11 doesnt even function at all on a good portion of desktop computers in use today because of the TPM requirement.
Just last weekend i helped someone that never used linux before to switch. The actual install took less than 5 minutes. GPU drivers come preinstalled with the distro and work out of the box. Then another 30 minutes or so of installing and setting up all the programs they need. Another 30 minutes to copy all their old files over and explaining some general differences and thats it. Literally zero tinkering required and they are happily playing their steam games at peak performance.
Ofcourse you can get unlucky with your hardware which then involves a very annoying amount of tinkering, but when the baseline on windows is already fuckloads of tinkering then having to do tinkering sometimes is not at all a bad trade off.
I dual boot on most of my devices and I have PCs around the house going back to Windows 95.
I am also proposing that “just this week I installed Linux for my mom” becomes the next “year of Linux desktop” and is treated with similar derision, because man.
In all seriousness, this is delusional. All Windows devices out there work out of the box and come with Windows preinstalled, so there isn’t an installation in the first place, just a first time setup. Installing Windows the way I like it takes some tinkering, but MS’s assumption is that most normies don’t have a way they like at all and will happily take the default. They are right about this.
There is certainly more clicking on a Windows install in that you have to say no to a bunch of stuff, but it’s ultimately fairly equivalent these days.
The problem with Linux isn’t installing it (sweaty Arch users aside), the problem is what happens next. You can get lucky and have everything work, particularly with Bazzite and other distros that have a narrow focus and provide specific installers targeted to specific hardware, but if something in your PC doesn’t work out of the box you’re SoL.
In the example from this video the guy found out their AMD GPU was running about 25% slower than expected, so now what? And that’s before he reaches an ungraceful boot failure and is stuck out of the OS instead of going into an automated recovery process.
You have to troubleshoot on Windows as well, as you do on any computer, but the likelihood of hitting an issue in the first place is lower due to it being the baseline platform, and the paths to a resolution are also more streamlined. That’s the definition of harder to set up and maintain.
The sooner the Linux community gets over the delusional bubble they live in after getting their systems set up and fine tuned the faster a transition to Linux for more people will be. The delusional rah-rah isn’t helping.
I should add that in my experience Linux developers and maintainers are WAY less unrealistic about the current state of Linux in these areas than vocal online advocates. This is more a community problem than a development or strategy problem, although there’s some of both in there as well.
You’re right that it’s Linux’s problem, but that doesn’t mean it’s Linux’s fault.
Sure. No argument from me here.
That’s just life, though. You so very often have to solve problems someone else created that get in your way but not theirs.
@TheBat @grue how do you define not working correctly ? …
the GFX Card booted
the GFX Card rendered the desktop
the GFX Card rendered Games… the only issue it wasn’t as fast as possible …
-> solution on windows -> you report and get a new driver or you get a new driver cause you don’t know that you don’t have the max performance
-> solution on linux -> you report and get a new driver or you get a new driver cause you don’t know that you don’t have the max performance^^^ where is the difference ?
Oh yeah because spending half a day manually downloading and installing a zillion drivers and their bloat and rebooting between each install is peak ootb-functionality.
Meanwhile I was in CP2077 literally 5 minutes after booting a fresh install of Bazzite. On the exact same computer.
Cringe.
Which operating system works out of the box for gamers that requires zero tweaks? Is it windows? Are you sure it’s windows?
More so than Linux, yeah. No system is perfect, but some are less fiddly than others.
Stuff should work correctly out of the box. That’s what average user expects. Linux is getting better at that every single day, is Windows? Linux is where the innovation is for the user, not Windows or any other proprietary, profit-seeking OS. Is it perfect? Probably won’t ever be. Will it get better? That’s up to us and our actions. Will windows or any other proprietary OS get better because of our actions?
Linux is getting better… but it’s still nowhere near the default Windows position. A major factor in this is because development focuses on Windows for most studios, and frankly Linux is so fractured that it’s difficult to make a game work on everything Linux.
But, that’s Linux’s main strength. It has a wider flexibility than other operating systems ny design. It will likely never be as “out-of-the-box” as Windows, no matter how much they sabotage themselves.
The average Windows user would have to change wildly for them to care about 99% of the changes that most power users would. You can see that in most other platforms, like YouTube, reddit, Netflix and other streaming services. They enshittify day by day and the average user shrugs and says “that’s the way it is” and continues on.
My whole comment -> check out https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2020/11/check-out-linux-porter-ethan-lee-show-off-how-linux-games-are-built-and-packaged/ and the video in it.
PS: This guy really knows what he is talking. All of his linux ports are top notch and if needed he provides extremly fast updates. GLIBC updates breaking stuff ( which has happen once in alot of years) -> he got you
But that responsibility is not on the OS. It’s a vendor and publisher responsibility. When a game doesn’t work on Windows, people don’t blame Microsoft. Admittedly the game was made for Windows. But most publishers and developers will give the same response to gamers, “fuck off, the game was for Windows XP, not W10 or W11. We will remake it and make you pay $60 again to play a game you already played 15 years ago. You are on your own until then.” The vast majority of old games that are still playable, are so through an effort from third parties. Like mod developers and vendors like Valve and GOG keeping compatibility alive.
Linux, as it has become abundantly clear after the SteamDeck and Proton, already makes gaming out of the box extremely easy and entirely viable. It was the other side of the equation who were being dickheads. Or, as an example, like Epic, or Genshin Impact, who intentionally go out of their way to break Linux viability for their games with utmost hatred.
you’re absolutely right, but it’s still the gaming experience as a whole on linux. is it unfair? absolutely! but it’s still the experience
Most shit on windows needs adjustments out of the box to work correctly… That’s just all PCs
That’s the whole thing with consoles is that you don’t have to do that
Most shit on windows needs adjustments out of the box to work correctly… That’s just all PCs
This is just not true of Windows. I trust you aren’t talking about settings in-game, of course.
He justifiably complained about PVP games having non-Linux-compatible kernel-level anti-cheat.
I’m tired of people conflating gaming as a whole to extremely mainstream titles that fit into “online PVP with malware anti-cheat” such as Apex Legends, Valorant, and Battlefield, and then bashing Linux for “poor gaming experience”.
Their experience with titles they enjoy is very valid, as valid as any other, but it’s not the entirety of gaming and OS experience, at all. There’s tons of games that run extremely well on Linux, even out of the box, no tinkering required, both on Nvidia and AMD hardware.
Grrr.
Personally, I find the Linux incompatibility with games that want to do shit to the kernel a plus so I don’t accidentally install one without realizing it comes with malware.
To your first comment about incompatible anticheat - in must cases it’s a conscious decision the publisher makes. Are We Anti-Cheat Yet it’s a good resource. Personally I find my OS preventing me from being able to run a privacy invading rootkit to be a pro as well.
To the second comment, a good amount of games bench better on Linux, not sure what’s going on with his system so I agree.
Definitely unfortunate to see a creator publishing content without first doing some research but that’s more and my common nowadays.
This YouTuber in particular does indeed just frequently throw out statements without properly checking whether they are even true at all.
It’s a big problem with this guy for sure, but also he’s usually pretty good at admitting when he’s wrong and calling himself out on it. I wonder if he’ll look into this again to get some clarity.
I am kind of shocked about the 7900 xtx. I have the same GPU and I am getting good performance under Linux.
I did some just for fun benchmarking on Doom The Dark Ages last night and I expected Linux to be slightly slower due to the built in ray tracing but I actually got better avgs under Linux. The max frame rate was slightly higher under Windows but the lows were way better under Linux. Overall fairly close performance with a slight edge to Linux.
Maybe Bazzite is doing some magic here. What distro was he using?
Edit: I watched a bit of it, he is running Bazzite, no idea why he is seeing such crazy different numbers. I typically run Proton GE, and I assume he is running Proton Stable, so that would make a dent. People are mentioning low power mode in the comments, but I never have had any issue with that and my 7900 xtx. I haven’t had to do anything weird or out of the ordinary.
I think it’s most likely due to me not playing the same games he is, Stalker 2 is basically the only he is playing that I have played in the past and I’ve haven’t done a comparison of that game on Linux vs Windows.
I’ve come across multiple times situations which arise from known issues leading to a worsened experience for the user. Linux cannot solve all problems, some are difficult to solve or some require solutions which may not be possible to be resolved but in any case, what the user usually misses, is that the OS identifies these situations and inform the user.
In this case, Jay would’ve really been off better if the user interface was able to simply inform the user of the circumstances or the limitations that it had detected.
We dont actually know what was causing the performance differences between linux and windows in Jays testing. I’ve noticed sometimes linux is + or - 20% the performance of windows even with everything configured correct.
I dont like telling people that the preformance is going to be better than windows. I just point out that the preformance on linux is good enough to have an enjoyable experience. I’ll take a 10% preformance hit to escape windows.
Wait, I have a 7800x3D and 7900 XTX and feel like I’m getting exactly the performance I’d expect for 1440p gaming. What do I need to look into to see if I’m leaving performance on the table? I’m using Arch so latest rolling kernel drivers seem to be working fine based on my monitoring of card stats and “feel” when playing modern games. Since performance has been fine out of the box, I never suspected I could be missing something so it would be nice to verify one way or another.
This is what I had to do couple of years ago: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1500#note_1854170
It seems it has been fixed since.
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I also dual boot, to separate physical drives, and the Ubuntu bootup process is constantly breaking. Every other restart I have to fix it so that it will boot. Having said that, gaming on windows was untenable. Every single game would crash between 1min and 30min, always with an nvlddmkm error code showing in the event viewer. Using a laptop rtx 4070. I tried absolutely everything to fix it. I even tried buying new ram sticks. Same error. I started to think something was wrong at the hardware level.
Since switching to Ubuntu, I haven’t had a single crash, playing every game on steam with maxed out graphics. It works perfectly. Also I’ve noticed that booting into windows sends cooling fans into overdrive while booting into Ubuntu is quiet as a mouse. Fuck windows, it’s basically spyware at this point and it doesn’t even work.
I can’t get doom the dark ages to run at a playable frame rate on my Ryzen 9 / etc 5080 laptop.
Literally the only issue I’ve ever had with Linux gaming.
average tech youtuber not knowing anything about tech
Hey, at least he’s up-front about it and didn’t type in
yes, do as I say!like Other Linus did.Complaining about Linus doing things like an inexperienced user when that is the whole point of the test is pretty stupid, honestly.
I would expect someone who knows just enough to follow troubleshooting using the command line but not knowing how powerful it can be would do the exact same thing in his position.
No. Doing things because you’re inexperienced is one thing, but reading a very strongly-worded and scary message that explicitly told him that it was about to break his system and then doing it anyway is on another level entirely.
As much as I fucking cant stand him, I have to say… in that case, Most new users would do exactly what he did.
Computer users always get hit with big ominous warning messages that amount to nothing 99.9% of the time. IIRC the reason something happened that time wasnt because Linus ignored the warning message, but because of a known bug in that version of the distro that was known about and wasnt fixed in the installer for months, until the video came out, that caused the DE to be removed when uninstalling something else… Which is just pants on head and should have been fixed long before the video came out.
Besides, and I say this as a non-technical non-sysadmin linux user… the overwhelming amount of tech support for linux doesnt encourage knowing what commands do, it encourages copy and pasting… because almost all the tech support solutions I’ve ever found basically amount to “if you have X problem, copy Y command into terminal to fix it” with no explanation on why it works, just that it (hopefully) does.
Computer users always get hit with big ominous warning messages that amount to nothing 99.9% of the time.
This is yet another instance of blaming Linux for Windows’ bad behavior.
He said, on a topic, about a big ominous message on linux, that would have done nothing at all… if it wasnt for the bug known for months in the distro, that they refused to fix until it got bad press from a popular youtube video.
But yes, its windows fault. /s
Right, that’s my point: when Linux gives a big ominous message, it’s because it’s actually important. If the distro hadn’t had that bug, it wouldn’t have given the big ominous message.
Remember, the bug wasn’t the warning message itself. The bug was removing the DE when installing Steam, which the message correctly warned about. The warning message was appropriate and warranted.
It is Windows, and only Windows, that mis-trains users to ignore warnings because it issues so many spurious ones for benign situations.
Again, when you have no idea how much the command line can do, and the instructions is literally for something as basic as installing Steam, nobody would expect to nuke their DE.
You’re also expecting that people should be able to parse an long ass message full of technical terms that they are unfamiliar with the first time they see it.
You guys really overestimate how competent the average person is. Linus was playing the perfect role of a “knows just enough to be dangerous” noob.
As I recall, the prompt was particularly clear about what was about to happen, hence the extra
yes, do as I say!response. Linus was either too stupid or too arrogant to realize that he was out of his depth and should consult someone with more experience.Ignorance and stupidity are very different things. This wasn’t a Chernobyl situation where the emergency scram button triggered a hidden flaw. This was a “PRESSING THIS BUTTON WILL IMMEDIATELY AND DEFINITIVELY NUKE, RUIN, DESTROY YOUR SYSTEM” situation.
Most people who has never dealt with Linux will ever understand that having to type a sentence signifies that it is an important message that needs to be read thoroughly. Its more likely for them to think its just a quirk of using Linux distros, such as using sudo.
Honestly, the average person would never figured that out unless they’ve had experience with it before. Most people can’t even read short error messages after something has gone wrong, let alone lines of text full of technical terms they have never seen before in the process of figuring out something as mundane as installing Steam.
I seriously think you guys are a bit out of touch with how non-technical people deals with their OS. The fact that you think its arrogance that made him not consult people instead of him playing the role of a non-technical person really says a lot about your own comprehension skills.
Do not pretend like Linus Sebastian is your tech illiterate grandmother. He’s a clown today, but he has had experience with computers in the past. Of all people, he should have known better.
Man, you’re really missing the point of that video. I guess when you want to hate on something, most people turn off the logical part of their brain.
Unfamiliarity with the system should make people more inclined to read shit carefully, not less!
That’s just fucking common sense, not elitism, and I make absolutely zero apologies for it.
That’s not the reality and you know it. If the fact that humans are generally stupid is news to you, you are just being ignorant. And thinking that your common sense applies to everyone is what makes you elitist.
I’ve been gaming on Linux on both Deck and Desktop for a while now and I like it, but I also have to admit that it’s not without issues. Thanks to Steam and Proton, most games really do “just work”, but some, especially non-Steam games or related tools like launchers, plugin/mod managers can cause issues and may need more effort to get running, which can be difficult for people with little Linux experience. I also recognise that not everyone wants to have to deal with that and I think that’s fair. And I get the impression that many Linux gamers underestimate their own skills and how much the average non-tech person would have to learn to be able to have a similarly good experience.
Updates can also just break games. I’s happened to me with Trackmania when the stupid Ubisoft launcher suddenly wouldn’t work anymore, or Blizzard games like World of Warcraft and Starcraft 2, which started having graphical issues. Slay the Spire, after a patch, always launched on the wrong screen and refused to let me move it to the primary one.
Disclaimer: I’m on a non-gaming focused, but popular distro (Fedora).
Slay the Spire in particular has a Linux native version. You shouldn’t have any issues with that.
Yeah I don’t know what’s up with that, but I’m not the only with this issue and funnily enough running the game with Proton fixes it.
It’s not an unreasonable to think that a backup os is a good thing to have, even if in this case it’s the one (most likely) being the reason Bazzite broke.
Now, I did listen to the video on my way to work, so I might have missed some details, but after checking the comments it seems like Jay’s performance wasn’t really where it should have been. Got to wonder if there’s some funky gotcha with the gpu module or proton settings.
Also, does Bazzite default to xorg or wayland? I honestly have no idea.
Wayland
It’s Wayland only, I’m pretty sure.
You can just have a thumbdrive with another linux distro and live boot with that. There really isn’t a need to have another os permanently installed.
The reason he’s actually giving to keep Windows is software compatibility for multiplayer games and other unsupported things. Using it as a fallback is just another reason he adds at the end when troubleshooting his broken bootloader.
He’s not wrong about any of it, although for recovery you’ll likely have a harder time accessing the Linux FS from Windows than the other way around, so having a recovery Linux on an external drive is good advice regardless.
Jay you mean? I replied to a comment, not the video, and the comment only said “backup os”.
Still, I admittedly did not watch the video because I’ve stopped watching that guy years ago. He’s one of the least knowledgeable “techtubers” I know. The only thing he was good at was custom watercooling stuff, but I don’t know if he still does that stuff.
Lastly, while it does suck to not be able to play a game due to anticheat, the best way to solve that issue is to not play those games. The devs will propmtly find a way to make an anticheat that works on linux too if their playerbase demands it.
Going by the Steam survey Linux is like 2-3% of Steam’s userbase. Not even allowing for how many of those people do have a Windows PC on the side, it’s gonna be a while before you convince devs to stop having Anticheat for the sake of that market segment specifically. If they were going to balk at the losses they would have added support in the first place. Being maximalist about it is fine as a principled stance, but you don’t have enough of a wallet to vote with it on this one.
The comment said “backup OS” because the video ends on a complaint that GRUB got pretty badly broken, presumably by the way they set up their Windows dualboot. I was clarifying for the record that he also suggested dualbooting for other reasons, mainly software compatibility, before things get to that point.
Again, he’s not wrong on either count.
You have to start somewhere my man. Also, not trying to “convince” devs to remove anti-cheat. The point would be to have a linux compatible solution.
Again, it’s not relevant that relevant how the video ends because the comment did not specifically made a reference to the video and I didn’t either. You’re adding context that you imagine OP was referring to but nothing of the sort was explicitly said.
If only we could keep windows on a thumb drive instead
You kind of can? If you want to have an OS that you will actually use (instead of just a backup to fix your actual os) on a thumb drive, buy a usb-c m.2 enclosure, put the cheapest ssd that meets your needs in there and just install windows there.
I didn’t want to commit more than a cheap flash drive. However I tried what you said since I had a m.2 enclousure laying around. I did all of this through virt-manager by passing the external device through. The installer complained when I passed the device as a usb device. I solved it by just passing device path of the external drive to the vm and the installer didn’t know any better.
I don’t see any other reason why this would not work for any usb device. usb flash drives as well. I might try this at some point.
The problem with normal fñash drives is longevity. The OS will probably wear it out pretty quickly. As an inexpensive and/or disposable solution I guess it’s fine, but it’s not reliable.
Depends. I’m still keeping win10 (but haven’t booted into it in months), just in case when on a game night something refuses to work on linux and I can just boot to windows and game with my friends. I’m not going to start troubleshooting then and there, doubly because in general alcohol is involved during those friday night gaming sessions.
The day for repurposing those partitions is coming closer though.
It sucks that you have to maintain it though. If you don’t update from time to time, you’ll have to update windows, steam, the game and probably thr gpu drivers as well.
I sincerely hope that Linux becomes at least mainstream enough to not have compatibility issues. It’s still not something I would recommend to people that don’t know how (or don’t want) to troubleshoot issues. If installed linux on my mom’s laptop she’d be constantly reaching out to figure out how to do/solve stuff.
I’ve been dual booting for ages without any windows-caused issues. is it windows 11 specifically that messes with dual booting or did I accidentally work around it by installing Linux to a separate ssd
Different disk is fine. Same disk, Windows is a little colonialist ass and on every update will rewrite the boot partition, screwing up Linux.
no idea if this still applies. but a long time ago i would still dualboot and thought i was smart: 2 smaller exchangable system disks (linux & windumb) + 1 large fixed data disk. during some windows updates it would make the data disk bootable and put its fucking bootloader on it.
i would get a blue screen while booting linux and the joy of removing a boot partition on my data drive.
If the data disk is configured as a primary disks and has a boot section, it will still do that. Windows wants to make sure it will load no matter which disk the PC decides to boot.
Yeah, if you’ve got two EFI partitions on separate disks and one is for Windows while the other is for your Linux, you’re good. Windows likes to reinstall its bootloader which sets it as the default and sometimes overwrites the Linux bootloader, but not if it’s on a different EFI partition, then it doesn’t “know” about it.
I had a problem with dualbooting windows because i always have to shutdown it using shift+shutdown, because windows kidnaps my ssd and hdd.
Also had issues with dual booting until I removed the Linux drives when installing Windows to make sure the boot partition was created on a separate drive.
Zero issues since.Biggest downside is Windows always rebooting after updates, and if I don’t sit there, it boots back into Linux as it’s the first option in Grub.
At least now I have the option to fire up Windows when I can’t solve something in Mint.
I had this issue on my media pc which I wanted to be booting into mint, but grub would throw it to windows on reboots which made it super unreliable. Finally found how to edit grub (really wish there was a simple ui for it but it must be pain, I guess). Hope it helps.
Thanks mate, but the only way to fix it would be to have Windows as the prio boot OS, which just hurts too much hehe.
I’d rather sit and wait and choose it manually after updating.
Biggest downside is Windows always rebooting after updates, and if I don’t sit there, it boots back into Linux as it’s the first option in Grub.
This is why I edited Grub to not timeout and instead wait for me to make a selection.
Can be done by running
sudo vim /etc/default/grub
Can also use nano or some other editor than vim too.
And changing GRUB_TIMEOUT=X to GRUB_TIMEOUT=-1 or a larger value to give you more time if you prefer to have it timeout eventually. -1 disables the countdown to auto select entirely.
And then run
update-grub
To have the changes confirmed.
I do this because I use Windows about half and Linux the other half so letting me make my decision works best for me.
You can also set up Grub to default to your last boot. I forget the exact setting name, but it’s a Google away. That’s what the guy in the video did, too.
Also, if you’re using EFI, you can use something like efibootmgr to select which entry to use on next boot up. Handy if you want to swap between OS installs without breaking out a remote KVM or hassle with GRUB monitoring all your drives.
efibootmgr(8): change EFI Boot Manager - Linux man page https://linux.die.net/man/8/efibootmgr
Honestly, the whole thing should be way more standardized, handled directly from BIOS without having to interrupt the boot and support fast booting instead of bringing up a menu every time. It’s weird that crappy, cheap ARM handhelds with Android/Linux dual boot handle this better than x64 devices
On Linux you can already boot to Windows (Bazzite even installs a script that does this into your Steam library to enable easy switching from Game Mode). I am not sure if there’s something readily available to do this on Windows, but either way it’s a massive waste of time to boot into one thing to then boot into the other. It’s even a waste of time to have to step through any menus at all to select a boot option.
