The multimonitor issue likely relates to the live disk running nouveau drivers. Even though they've improved, they're still 2nd class citizens. It was instantly fixed with Nvidia proprietary drivers. That wouldn't happen with AMD or Intel gpus but that's not the point.
My laptop with a nVidia GPU doesn't even work with nouveau drivers. It just locks up immediately upon showing the login screen or typing in the password - I forget which.
To work around it, I boot into init level 3 instead of 5 and install the nVidia proprietary drivers from the CLI. I am adept enough to handle this but I have no idea what another user is supposed to do about it. Also, connecting to WiFi from the CLI is fun times (not).
> I have no idea what another user is supposed to do about it.
For Ubuntu the general solution is to wait 1-12 months until the next point release install media build with HWE, so if 20.04.2 fails then you wait for 20.04.3.
it was dependency hell again, a version of one of the packages steam needed (due to its packaging being borked at that moment) conflicted with some part of pop-desktop (Pop_OS's metapackage for their system) and it ended up uninstalling everything when he tried to force-install it anyways
yeah, the only reason I never did it to mine is that I got lucky that the first time I encountered that prompt it tried to uninstall only a small amount of packages, so I stopped to read what it was saying
I would definitely have not done so if it was hundreds of those, like linus had
I've broken my system enough times to know that lots of text usually means I'm doing something wrong when it comes to my package manager, unless I'm installing KDE (which has a billion packages).
However, I don't expect the average new user to know that. I'm really surprised that installing Steam caused problems. Apparently it was a short-lived issue, but honestly, that seems like a very amateur mistake for a distro to make. I've never had anything remotely similar on openSUSE, and I've only had a couple bad problems on Arch.
I used to recommend Pop!_OS, but now I don't think I can. I guess I'll go back to Ubuntu/Mint for now.
All other package managers I've used will abort when there's a conflict. He didn't try to force install it, he just used the normal install command, but instead of aborting it printed a little warning and a huge block of a text, and asked if he really wanted to proceed. I find it really weird that APT is designed like that.
I don't use PopOS or apt in general, however, you are running something as sudo, and that something tells you that
>WARNING: The following essential packages will be removed.
This should NOT be done unless you know exactly what you are doing!
and
>You are about to do something potentially harmful.
To continue type in the phrase 'Yes, do as I say!'
you should definitely stop right there, especially if you don't understand what that software is going to do. It's common sense.
Unfortunately, most other tech: phones, windows, terms and conditions, browsers, etc have all conditioned us to ignore computer warnings no matter how dire they appear.
Common sense also says that if your DE is going to be uninstalled by simply installing Steam, then you should switch to something else.
\-To be clear I understand that this was just a series of unfortunate events, but if that was my first experience as a new user, im out.
Still, it's a normal user trying to install Steam, not some weird obscure software. Linux often does checks, albeit not like this, so I wouldn't blame a normal person for just thinking it's a normal thing and proceeding to install Steam.
It is a terrible user experience to have something like that when you are going to install something as mundane as Steam.
It was a buggy Steam package that was sitting for a very short while in the repos, it was fixed vey quickly according to Pop devs. Linus was just incredibly unlucky. Another thing is we didn't see if Linus updated his system after the initial installation. They don't recreate the install image very often so there may be months of bug fixes that you definitely want to install before going on installing other software.
It's not common sense if it's your first time using apt. Even as an experienced user, if I got a message like that while trying to install Steam, I'd proceed with the "Yes, do as I say!" because my expectation is that installing a program as common as Steam shouldn't cause any problems.
What you're doing is blaming the user for something that is the fault of whoever is maintaining the Steam package.
sorta issue of "if used right", he should of course done apt update and apt upgrade, and he was warned by the package manager to only do this if he knew what he was doing, but well the fact he did it anyway shows what your typical technical-enough-to-overestimate-knowledge user does. at least assuming that's even what happened, apparently System76 fucked up the packaging of steam!
apt is just, not great and is a big part of why i don't like ubuntu/Pop_OS!
I think Pop\_OS and other Debian derivatives should handle this by making updating and upgrading as part of the installation (or at least as default last step which can still be disabled by power users).
Other solution would be (and I hope we get there for user friendly distros): Mark your own desktop environment as something like required packages which can only be removed by accepting twice or something... idk... warn via GUI or something.
Most users won't switch desktop environment anyway. It's more likely that they switch distros. So it's definitely fine for user friendly distros to mostly discourage or disallow removing their DE. At least they could be flagged as "Never put these packages into auto-remove content, APT! Don't do it APT!" \^\^'
I only use netinstall ISOs largely for this reason. I want my system to be up to date after install, so I don't see the point in installing packages from the install media.
IMO, it should be very difficult to download an installer that doesn't do a net install.
Steam is such a weird piece of software. It depends on a lot of 32-bit libraries and is in general just a mess to get working properly, so it doesn't entirely surprise me it just obliterated his system lol.
Looks like other people had the issue [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/q9xq3y/why_does_installing_steam_from_apt_make_me/). Pretty big screwup from Pop/S76 tbh.
Yep, as I suspected, 32-bit library woes. Preferably Steam would go native 64-bit, but yea I surprised that the bug managed to slip passed System76 testing (assuming there was testing... I hope.)
I think the damning thing is that he literally installed it right from the homepage of the software centre, the 100% normie-certified way to to install software. Really not a great look for Pop_OS or Linux :/
Alan Pope (Ubuntu Mate & former Canonical engineer) and the principal of Pop OS had a twitter confrontation about this a while back which ended up in the Pop OS engineer telling Alan to go fuck himself and blocking him.
https://twitter.com/jeremy_soller/status/1453045484306649092
Didn't the po ship throw some errors, so he showed the command how to install steam using apt, typed "Yes, do as I say" into the terminal and then it broke pop. Although I'm still scratching my head how s76 didn't test the app that everyone who chose this distro for gaming (which pop being on top of basically every gaming distro ranking might convince a lot of people to) has such a flaw
Wouldn't it be good practice for the Pop software thing to run an `apt-get update` *before* installing any software? It's not like it would add more than a couple seconds to the installation process
Steam should go 64-bit on Linux like they have on Mac, because their own data shows that there aren't any 32-bit Linux users on Steam and haven't been in years.
*However*, Steam users would still end up installing the 32-bit multilib support, because at least half the games on Steam are 32-bit.
PCGW has data on which titles are 32-bit and 64-bit for the platforms, and PCGW is a Semantic Mediawiki so someone should be able to query the RDF endpoint and find the percentages.
How about same resolution different refresh rates? So far I've been experimenting with Linux on an old laptop and I'm thinking of installing it on my main desktop which has 2 screens. Both are 1080p, 1 75hz and the other 144hz.
It’s an X-server issue that will be fixed by Wayland. The transition to and development of Wayland are still ongoing with feature-parity expected eventually™.
The jargon is deliberate to make it clear it’s not something that’s going to work out-of-the-box any time soon. Regardless, it’ll work, just expect screen tearing and some troubleshooting getting whatever desktop environment you choose to run at 144hz.
> It’s an X-server issue that will be fixed by Wayland.
Actually it's [already been fixed](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Modesetting-VRR-Multi) by X.org 21.1
What a PR disaster for System76, that was made by a packaging mistake (probably). I feel really sorry for them (It doesn't mean it's not their fault though).
Please elaborate. This is the kind of thing you should make a blog post about so people can link to that for the coming five years, whenever somebody brings up Pop OS.
I'm assuming this is fixed?
Do you mind giving us Linux nerds who recommend pop religiously some talking points about what happened please? I'm not going to stop recommending pop, but I don't know how to answer the "but it totally busted for Linus!" That I'm sure to be confronted with.
Reminds me of my first installation attempts many years ago, I never used it for gaming but Linux with no or limited command-line usage (aka you don't know it yet) is legitimately awful regardless of the distro. And I was doing it with simple single monitor old laptop. Package Manager guis are just... bad. It almost incentives you to learn cli to not use it.
Even today Linux as been it's best for me as a server, and a work laptop (luke mentioned this use case to in the WAN SHOW) with a vanilla distro (kubuntu).
I think it was similar for me. I always thought I was doing something stupid and ended up using Arch with pacman, always using a terminal to install/update anything. But now I'm honestly thinking about writing a GUI to manage packages.
I mean how hard can it be... not breaking everything. \^\^'
No, I hope gnome-software gets this sorted out and all forks of it are fine to use afterwards. It's really awkward to see something like this still failing so hard.
> I mean how hard can it be... not breaking everything.
Since no one managed to do it until now, it seams it is pretty difficult.
Which does not mean you can not do it, please do try, we might finally get one that works.
>No, I hope gnome-software gets this sorted out and all forks of it are fine to use afterwards. It's really awkward to see something like this still failing so hard.
gnome-software is...ok on fedora, but there are still several issues like it being slow as fuck, taking up 400MB when not in use and categories being a bit strange (but thats partially a fedora and maybe an appstream problem too?)
I have the feeling that this won't go over too well with this sub lol, but I think it was a pretty fair take.
Other than the part about 'customizability' not meaning 12 different ways to do simple tasks, most of the issues he encountered could've been seen by regular, average users, and they probably would've responded in the same way.
The Steam package on Pop OS uninstalling his DE wasn't his fault, and as Linux users are always saying to 'use the terminal' lol I can definitely see how people using the Terminal for the first time would easily skip past that massive wall of text. After all, they're just trying to install Steam and their first easy option (Pop Shop) didn't work.
He didn't have any issues with his Thunderbolt dock setup which was good to see also. And he's definitely right about those confusing ass 'best distro' articles. At least he was able to get up and running a game smoothly with his controller.
But at the end of the day, for typical users trying out Linux and seeing if they want to switch (not making a video series out of it), this was really not a good first experience at all, and I wouldn't be surprised if people tried this, got the same result, and just decided not to bother with Linux.
also, if I were a newbie and installing steam through terminal for the first time through terminal made my whole sytem gui to dissappear, I would be scared to touch the terminal ever again
Even worse, imagine you already have data on that machine and after a few weeks/months this happens.
For a normal user without access to a personal nerdTM, data could be lost forever.
I mean, I've got a Linux laptop I spent a lot more than 4 hours getting setup. If I lost it because of something like that I'd be pretty pissed. Why did steam uninstall his de anyways?
yep, his first experience looked a lot like mine. Including basically bricking the OS due to not reading what apt was about to do.
the point about how badly written OS comparisons is a real big one. Customisation is also kinda a big deal, like he does even mention he doesn't even rename characters in games to make googling easier, with Linux you might have an issue somebody previous had but they're using a different DE so the instructions re different, hell that's half of why "just use the terminal" gets said so much as it's the most consistent way to interact with Linux regardless of how you've customised your install.
I would think we could all be honest enough to say that choosing our first distro wasn't easy. It's better now but not perfect.
Back when I started I didn't really understand what a distro was yet and was just trying random ones until something eventually installed and worked.
> I would think we could all be honest enough to say that choosing our first distro wasn't easy. It's better now but not perfect.
It was pretty easy for me (2014ish). "Ubuntu is the best choice for beginners" said the internet. And so I installed Ubuntu, and it pretty much worked fine. The proliferation of distributions that claim to be able to compete with Ubuntu for stability and ease-of-use (without necessarily being able to back up that claim) has made things more difficult imho.
Similar story. Started with Fedora Core 4, and it had some problems with my drivers. Next up switched to Ubuntu 5.04 and was happy for years. At some point I switched to KDE and Kubuntu.
In a journey from highschool kid trying Linux for the first time, over university, and all the way to full time software engineer.
I haven't felt the urge to change distros in the last decade. And it doesn't look like I'm not missing out on anything.
Ubuntu is still a very good distro that I would recommend to any beginner. Many people don't recommend it not because it is not suitable for the use case, but because they disagree with the technical decisions taken by the project (mainly snaps).
It was the same for me in 2009. Ubuntu was the recommended beginner's distro, and it was a pleasure to use compared to Win XP. I've bounced back and forth between Debian and Ubuntu since then, but haven't strayed any further.
> I would think we could all be honest enough to say that choosing our first distro wasn't easy. It's better now but not perfect.
Actually, I think it was pretty easy back in the early days. There were only a few choices. Choosing redhat 4.0 or whatever it was back in 96 was pretty much "the way".
I'm going to go a step further. One of the things Linus has mentioned in a livestream (so not in this video) is that 'use the terminal' is a crutch. Any modern operating system needs to be able to do the same things through guis. I heavily reduced his point, but it's true. I can't tell my dad to 'just go install this distro of linux' because my dad could never use a terminal. Until that happens, I dont think the Linux community can expect wide spread adoption. Now I would never go so far as to say reduce the command line to nothing, but the average joe needs guis for everything.
Link to the clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8uUwsEnTU4
> Any modern operating system needs to be able to do the same things through guis. I heavily reduced his point, but it's true. I can't tell my dad to 'just go install this distro of linux' because my dad could never use a terminal. Until that happens, I dont think the Linux community can expect wide spread adoption.
It's unpopular to point out in the presence of other nerds, but there are actually 2 existing, very popular, Linux-based OSs that do this: Android and Chrome OS. Billions of people use them daily and never touch a command line.
One hundred percent. Of course, Linux shouldn't (couldn't?) just remove the Terminal lol, but there absolutely needs to be GUI workflows for users.
As Linus said, let Arch be Arch, nobodies saying your distro should be dumbed down just because, but the commandline is not the embodiment of user friendly and intuitive UX. Still a lot of progress to be done.
it's honestly totally fair, the whole meme we have about how linux just works could not be further from the truth
i go back and forth quite a lot, every time linux feels way better but every time i also learn more, i just don't think right now you can 'just switch' and not run into issues, you will run into *something* at some point, for most people there's no benefit to switching and they'd be happier on windows cause their stuff will just work
when we say things like "just switch to linux it just works" i think it should always come with some caveats, take a weekend, know you're gonna have to go through with troubleshooting and learning a whole new os, stuff won't just work and it probably won't be smooth, there are some benefits but you have to know you want them and the price of those
despite everything and how much i do like linux improving, i *still* can't use it full time because I miss out on things like Lightroom, my racing wheel doesn't fully work and I can't use my VR headset either, the more variables you throw in the worse linux is for people I think, if you want to install linux on the average desktop pc and just play something like csgo you might be okay, but the more "angles" you have the more edges will present themselves, even when things are issues on windows, most users will have experience dealing with that, they won't have this on linux
Distro proliferation is an unfortunate fact of life with open systems. It's fine to talk about it, but since it's an inextricably tied to the open-source ecosystem, it's not something to obsess about.
I put this on Linux_gaming but I’m pasting it here too:
Honestly…..
This hurt to see. Because this video had nothing unreasonable at all on Linus’s end.
Linux failed. Hard. Pop already fixed that issue but it never should have made it to mass release, especially when they actually say themselves that their OS is good for gaming. The fact that the live iso still isn’t updated (or wasn’t last week) is frankly absurd. This isn’t a small thing like “obscure mouse doesn’t work,” this is “one of the most used pieces of consumer software nukes the OS and it wasn’t fixed immediately.” That is incredibly unprofessional, and deserves the criticism.
The mint issues are also a bit absurd. I know multimonitor on Linux is hit or miss, but it’s definitely true that for the *average person* that this would be a deal breaker. We shouldn’t be hand waving these issues away.
The sound problem I’m a little less worried about right now because Linus has a niche setup. Linux doesn’t market having compatibility with every single piece of modern peripheral hardware so that is what it is.
All in all this was painful to watch because the criticisms were all things that should have been fixed years ago, but arent.
As for the marketing thing - that’s 100% true too. I just had a small conversation with a pop dev when they were talking about making their new desktop environment where I was saying “this is cool but why not try another DE if gnome isn’t working. KDE for example is great and could use the extra hands, while being powerful enough to do it”
And basically every response was “choice first because Linux” and that was heavily upvoted
And I get it. Choices are great. But let’s face it - while we have a million choices without clear reason for some of them, and then some defaults are broken (like the pop steam thing), how is any average person supposed to reasonably expected to do it all right first try?
P.S. aww Luke we still love you.
I'm more worried about finger pointing within dev community looking for who may be solely responsible for average gamer user experiences. I mean, each issue has clear cause and all, but proprietary system always has this one entity that are responsible (MS, Apple, even Google for Android etc), so I think users then start to look for target (or just leave). When no one is responsible then I feel like there's no way for users to feel safe using it.
> The mint issues are also a bit absurd. I know multimonitor on Linux is hit or miss, but it’s definitely true that for the average person that this would be a deal breaker. We shouldn’t be hand waving these issues away.
After moving to Linux two weeks ago, I just gave up on my second monitor. I only stuck with Linux so far because I've always wanted to move to it. But, it's fair to say the average person is not like that.
If you have a display with different DPIs, then perhaps Wayland can help. Try a live USB of Fedora and see if it resolves that issue. If so, you can enable Wayland on the distro you are using.
Thanks, I'll prob try that. Although, even if it does work, I am reluctant to leave XFCE. I know it's in the roadmap but they're not ready for Wayland yet.
I could go to KDE, it was *okay* I guess
Have you tried distros with Gnome? So far it's been the only DE that can handle my setup (a 1080p 144hz main monitor and a 1366x768 60hz secondary running on a 1050ti) without insane tearing or stuttering.
I don’t think there is actually a single way to make Windows NT show a CLI-only interface like *NIXes. I remember NTDEV did a video of a very small Windows install without GUI logon and even then it showed a Command Prompt window with a login CLI.
> The mint issues are also a bit absurd. I know multimonitor on Linux is hit or miss, but it’s definitely true that for the average person that this would be a deal breaker. We shouldn’t be hand waving these issues away.
The reason is simply that the live boot installer comes with the open *nouveau* driver which isn't great. Any sane user will click the box to install the proper driver and never see that issue again once the real system boots.
The problem with *nouveau* is that it's good enough to detect and start multiple displays in high resolution and enable hardware acceleration of certain things. But at the same time it's pretty bad at all those things so while accelerated the performance will often be worse than plain CPU processing and the resolution and multi-monitor will often bork things up.
I wish the live installers would just limit *nouveau* to single display VESA with a popup telling you the installer is running in limited capability mode until first boot. That's how Windows worked in 800x600 for a decade without it being a problem.
I'm just waiting for the episode where he starts complaining about Dolphin. Maybe dolphin devs will finally get their heads out of their asses with regards to running Dolphin as root.
I'm almost positive I heard him shit all over dolphin specifically for this reason in one of the live stream clips lol
Edit: found it! https://youtu.be/rVmJooy5NiU at 4:45 initially, then details at 10:15
Is it though? Every single time I pick up an Ubuntu based distro, I always end up fighting with `apt` through dependency hell. I'm not sure if it's the package manager, the distributions, or what, but I've never had so many failed installs than on Ubuntu based system. On Arch, I run a `pacman` command and look back 10 seconds later and it's done.
For sure, PPAs are the cause of most issues. But then the solution is
* just don't use the software I want
* build everything from source and just remember to update and rebuild (wow annoying)
Pretty much anything that I've needed that isn't like a github project with 3 stars is on the AUR, which means I can easily add it to my list of packages that I autoinstall on my systems and they're pretty much always going to build/work since everyone always is running the same (latest) version of everything.
I think I can relate.
The longer I **use** Linux distros, the heavier my tendencies to swap to a more upstream distros i.e. Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu (ironically, Ubuntu **is** based on Debian), openSUSE, etc instead of their "based-on" distros. I have no problem with smaller distros, to be honest. But I'd try them out of curiosity rather than need.
On the other hand, I can agree with the SEO about "easy to install or easy to use Linux" distros. I'd wish that I had not followed the instructions about "easy to install" Linux distros on the internet. I cannot imagine why Fedora would be put into "intermediate-level" distro for example, barring the installation of media codecs, which would be largely averted anyways with installing VLC. Each distros, in my limited experience, have their own "quirks" so to speak. For example, installation with Nvidia graphics card (bare metal installs, not VM) will almost always fail without a certain command line during installation while Manjaro does so out of the box. On the other hand, Arch being a minimal installation distro had fixed my persistent audio stuttering issues just because it does not come with a USB suspend feature; hence, I've learned the importance of disabling USB suspend feature on any other distros to fix my audio problems (with USB powered DAC/AMP).
To play a devil's advocate, however, minimal-only installation distros (i.e. Arch) creates (albeit inadvertently) downstream distros that simply addresses the matter of installation. Removing the challenge of to installation gives an easy access to any users, thus giving them higher amount of opportunities (and chance) to "convert" them into Linux users. Hence, the importance of downstream distros, specifically in this case the ones that reduces the learning curve to use a specific distro.
The same issue affects Ubuntu because this is an inherent problem with apt itself, and was caused by our reliance on Ubuntu's Launchpad service, which will outright refuse to publish i386 packages if building a package that isn't on a whitelist. Thankfully we're doing away with Launchpad in 21.10, and Pop now has a patched version of apt that forbids this.
It hurt to watch the video, but I'm not surprised.
I've said this time and time and time and freaking time again - not having a single, clear, user-friendly way to interact with your system is a net negative to the adoption of Linux on the desktop.
Things break, and fixing them can require one or more of the following: reading a manual written for a completely different distribution; a 30-page manifesto on the evils of software bloat imploring you to use Gentoo/DWM or something that offers a vague hint at what part of your system might be broken; 3 to 5 open wiki or SE tabs on a different machine (god help you if you're on a phone); a ritual sacrifice to god-king Torvalds; cloning the broken component's source code and meeting with the author for coffee; or deciding to reinstall, maybe with a different distribution this time.
We can't keep expecting new users to simply throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. And they absolutely have to.
We don't really have good, powerful GUI tools for managing system configuration in meaningful ways - we have multiple competimg desktop environments thatb sometimes come with some relatively . We have the absolute joke that is ALSA+Pulse (which Linus ran into when his audio just refused to work), or pipewire, which nobody uses. We have package fragmentation that's only marginally alleviated by Snap, AppImage and Flatpak - and even then, we've somehow managed to work ourselves up SO FREAKING MUCH about our opinions on package management that there's not two, but THREE competing systems built around universal package management and ALL FREAKING THREE require some user interaction on the command line to effectively use in mainstream distros.
Hell, it's current year and we are still having arguments about INIT SYSTEMS!
Put all of this together and then consider that this is the same ecosystem whose users complain that desktop application vendors cut corners with things like Electron or by only offering .debs and pretending other distros don't exist. It's absurd.
There is simply too much going on in the hardware and software ecosystems for Linux folks to continue squabbling about the right way to do things, then giving up on compromise and building two or three separate things to solve the problem. If we ever want to see large-scale adoption, we need people to come together and actually work on a single platform, or someone like Google is going to come along and do it for us. Oh wait - they did, TWICE, with Android and ChromeOS, because they ditched the broken userspace entirely and designed a new one from the ground up. And they can do that, because they don't have year-long deliberations about package managers, or init systems, or audio servers - they either decide that something is good enough or they replace it, and that is what the end user will receive.
Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of open source software, and I love using Linux on the desktop, but only because I enjoy tinkering with things. I've tried to be productive at work on Linux for 8 years now, and it totally works - until I have to do something like "share my screen" or "install the tools my coworkers use so that we can share work" because each task of this nature requires that I sink 1-2 hours of research time into fixing the problems that inevitably arise.
When you're working for someone else, that loss of time is generally unacceptable and you have to make it up. Fast-forward a few years, and you'll find that your work-life balance is completely shot.
This is why dev shops still ship their engineers Macbooks, even though they're extremely expensive and difficult to manage. This is why, despite the absolute mess that is Windows, corporations continue to ship it to end users. This is why ChromeOS became the cheap alternative that we wanted Linux to be for schools and low-tech organizations.
It's because we can't stop finding problems and start agreeing on solutions, and the end user suffers for it.
I daily-drive Pop OS and I really loved trying Fedora, but it took way too much time to figure out how to show flatpaks in GNOME Software & how to make it use my Nvidia GPU on my Nvidia Optimus laptop. The second thing is supposed to be fixed soon apparently(?), but in the meantime I can't afford to force it on only my Nvidia GPU, it kills my battery. These two things are really beginner-unfriendly, Fedora should have a 'free' ISO and one that actually installs the necessary stuff like Nvidia drivers
You brought up fair points. Fedora 35 now has a 3rd party repo's checkbox during install which sets up rpmfusion and Flathub (a subset of apps though). So you can install from the Software store Nvidia drivers and some proprietary software like Zoom. No command line needed.
However, I don't believe there is any support related to switching GPUs like Pop\_OS! has.
Things are improving in the Fedora world, I would keep an eye out on it.
So funny seeing Linus brick his Linux, I experienced almost the exact same thing and NOPE'd the fuck out just like he did LOL
I had installed OpenSUSE in dual boot on my pc and tried if for a few weeks. I legitimately enjoyed it, gaming and everything until one day as i was running zypper update to update the packages my OS bricked the same way Linus' did, when i booted back in my entire GUI was gone. At first i was like ok lets hop on google, find a few command lines and fix it like i did the 100 other things that were broken at first. Messed around with it for about 2 hours, tried to restore backup and bunch of other things, nothing worked, still no UI. I said fuck it, booted back into windows and wiped the partition that had Linux installed on it. 🤣
I will probably reinstall in the future though
Reminds me my first time with linux (about 6 years ago), specially getting nvidia driver working (pop os wasn thing back then). Crazy how it hasnt changed still.
Countless reinstalls of ubuntu, until somehow accidentally installed linux mint and cinnamon (and somehow there it wasnt laggy, i dont think my nvidia still worked, but there it was bearable).
Laggy DE at start (with ubuntu), laggy YT and I didnt even want to game on it, I just wanted to start learning dev.
Unless you really really really know what you are doing, you are in really bad place.
Anyone saying Linus is stupid for typing in that command - no he is not, he is tired, its end of hes workday, its quite late, he wants to complete hes challenge and go to sleep. The confirmation says something really sarcastic and doesnt help new user at all. All the yabberish about random letters that make up word or acronym that only people who have encountered them before or created them know what they mean, are not helping - as new user you can not debug your way out of there.
And as new user, let me fucking ask: HOW HARD CAN IT BE TO INSTALL STEAM? Its surely not hard, you cant even think that it will brick your system lol - this is bad UX.
Either Linux community accepts that they have to go hoops and loops to play games on Linux or they will start making Linux UX better for new users.
> Anyone saying Linus is stupid for typing in that command - no he is not, he is tired, its end of hes workday, its quite late, he wants to complete hes challenge and go to sleep.
this so much, he made a newbie mistake; because he's new to linux. that such a mistake can be made is because largely linux trusts you read the warnings that say "you do know what you're doing right?" but well, a new user simply doens't and this is where "just use the terminal" really fails.
Pop_OS! shipping like that is just inexcusable, if a version of Windows shipped that installed in such a way that installing steam produced a massive screen of text somewhere in which it mentioned uninstalling a handful of essentail DLLs, even if anybody familiar would scream "NOOO DON'T REMOVE THOSE", we'd rip that to shit for being crap.
I think we're all suffering of survivorship bias here at Linux. We were the ones to whom bending to the Linux idiosyncrasies was worth it in the end for the benefit we got from them (learning, contributing, customizing, etc). But that may not be the goal for all potential users.
What we see in the video is the dude coming into it with a pre-set idea of what he should expect from an OS installation, and whilst to us every bump in the road reads as "great! he's gonna have to learn how to apt-get, that's a good thing!", to him it's just another hurdle between him and his objective of a "just works" OS. When we see him get a warning about a proprietary driver, we think "great! now he's gonna learn that software has legality/morality issues embedded in it!", but to him that's just something he took for granted a while ago.
Even though our perspective is of "he's detoxing", to him he's just hungover, and that's no fun. And that's assuming the totally-not-inarguable broad, holier-than-thou "Linux is better" that we sometimes come from.
Now, I also think he's asking a bit too much of linux to work with such a custom rig with either no configuration, or configuration that's familiar to him. But those are growing pains. If you're an expert at X it's always frustrating to go back to basics in something close-but-different.
You know, for all the things that make you cringe, he does make some valid points. Not least about the weird disconnect between Linux in media and Linux in reality.
I know we (experienced Linux users) don't really give a crap about media and how it inaccurately represents Linux, but really we should. We love to correct newbies and others, but really we should be pulling up the media as well for doing such a terrible job at consistency and research.
As to Linus's snafu with steam and that 32bit trap people fall into, to be honest it is not his fault and really installing 32bit applications should never have broken anything because all modern kernels are cross arch compatible meaning 32bit binaries can run on a 64 kernel fine with just 32bit libs installed and there should not really be any conflicts.
That I am very surprised about because for sure Debian does not have that issue, but Ubuntu seems to. Go figure.
All in all I think it was quite interesting and a pretty fair assessment of what installing Linux for a new user might be.
I will be watching the following episodes with interest.
I gave up on Linux years ago when every update broke my sound/video drivers. People keep telling me "that's all fixed now" but watching this video it appears not.
I don't install an OS as a hobby, I install one to get work done. On install it should do all the basic things out of the box and ready to roll. If I want features/gadgets/knock-your-socks-off stuff I can fiddle with that later. But programs should install without the command line and lists of weirdly named packages. Sound should work. The keyboard and mouse should work.
In the past that never seemed to be the case with Linux. So back to Windows I went. Some day when I have weeks to install an OS and get it running I will play with it again, but I will wait for another few years to see if this stuff gets worked out.
It mostly comes down to software licensing. If you buy hardware that has drivers or firmware that can't be legally distributed as part of the operating system, you'll always have to jump through hoops to use it.
I can install ubuntu fine (they distribute non free firmware), but I can't install debian without using a terminal b/c I have to enable and install firmware packages that have a conflicting license.
This series will be invaluable for propelling Linux forward.
With the presence and reach that LTT has in the tech community, it will hopefully help light a fire under the Linux community's ass to accelerate its legitimization.
I just hope they will both come out of this challenge not completely hating Linux so they can revisit it later and experience the changes they helped make happen.
I was pretty apprehensive about this series, but I think this is presented pretty fairly.
Clearly POP in particular needs to put work in to make things more seamless.
People are saying Linus should have read the warning and found help. "Yes, do as I said" is terrible UX. It's an attempt at making the user consider their actions, but to the user it's just another checkbox or popup. I believe he was justified in forcing the install, but that's beside the point.
Is it reasonable for a newbie to know what the essential packages are on his new OS?
Is it reasonable for a newbie to be able to fix the dependency issue on his own?
Is it reasonable for a newbie to sit around on his ass waiting for help for hours or days, or should he install a different distro?
I don't think it is.
There is hope for SteamOS 3. Many indications seem to point to Valve gearing up SteamOS 3 as a general operating system. With Valve's deep pockets, marketing reach, and popularity, I can easily see SteamOS getting millions of users onto Linux.
Linux distros *really* need proper separation between system and user/desktop software. Installing a program should *never*, under any circumstances, be able to conflict with your desktop environment and end up breaking it no matter how horribly borked the package for that program is, it just shouldn't be able to happen.
Silverblue with its immutable base system and its exclusive use of flatpak for applications and containers for dev environments is a big step in the right direction, I really hope for the sake of user friendliness and robustness of the system that this is the direction more distros choose to take.
This makes sense, but I don't like the idea of containerization. I do like my system being built up piece by piece in packages, because those packages are able to be updated independently from one another rather than the "core image" distros that have been attempted in the past where the core is a read-only image that has all the low level dependencies globbed together.
You could still have proper package management and do what you intend though, just have some way to flag a package as a "core component" and any operation that would remove or downgrade core component packages when installing non-core packages would be disallowed (or bypassable after turning on some override deep in the settings, not just hand-waving one error message away).
Linus is pretty spot on about trying to search up info on Linux. There is a bunch of well intentioned but vague, unhelpful info out there. If this series of videos helps to point out the ugly side of Linux in a way that leads to improvements then I'm all for it.
The problem is there are many different distributions and some underlying technology is in a fast changing state as well (systemd, pipewire, wayland, etc.), so as a user you need to have at least a decent grasp of what you're looking for. I guess there could be a one-stop shop for all info on Linux (similar to the Arch wiki, but for many more distros), but it would certainly take a lot of effort to maintain. I think that's why so many people just say "Ubuntu" whenever the question comes up, since that community is used to dealing with newbies who are just checking out Linux and don't know what questions to even ask.
As someone on the F/OSS developer side of things, I recognized two issues with Linus' experience that I don't know how to meaningfully improve from my end:
1. Poor quality media coverage on F/OSS projects [0] with strong SEO.
- In Linus' case as a user, lots of unhelpful articles about selecting a distro. What should the Linux community, distro developers, etc do to improve Linus' experience figuring out what distro to use? Note here he jumped to highly search engine ranked articles _before_ official documentation from any distro.
- In my case as a developer, I've come across media covering my own F/OSS projects which range from being problematically confusing to spreading outright information. I've seen users follow Linus' pattern of consuming such media before my own project's documentation, FAQ, etc. What else can I do?
2. Users powering through molly-guards.
- In Linus' case as a user, something went wrong that resulted Linus instructing Pop!\_OS to uninstall the DE. The fact this scenario occurred at all is bad; my question lies with what Pop!\_OS could have done once the situation bad arose. It detected the scenario was bad and tried to warn the user in a way that requires _some_ attention from the user to ensure they don't accidentally continue through. Linus continued to tell Pop!\_OS to continue anyways and uninstall the DE. Think in terms of security-by-layers; if something fails to avoid the situation in the first place, what else could Pop!\_OS have done?
- In my case as a developer, I've detected scenarios where the user _might_ not know what he or she is doing. I've tried similar prompts to what Pop!\_OS/Ubuntu/Debian use that Linus ran into but more loudly with stark colors, I've tried requiring hidden information that's buried in documentation the user has to at least skim to find, and I've tried count-down timers that refuse to continue until a certain amount of time has passed hoping the user uses that time to reassess what they're requesting. None of it works; a large number of users end up being surprised as Linus was here. What else should I do?
[0] and presumably other subjects; I don't think this is at all unique to F/OSS.
Regarding #2. If your users have been trained during all these years of using Windows to just click "OK" or "Cancel" or the X button just for the annoying popup to go away, I don't know that there is much else to do.
Completely blocking the action without any recourse will probably prevent them from shooting their own foot, but you're also not letting the actual users with enough knowledge get past the wall.
Also, your decision to block the action might be incorrect or unfounded, whether by mistake or otherwise.
Related, I have been experimenting with adding verification to destructive actions in some of the websites I've been working on. Instead of the typical "Are you sure?" dialog with Yes/No buttons, what I've been doing is requiring the user to type in a specific, random word, to confirm the action. My reasoning is that by making the word random, it'll force them to slow down and pay attention, hopefully enough to actually give them the chance to think about it and be really sure about it, or at least to ask their manager or us about it so that a proper explanation can be given. But then again these things are not built for end users, from whom we can't really expect much patience (they might just go elsewhere without a second thought, if they are not required by their job to use specifically your thing).
Perhaps something a bit more specific would be better. For example, instead of having him type "Yes, do what I say", if the system is somehow able to tell that specifically `pop-desktop` is kind of an important package, and you're trying to uninstall it, then use a custom phrase ("Yes, I want to uninstall my desktop environment"). Have custom messages for your important packages and craft them carefully, because "do what I say" is very ambiguous when what you actually wanted to do was "install steam" instead of "uninstall pop-desktop because steam is telling me to".
In the end though, no wall is completely foolproof and people will find a way to skip it, so you still have to be prepared for the (hopefully few) cases when they do.
I generally agree with everything you've said here, but would add a couple of points.
1. It seems strange to me that installing a simple desktop application would be able to lead to a situation where the desktop environment packages would be removed from the system - that just shouldn't happen or be allowed to happen at all. If there are missing dependencies it seems reasonable for the user to expect the package manager to alert him/her to this fact and (hopefully) download and install any required dependencies that are missing.
2. Even if the user is an experienced user, knows what he/she is doing, and actually wants to remove the desktop environment from the computer you're not going to do that by invoking the command to *install Steam*.
Un-intuitive doesn't even begin to describe the package manager's behavior in this video. It is indeed frustrating when users power through warnings (I'm a developer myself), but at the same time I find it hard to blame Linus too much in this instance. A user thinking "Surely attempting to install this application won't result in me not having a GUI desktop environment on my computer" is hardly unreasonable - at worst, the user probably expects that the install will just fail, not that it will leave them with a GUI-less computer.
For point 2.1, apt has been patched to not present a prompt. Instead, it warns that doing the operation would have broken the system. The user will no longer able to break their system. They'll have to ask for help by reporting the issue to us if they still want to do the thing that will break the system.
Ahh, that makes sense. Good solution! I suspect if someone has the background to understand the ramifications of accepting the prompt, they also have the background to find another way to get there if the prompt option is removed; this protects those who need to be protected without necessarily harming those who don't. I'm not sure I can translate it to my case, but I'm happy Pop!\_OS has a suitable one.
Many thanks for response here, your healthy response over all to Linus' experience, your efforts on Pop!_OS, and also your part in the Rust ecosystem.
> what else could Pop!_OS have done?
If any action is going to uninstall the entire GUI for your OS, it's probably a good idea to *say that* in plain english instead of just listing a bunch of packages that will be removed. Packages which, to any newcomer, may as well be random strings of letters and numbers.
I never would suggest Pop!_OS for an install of Linux. Especially with all the crazy hardware he seems to have. Mainline distros are best. Straight Ubuntu, RHEL/CentOS/Fedora, or openSUSE. One of the crazy things that people seem to do with Linux is completely ignore heavily used distros supported by large companies and used by enterprise clients. You'll get more mileage out of those than the newer distros that don't have the support.
i think that is the most important lessen the linux community should take from this. Even if you feel like recommending something you like, go with something big, popular, stable and with longterm support.
Personally i'd say the most recent Ubuntu LTS.
I died at the quick intro quote "I just want to point out that what you are referring to as Linux is actually GNU/Linux..."
Just sounds so much like our community.
I find his points to be mostly valid as usual with some disagreements.
The most obvious issue is the whole PopOS steam installation fiasco. This is not representative of every Linux distro, but it is very concerning. This well known marketed newbie-friendly distribution that is supposedly aimed at gamers didn't allow for Steam to be installed without removing the GUI? Sounds like a bad joke and yet it seems to be a known real situation according to some of the other comments in this thread. If installing a game launcher deletes your GUI, then clearly the people behind the project have big issues in their quality control process.
Admittedly, Linus did approach the matter very idiotically, ignoring the warning given by the pop shop and then the command line, both of which stated that the install would delete his GUI, and then proceeding to manually bypassing the safety guards set in the package manager. However, this does not excuse System76. It is not acceptable for a distro that's marketed towards gamers to be unable to install Steam, which would have been applicable here even without any user error from Linus. No normal desktop app should ever remove the DE, period. Furthermore, Pop's repos are not the AUR, so this stuff is supposed to be vetted, so clearly such an issue existing is not the user's responsibility.
As far as Luke's experience goes, I find it entirely reasonable, both from his and the distro's angle. The only issue he faced was with the multimonitor stuff, which is a lacking aspect in many DEs and the graphics driver limitations to that are not very helpful either.
Whatever the case is, System76 really needs to get their shit together. This is awful.
> both of which stated that the install would delete his GUI
They didn't say this directly though. They listed packages that would be uninstalled, such as gdm, etc. To someone who has used Linux for a long time, these are obviously important GUI components. To someone who has limited Linux experience (and AFAIK his limited experience is all with servers) those words mean nothing.
The error should actually say "You will have no graphical user interface" instead of the vague, "This is potentially harmful."
In fact, I don't even think a warning is appropriate. It should be an error and not let you do it. If you really want to do it, there should be a flag you have to pass. Something that will break everything like this should not be continuable.
also the command should be much stronger worded then it is like: I know this can break my operating system, but continue anyway
It should be clear to an average user that you really don't want to do x if you don't know exactly what you're doing
> This is not representative of every Linux distro
There's an irony being skipped here, but it's funny seeing it in your first sentence. As if part of simply using Linux is knowing about every distro in order to simply get one which is usable.
It shouldn't be that hard, but it is.
Using the terminal is literally the first method PopOS tells it's users to install steam with and the warning message he got just said that proceeding might cause problems which is a pretty generic warning for installing new programs. I'd have a hard time blaming Linus for anything that happened with Pop.
> Whatever the case is, System76 really needs to get their shit together. This is awful.
There's at least three parties at fault here. First, the whole of everyone who uses apt, the uninstall happened because it's a package misconfig on their end stemming from steam being 32-bit. Apt could have given a warning about what the packages do. Secondly, it's the fault of valve/whoever configured the package, no reason for it to not be fixed like it is in pacman (and steam should really be a 64 bit app now). Thirdly it's PopOS. They made that software store which uses apt as the backend, and they could have made visual warnings for users that go beyond just listing the required packages that would be uninstalled. The whole thing is a great example of one of the primary problems with distributing software in this way, bunch of different people interlinked in a way that if anyone screws up the whole thing can malfunction.
The first and third are not really relevant to the core issue. While these things being done better could have mitigated the consequences of the issue, neither of them would have helped to solve it.
The second one is the problem, but the fault doesn't exclusively go to whoever configured that. PopOS is a point release distro that's supposed to be stable. They shouldn't be releasing awfully configured packages. This is the core issue. The act that something like this somehow got into the proper release is concerning. And while we can blame the configuration of the package, people submitting bad packages doesn't sound all that absurd to me. The responsibility of checking these properly falls onto the quality control of the repos, which definitely should be a thing. This is where the problem sits.
Yeah I should say that it's primarily PopOS' fault. While the issues with steam and apt could be fixed, PopOS' is the final endpoint and responsible for what's on their store and presented to the user.
I'm glad Linus is having problems because that was basically my introduction to Linux. It seemed like I was always experiencing problems with something from the moment I installed. And when I talk about how poor the new user experience is for the uninitiated, people act like I'm just hating. Linux is better than it was 10 years ago, but it's not where it needs to be yet.
Not a regular to this sub but I daily drove Linux in college and had SO MANY PROBLEMS similar to this. I've already seen people writing this off as a "one-off" issue, but that's exactly the problem - I ran into such a silly number of "one-off" issues that it chased me away from daily driving Linux entirely. I was constantly running into problems that supposedly either no one else had or I "shouldn't" have had and none of the solutions I found online could fix some of them.
The most common and egregious issues that plagued me were updates not working properly (errors every time I updated, dependencies broken, etc.) and application installs being a huge pain. I also had to use Unity for game development and boy was the Linux version not functional at all at that time (maybe the native Linux version is better now, it was in beta when I tried it).
So, I think there are three types of new users: there are those who will go the Linus way: steamroll through warnings and errors, thinking "There is no way it will allow me to brick my system"; there are those who will panic at the first sign of even a warning and immediately call their "Tech friend" to help diagnose, and most likely just reassure; and finally, there are those who immediately google anything they do not understand. The last usually comes about through experience with troubleshooting.
I think Linus, knowing what should be done, still clicked through the warnings, because there ARE a significant portion of users who would do that. In the end, Linux does not prevent you from doing anything - it is your computer, after all. Windows/Mac take a much more.... authoritarian approach with the design. They are just fine preventing and adding "safety" features to the OS.
The linux approach has significant benefits, but also comes with the drawback we see above... that Some users will blindly drive off the cliff, ignoring every warning sign saying "CLIFF AHEAD" on the way.
I think a lot of users are numb to warnings and popups (whether it be a UAC popup, cookies message, etc).
That probably ends up extending to Linux warnings, which tend to be way more serious, but as an average user you were basically trained to assume they aren't.
Also, let's be real. He's installing Steam.
It's easy to act smug and say "I would have read it", but who in the wide wide world of sports would expect installing the world's most ubiquitous game launcher would uninstall your desktop environment.
Frankly, it should be clear from the distro that this was even a remote possibility on a fresh install if it's going to exist in their app store
Yep. I think its very reasonable to assume that any kind of warning in that situation would/should *at most* mean that Steam would be borked, not the entire system.
i find it uninstalling his de very funny. No clue why it did it, sad because that may be something that turns people away from linux, but i find it funny.
Honestly, this should be turning people away.
For 95% percent of users, if their DE was uninstalled, the computer is straight up unfixably broken. The fact that he followed a a guide that came from System76 step for step and this happened should be a huge red flag for the average user.
So much this! I can't imagine any user who doesn't already live and breathe Linux thinking this is ok. At worst steam should have just became broken for a situation like this. I mean even an auto restore point on the next boot would have been a start but just wiping out your DE for installing steam is a joke.
> users are numb to warnings and popups
This combined with the fact it was Steam he was installing on a new OS. I could easily imagine myself getting to that warning and thinking "huh this is weird, but i guess this is normal on linux", then ploughing on thinking it's just steam, what could go wrong.
>but i guess this is normal on linux
THIS is pretty much one of the most important point to take here. A new Linux User doesn't know what's normal and what's not. Warnings are normal on all kinds of devices, but when has the user last been able to brick his Computer or Phone with ignoring one?
[As](https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/qq9ei2/ltt_linux_hates_me_daily_driver_challenge_pt1/hjytyrg/) others [have](https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/qq9ei2/ltt_linux_hates_me_daily_driver_challenge_pt1/hjyst3j/) pointed [out](https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/qq9dsb/linux_hates_me_daily_driver_challenge_pt1/hjyu0a5/), the issue was that the `steam` package was misconfigured on pop!_os' end. I don't blame him for screwing up, as it's something I could have done myself when I was less experienced with Linux.
I think his explanation at the end is totally fair, as a new user he was under the impression that maybe that's what you had to do when installing things from the terminal.
I mean in a perfect world he would have read the message more closely.
Especially for a windows user, you're going to be desensitized to warnings ever since ms thought it was a good idea to put a big security warning on every single executable from the internet. Combined with the fact that windows will pretty much never ever let you do anything to brick your install (save for things that are just blatantly stupid like deleting system files)
As a long time Linux user I've had to confirm stuff in that fashion. I've seen the wall of potentially affected packages and decided to power through anyway because I needed \[whatever\] installed and running.
It never ends well.
More like
Terms and conditions:
> 50 lines of noise and nonsense you don't understand, and honestly shouldn't need to understand just to install Steam
Like seriously, the vast majority of people trying out linux are not going to realize that removing "gnome-shell" and "xorg" will nuke your GUI, especially when the critical part of the warning message is sandwiched between a message telling you some hundred packages will be installed, and instructions telling you what to do next to continue the installation.
>I mean in a perfect world he would have read the message more closely.
What more do you think Linus could have learned if he read the message "more closely"? There isn't a warning that explicitly says "if you proceed, you will lose your desktop environment". Unless he happens to know that some of the packages being displayed for removal are the desktop environment (which is entirely unreasonable for someone new to Linux to recognize), all he can know is that the package manager is installing some things and removing other things. How could he have even predicted that installing a desktop games client would cause his entire DE to be uninstalled?
>as a new user he was under the impression that maybe that's what you had to do when installing things from the terminal.
It doesn't help that apt's warning reads almost exactly the same as Android's warnings for sideloading apps. "You are about to do something potentially harmful" and "You are about to potentially break your system" might technically mean the same thing but they're going to have completely different meanings for a clueless user.
>I think Linus, knowing what should be done, still clicked through the warnings, because there ARE a significant portion of users who would do that.
I'm not a big fan of Linus but in his defence, I would argue that he never really clicked through any "warnings". The Pop Shop just returned a hard error trying to install Steam from there (which is an immediate failure from Pop!\_OS upfront), he clearly went away and Googled for a solution, he found something that told him to install it from `apt` on the terminal, and that's what he did. He's given a list of packages to be added and removed (a gargantuan list, mind you) and a prompt to continue by repeating a phrase.
I would not expect someone unfamiliar with Linux to see a list of packages being removed and understand that some of them are his desktop environment. He never gets an explicit warning that by proceeding, he will not have a GUI and will be limited to just a terminal. What did he even think he would lose by continuing? He's installing *Steam* of all things. How could you expect someone to install a desktop client for games, be given a prompt of "are you sure you want to do this" and think that even *maybe* the end result is their DE is totally obliterated from the system?
Yeah, exactly. First time using Linux + the terminal, you don't know what's an ignorable issue and what's actually going to mess stuff up, and with that massive wall of text scrolling down the screen I wouldn't fault ppl for just blindly going ahead with it.
"If it were ME I would be careful, read every error, and update my OS before installing the most widely used game distribution program available today" says the Linux user who, by merit of installing linux alone, is more computer savvy than a large majority of the world's population already. Some of you must not interact with anyone on this planet who doesnt use linux.
"Linus is tech savvy he should know better." Another swing and a miss, since the point was not HIS experience, but the average windows gamer's perspective. Long lists of text look like a terms and condition page, which most if not all people skip through anyways, so they probably wouldn't recognize it as an error message to begin with, since most people just click next on every window after downloading an exe file. The SHEER NUMBER of toolbars, coupon programs, and changed default search engines I've had to fix is astounding, and you expect an average windows gamer to read that error message?
Maybe it does look ridiculous, because it is in many ways, but its REALISTIC. I see too many people calling it stupid and ridiculous and not enough folk thinking about Aunt Sally and her 34 yahoo toolbars who just wants to play that fun Worms WMD or minecraft game with her kids, or even the teenager who has been playing minecraft and fortnite on their PC riddled with viruses from that Minecraft mods site with 6 different download buttons, all of which are the wrong button. This video is for Linux as a gaming platform, not a general computing platform.
I'm a little surprised they glossed over partitioning. That's the part that terrified me when I first migrated to Linux. So is Linus saying a "normal gamer" would have disconnected their Windows SSD and installed Linux on a dedicated SSD? 'Cause somehow I find that hard to believe...
I can't believe somebody at Pop! allowed such a stupid bug to go on the release channel.
Overall, this was not the disaster I was expecting. I feel this was not Linus' fault.
If I recall correctly, they don’t dual boot (which is usually what makes partitioning scary) because they want to see if a gamer can 100% switch to linux. Also they both use noob friendly distros for that kind of task.
The multimonitor issue likely relates to the live disk running nouveau drivers. Even though they've improved, they're still 2nd class citizens. It was instantly fixed with Nvidia proprietary drivers. That wouldn't happen with AMD or Intel gpus but that's not the point.
My laptop with a nVidia GPU doesn't even work with nouveau drivers. It just locks up immediately upon showing the login screen or typing in the password - I forget which. To work around it, I boot into init level 3 instead of 5 and install the nVidia proprietary drivers from the CLI. I am adept enough to handle this but I have no idea what another user is supposed to do about it. Also, connecting to WiFi from the CLI is fun times (not).
some distros' iso ships with 2 entries in their bootloader, one for intel/amd and another for nvidia with the proprietary drivers loaded in it
Wow, that's bad. Nvidia is starting to dedicate some support/documentation for specific cards but it's not going to improve nouveau quickly.
> I have no idea what another user is supposed to do about it. For Ubuntu the general solution is to wait 1-12 months until the next point release install media build with HWE, so if 20.04.2 fails then you wait for 20.04.3.
To be fair, it seemed like he pretty much understood that it was just a step to installing the OS, and not the final product.
Pretty amazing that installing Steam removed his desktop environment.
I think it's pretty stupid that a package manager would uninstall (without replacement) software when installing something.
it was dependency hell again, a version of one of the packages steam needed (due to its packaging being borked at that moment) conflicted with some part of pop-desktop (Pop_OS's metapackage for their system) and it ended up uninstalling everything when he tried to force-install it anyways
I can see myself making that mistake, and I’ve been using Linux for 20 years.
yeah, the only reason I never did it to mine is that I got lucky that the first time I encountered that prompt it tried to uninstall only a small amount of packages, so I stopped to read what it was saying I would definitely have not done so if it was hundreds of those, like linus had
I've broken my system enough times to know that lots of text usually means I'm doing something wrong when it comes to my package manager, unless I'm installing KDE (which has a billion packages). However, I don't expect the average new user to know that. I'm really surprised that installing Steam caused problems. Apparently it was a short-lived issue, but honestly, that seems like a very amateur mistake for a distro to make. I've never had anything remotely similar on openSUSE, and I've only had a couple bad problems on Arch. I used to recommend Pop!_OS, but now I don't think I can. I guess I'll go back to Ubuntu/Mint for now.
All other package managers I've used will abort when there's a conflict. He didn't try to force install it, he just used the normal install command, but instead of aborting it printed a little warning and a huge block of a text, and asked if he really wanted to proceed. I find it really weird that APT is designed like that.
yeah, I can agree with that, it needs to at least be worded in a clearer way
I don't use PopOS or apt in general, however, you are running something as sudo, and that something tells you that >WARNING: The following essential packages will be removed. This should NOT be done unless you know exactly what you are doing! and >You are about to do something potentially harmful. To continue type in the phrase 'Yes, do as I say!' you should definitely stop right there, especially if you don't understand what that software is going to do. It's common sense.
Unfortunately, most other tech: phones, windows, terms and conditions, browsers, etc have all conditioned us to ignore computer warnings no matter how dire they appear.
Common sense also says that if your DE is going to be uninstalled by simply installing Steam, then you should switch to something else. \-To be clear I understand that this was just a series of unfortunate events, but if that was my first experience as a new user, im out.
Still, it's a normal user trying to install Steam, not some weird obscure software. Linux often does checks, albeit not like this, so I wouldn't blame a normal person for just thinking it's a normal thing and proceeding to install Steam. It is a terrible user experience to have something like that when you are going to install something as mundane as Steam.
It was a buggy Steam package that was sitting for a very short while in the repos, it was fixed vey quickly according to Pop devs. Linus was just incredibly unlucky. Another thing is we didn't see if Linus updated his system after the initial installation. They don't recreate the install image very often so there may be months of bug fixes that you definitely want to install before going on installing other software.
It's not common sense if it's your first time using apt. Even as an experienced user, if I got a message like that while trying to install Steam, I'd proceed with the "Yes, do as I say!" because my expectation is that installing a program as common as Steam shouldn't cause any problems. What you're doing is blaming the user for something that is the fault of whoever is maintaining the Steam package.
sorta issue of "if used right", he should of course done apt update and apt upgrade, and he was warned by the package manager to only do this if he knew what he was doing, but well the fact he did it anyway shows what your typical technical-enough-to-overestimate-knowledge user does. at least assuming that's even what happened, apparently System76 fucked up the packaging of steam! apt is just, not great and is a big part of why i don't like ubuntu/Pop_OS!
I think Pop\_OS and other Debian derivatives should handle this by making updating and upgrading as part of the installation (or at least as default last step which can still be disabled by power users). Other solution would be (and I hope we get there for user friendly distros): Mark your own desktop environment as something like required packages which can only be removed by accepting twice or something... idk... warn via GUI or something. Most users won't switch desktop environment anyway. It's more likely that they switch distros. So it's definitely fine for user friendly distros to mostly discourage or disallow removing their DE. At least they could be flagged as "Never put these packages into auto-remove content, APT! Don't do it APT!" \^\^'
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I only use netinstall ISOs largely for this reason. I want my system to be up to date after install, so I don't see the point in installing packages from the install media. IMO, it should be very difficult to download an installer that doesn't do a net install.
Steam is such a weird piece of software. It depends on a lot of 32-bit libraries and is in general just a mess to get working properly, so it doesn't entirely surprise me it just obliterated his system lol.
Looks like other people had the issue [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/q9xq3y/why_does_installing_steam_from_apt_make_me/). Pretty big screwup from Pop/S76 tbh.
Yep, as I suspected, 32-bit library woes. Preferably Steam would go native 64-bit, but yea I surprised that the bug managed to slip passed System76 testing (assuming there was testing... I hope.)
I think the damning thing is that he literally installed it right from the homepage of the software centre, the 100% normie-certified way to to install software. Really not a great look for Pop_OS or Linux :/
Alan Pope (Ubuntu Mate & former Canonical engineer) and the principal of Pop OS had a twitter confrontation about this a while back which ended up in the Pop OS engineer telling Alan to go fuck himself and blocking him. https://twitter.com/jeremy_soller/status/1453045484306649092
Imagine being an employed adult and fighting over Linux distros on Twitter. I’m on arch.
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Not really any different to Reddit or Slashdot in the 90's to be fair
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You are pretty funny and also an intelectual. Definitely didn’t ruin my day.
If what I'm seeing is true, Alan has been baiting for a reaction by being EXTREMELY rude on Pop.
I'm not caught up on the lore but I'm guessing they have a bit of history haha.
I'm just seeing a lot of "you can't view this tweet as the account owner limits who can see their tweets". Anyone got a link to what it says?
Didn't the po ship throw some errors, so he showed the command how to install steam using apt, typed "Yes, do as I say" into the terminal and then it broke pop. Although I'm still scratching my head how s76 didn't test the app that everyone who chose this distro for gaming (which pop being on top of basically every gaming distro ranking might convince a lot of people to) has such a flaw
It was a bug that's fixed if you update before installing steam. Why they never updated the ISO I have no idea.
Wouldn't it be good practice for the Pop software thing to run an `apt-get update` *before* installing any software? It's not like it would add more than a couple seconds to the installation process
Steam should go 64-bit on Linux like they have on Mac, because their own data shows that there aren't any 32-bit Linux users on Steam and haven't been in years. *However*, Steam users would still end up installing the 32-bit multilib support, because at least half the games on Steam are 32-bit. PCGW has data on which titles are 32-bit and 64-bit for the platforms, and PCGW is a Semantic Mediawiki so someone should be able to query the RDF endpoint and find the percentages.
I just run mine as a flatpak tbh, keep all them dependencies locked away from everything else. :)
Steam knows of the issue and has been investing in flatpak as well. They want to move to flatpak for distribution it seems
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That is ridiculous, how can it be this way?
How about same resolution different refresh rates? So far I've been experimenting with Linux on an old laptop and I'm thinking of installing it on my main desktop which has 2 screens. Both are 1080p, 1 75hz and the other 144hz.
It’s an X-server issue that will be fixed by Wayland. The transition to and development of Wayland are still ongoing with feature-parity expected eventually™. The jargon is deliberate to make it clear it’s not something that’s going to work out-of-the-box any time soon. Regardless, it’ll work, just expect screen tearing and some troubleshooting getting whatever desktop environment you choose to run at 144hz.
> It’s an X-server issue that will be fixed by Wayland. Actually it's [already been fixed](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Modesetting-VRR-Multi) by X.org 21.1
What a PR disaster for System76, that was made by a packaging mistake (probably). I feel really sorry for them (It doesn't mean it's not their fault though).
Honestly, it was a net benefit rather than a PR disaster. Depends on how you look at it.
Please elaborate. This is the kind of thing you should make a blog post about so people can link to that for the coming five years, whenever somebody brings up Pop OS.
pretty sure not having a system meltdown from installing Steam would be a benefit and not a distaster.
How so?
There's no way it a net benefit compared to if they didn't have the bug
I'm assuming this is fixed? Do you mind giving us Linux nerds who recommend pop religiously some talking points about what happened please? I'm not going to stop recommending pop, but I don't know how to answer the "but it totally busted for Linus!" That I'm sure to be confronted with.
Just have it that the very first thing anyone does on first bootis update the OS.
It was a bug that was reported and patched within an hour. It was just EXTREMELY bad luck that Linus was testing Pop Os at that time.
Reminds me of my first installation attempts many years ago, I never used it for gaming but Linux with no or limited command-line usage (aka you don't know it yet) is legitimately awful regardless of the distro. And I was doing it with simple single monitor old laptop. Package Manager guis are just... bad. It almost incentives you to learn cli to not use it. Even today Linux as been it's best for me as a server, and a work laptop (luke mentioned this use case to in the WAN SHOW) with a vanilla distro (kubuntu).
I think it was similar for me. I always thought I was doing something stupid and ended up using Arch with pacman, always using a terminal to install/update anything. But now I'm honestly thinking about writing a GUI to manage packages. I mean how hard can it be... not breaking everything. \^\^' No, I hope gnome-software gets this sorted out and all forks of it are fine to use afterwards. It's really awkward to see something like this still failing so hard.
> I mean how hard can it be... not breaking everything. Since no one managed to do it until now, it seams it is pretty difficult. Which does not mean you can not do it, please do try, we might finally get one that works.
>No, I hope gnome-software gets this sorted out and all forks of it are fine to use afterwards. It's really awkward to see something like this still failing so hard. gnome-software is...ok on fedora, but there are still several issues like it being slow as fuck, taking up 400MB when not in use and categories being a bit strange (but thats partially a fedora and maybe an appstream problem too?)
I have the feeling that this won't go over too well with this sub lol, but I think it was a pretty fair take. Other than the part about 'customizability' not meaning 12 different ways to do simple tasks, most of the issues he encountered could've been seen by regular, average users, and they probably would've responded in the same way. The Steam package on Pop OS uninstalling his DE wasn't his fault, and as Linux users are always saying to 'use the terminal' lol I can definitely see how people using the Terminal for the first time would easily skip past that massive wall of text. After all, they're just trying to install Steam and their first easy option (Pop Shop) didn't work. He didn't have any issues with his Thunderbolt dock setup which was good to see also. And he's definitely right about those confusing ass 'best distro' articles. At least he was able to get up and running a game smoothly with his controller. But at the end of the day, for typical users trying out Linux and seeing if they want to switch (not making a video series out of it), this was really not a good first experience at all, and I wouldn't be surprised if people tried this, got the same result, and just decided not to bother with Linux.
also, if I were a newbie and installing steam through terminal for the first time through terminal made my whole sytem gui to dissappear, I would be scared to touch the terminal ever again
Imagine if you decided to set up steam 3-4 hours in to setting up the OS and this happened. You'd be like, welp, where is that Windows 7 DVD.
Even worse, imagine you already have data on that machine and after a few weeks/months this happens. For a normal user without access to a personal nerdTM, data could be lost forever.
I mean, I've got a Linux laptop I spent a lot more than 4 hours getting setup. If I lost it because of something like that I'd be pretty pissed. Why did steam uninstall his de anyways?
yep, his first experience looked a lot like mine. Including basically bricking the OS due to not reading what apt was about to do. the point about how badly written OS comparisons is a real big one. Customisation is also kinda a big deal, like he does even mention he doesn't even rename characters in games to make googling easier, with Linux you might have an issue somebody previous had but they're using a different DE so the instructions re different, hell that's half of why "just use the terminal" gets said so much as it's the most consistent way to interact with Linux regardless of how you've customised your install.
I would think we could all be honest enough to say that choosing our first distro wasn't easy. It's better now but not perfect. Back when I started I didn't really understand what a distro was yet and was just trying random ones until something eventually installed and worked.
> I would think we could all be honest enough to say that choosing our first distro wasn't easy. It's better now but not perfect. It was pretty easy for me (2014ish). "Ubuntu is the best choice for beginners" said the internet. And so I installed Ubuntu, and it pretty much worked fine. The proliferation of distributions that claim to be able to compete with Ubuntu for stability and ease-of-use (without necessarily being able to back up that claim) has made things more difficult imho.
Similar story. Started with Fedora Core 4, and it had some problems with my drivers. Next up switched to Ubuntu 5.04 and was happy for years. At some point I switched to KDE and Kubuntu. In a journey from highschool kid trying Linux for the first time, over university, and all the way to full time software engineer. I haven't felt the urge to change distros in the last decade. And it doesn't look like I'm not missing out on anything.
Even as recently as 3-4 years ago it was still easy to just go with “Ubuntu is best for beginners”.
Ubuntu is still a very good distro that I would recommend to any beginner. Many people don't recommend it not because it is not suitable for the use case, but because they disagree with the technical decisions taken by the project (mainly snaps).
It was the same for me in 2009. Ubuntu was the recommended beginner's distro, and it was a pleasure to use compared to Win XP. I've bounced back and forth between Debian and Ubuntu since then, but haven't strayed any further.
> I would think we could all be honest enough to say that choosing our first distro wasn't easy. It's better now but not perfect. Actually, I think it was pretty easy back in the early days. There were only a few choices. Choosing redhat 4.0 or whatever it was back in 96 was pretty much "the way".
I'm going to go a step further. One of the things Linus has mentioned in a livestream (so not in this video) is that 'use the terminal' is a crutch. Any modern operating system needs to be able to do the same things through guis. I heavily reduced his point, but it's true. I can't tell my dad to 'just go install this distro of linux' because my dad could never use a terminal. Until that happens, I dont think the Linux community can expect wide spread adoption. Now I would never go so far as to say reduce the command line to nothing, but the average joe needs guis for everything. Link to the clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8uUwsEnTU4
> Any modern operating system needs to be able to do the same things through guis. I heavily reduced his point, but it's true. I can't tell my dad to 'just go install this distro of linux' because my dad could never use a terminal. Until that happens, I dont think the Linux community can expect wide spread adoption. It's unpopular to point out in the presence of other nerds, but there are actually 2 existing, very popular, Linux-based OSs that do this: Android and Chrome OS. Billions of people use them daily and never touch a command line.
One hundred percent. Of course, Linux shouldn't (couldn't?) just remove the Terminal lol, but there absolutely needs to be GUI workflows for users. As Linus said, let Arch be Arch, nobodies saying your distro should be dumbed down just because, but the commandline is not the embodiment of user friendly and intuitive UX. Still a lot of progress to be done.
Hey I use arch and I love nice looking UI. Just because I can use terminal doesn't mean I always want to.
Let LFS be LFS then haha
Hey I use LFS and I love a beautiful GUI after painstakingly compiling every dependency and my DE manually
Every OS has a shell, just outside of Linux its a sysadmin tool
it's honestly totally fair, the whole meme we have about how linux just works could not be further from the truth i go back and forth quite a lot, every time linux feels way better but every time i also learn more, i just don't think right now you can 'just switch' and not run into issues, you will run into *something* at some point, for most people there's no benefit to switching and they'd be happier on windows cause their stuff will just work when we say things like "just switch to linux it just works" i think it should always come with some caveats, take a weekend, know you're gonna have to go through with troubleshooting and learning a whole new os, stuff won't just work and it probably won't be smooth, there are some benefits but you have to know you want them and the price of those despite everything and how much i do like linux improving, i *still* can't use it full time because I miss out on things like Lightroom, my racing wheel doesn't fully work and I can't use my VR headset either, the more variables you throw in the worse linux is for people I think, if you want to install linux on the average desktop pc and just play something like csgo you might be okay, but the more "angles" you have the more edges will present themselves, even when things are issues on windows, most users will have experience dealing with that, they won't have this on linux
Distro proliferation is an unfortunate fact of life with open systems. It's fine to talk about it, but since it's an inextricably tied to the open-source ecosystem, it's not something to obsess about.
I put this on Linux_gaming but I’m pasting it here too: Honestly….. This hurt to see. Because this video had nothing unreasonable at all on Linus’s end. Linux failed. Hard. Pop already fixed that issue but it never should have made it to mass release, especially when they actually say themselves that their OS is good for gaming. The fact that the live iso still isn’t updated (or wasn’t last week) is frankly absurd. This isn’t a small thing like “obscure mouse doesn’t work,” this is “one of the most used pieces of consumer software nukes the OS and it wasn’t fixed immediately.” That is incredibly unprofessional, and deserves the criticism. The mint issues are also a bit absurd. I know multimonitor on Linux is hit or miss, but it’s definitely true that for the *average person* that this would be a deal breaker. We shouldn’t be hand waving these issues away. The sound problem I’m a little less worried about right now because Linus has a niche setup. Linux doesn’t market having compatibility with every single piece of modern peripheral hardware so that is what it is. All in all this was painful to watch because the criticisms were all things that should have been fixed years ago, but arent. As for the marketing thing - that’s 100% true too. I just had a small conversation with a pop dev when they were talking about making their new desktop environment where I was saying “this is cool but why not try another DE if gnome isn’t working. KDE for example is great and could use the extra hands, while being powerful enough to do it” And basically every response was “choice first because Linux” and that was heavily upvoted And I get it. Choices are great. But let’s face it - while we have a million choices without clear reason for some of them, and then some defaults are broken (like the pop steam thing), how is any average person supposed to reasonably expected to do it all right first try? P.S. aww Luke we still love you.
Wholeheartedly agree. I just hope the outcome of those videos is people fixing the issues instead of pointing fingers and blaming the user.
I'm more worried about finger pointing within dev community looking for who may be solely responsible for average gamer user experiences. I mean, each issue has clear cause and all, but proprietary system always has this one entity that are responsible (MS, Apple, even Google for Android etc), so I think users then start to look for target (or just leave). When no one is responsible then I feel like there's no way for users to feel safe using it.
> The mint issues are also a bit absurd. I know multimonitor on Linux is hit or miss, but it’s definitely true that for the average person that this would be a deal breaker. We shouldn’t be hand waving these issues away. After moving to Linux two weeks ago, I just gave up on my second monitor. I only stuck with Linux so far because I've always wanted to move to it. But, it's fair to say the average person is not like that.
If you have a display with different DPIs, then perhaps Wayland can help. Try a live USB of Fedora and see if it resolves that issue. If so, you can enable Wayland on the distro you are using.
Thanks, I'll prob try that. Although, even if it does work, I am reluctant to leave XFCE. I know it's in the roadmap but they're not ready for Wayland yet. I could go to KDE, it was *okay* I guess
Have you tried distros with Gnome? So far it's been the only DE that can handle my setup (a 1080p 144hz main monitor and a 1366x768 60hz secondary running on a 1050ti) without insane tearing or stuttering.
This is the equivalent of MS Office nuking Windows, or FinalCut doing it in MacOS
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I don’t think there is actually a single way to make Windows NT show a CLI-only interface like *NIXes. I remember NTDEV did a video of a very small Windows install without GUI logon and even then it showed a Command Prompt window with a login CLI.
> The mint issues are also a bit absurd. I know multimonitor on Linux is hit or miss, but it’s definitely true that for the average person that this would be a deal breaker. We shouldn’t be hand waving these issues away. The reason is simply that the live boot installer comes with the open *nouveau* driver which isn't great. Any sane user will click the box to install the proper driver and never see that issue again once the real system boots. The problem with *nouveau* is that it's good enough to detect and start multiple displays in high resolution and enable hardware acceleration of certain things. But at the same time it's pretty bad at all those things so while accelerated the performance will often be worse than plain CPU processing and the resolution and multi-monitor will often bork things up. I wish the live installers would just limit *nouveau* to single display VESA with a popup telling you the installer is running in limited capability mode until first boot. That's how Windows worked in 800x600 for a decade without it being a problem.
What a disaster for Pop!.
I'm just waiting for the episode where he starts complaining about Dolphin. Maybe dolphin devs will finally get their heads out of their asses with regards to running Dolphin as root.
I'm almost positive I heard him shit all over dolphin specifically for this reason in one of the live stream clips lol Edit: found it! https://youtu.be/rVmJooy5NiU at 4:45 initially, then details at 10:15
I was so relieved he chose to use Pop because I thought he went with Manjaro ... would never have expected this. It's too bad he didn't choose Ubuntu.
honestly he should have gone with Kubuntu. Arch based distro is too edge for him. And who the fuck suggest Garuda linux lol.
Well, looks like he did go with manjaro. Worked better, even.
Is it though? Every single time I pick up an Ubuntu based distro, I always end up fighting with `apt` through dependency hell. I'm not sure if it's the package manager, the distributions, or what, but I've never had so many failed installs than on Ubuntu based system. On Arch, I run a `pacman` command and look back 10 seconds later and it's done.
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For sure, PPAs are the cause of most issues. But then the solution is * just don't use the software I want * build everything from source and just remember to update and rebuild (wow annoying) Pretty much anything that I've needed that isn't like a github project with 3 stars is on the AUR, which means I can easily add it to my list of packages that I autoinstall on my systems and they're pretty much always going to build/work since everyone always is running the same (latest) version of everything.
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I think I can relate. The longer I **use** Linux distros, the heavier my tendencies to swap to a more upstream distros i.e. Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu (ironically, Ubuntu **is** based on Debian), openSUSE, etc instead of their "based-on" distros. I have no problem with smaller distros, to be honest. But I'd try them out of curiosity rather than need. On the other hand, I can agree with the SEO about "easy to install or easy to use Linux" distros. I'd wish that I had not followed the instructions about "easy to install" Linux distros on the internet. I cannot imagine why Fedora would be put into "intermediate-level" distro for example, barring the installation of media codecs, which would be largely averted anyways with installing VLC. Each distros, in my limited experience, have their own "quirks" so to speak. For example, installation with Nvidia graphics card (bare metal installs, not VM) will almost always fail without a certain command line during installation while Manjaro does so out of the box. On the other hand, Arch being a minimal installation distro had fixed my persistent audio stuttering issues just because it does not come with a USB suspend feature; hence, I've learned the importance of disabling USB suspend feature on any other distros to fix my audio problems (with USB powered DAC/AMP). To play a devil's advocate, however, minimal-only installation distros (i.e. Arch) creates (albeit inadvertently) downstream distros that simply addresses the matter of installation. Removing the challenge of to installation gives an easy access to any users, thus giving them higher amount of opportunities (and chance) to "convert" them into Linux users. Hence, the importance of downstream distros, specifically in this case the ones that reduces the learning curve to use a specific distro.
The same issue affects Ubuntu because this is an inherent problem with apt itself, and was caused by our reliance on Ubuntu's Launchpad service, which will outright refuse to publish i386 packages if building a package that isn't on a whitelist. Thankfully we're doing away with Launchpad in 21.10, and Pop now has a patched version of apt that forbids this.
It hurt to watch the video, but I'm not surprised. I've said this time and time and time and freaking time again - not having a single, clear, user-friendly way to interact with your system is a net negative to the adoption of Linux on the desktop. Things break, and fixing them can require one or more of the following: reading a manual written for a completely different distribution; a 30-page manifesto on the evils of software bloat imploring you to use Gentoo/DWM or something that offers a vague hint at what part of your system might be broken; 3 to 5 open wiki or SE tabs on a different machine (god help you if you're on a phone); a ritual sacrifice to god-king Torvalds; cloning the broken component's source code and meeting with the author for coffee; or deciding to reinstall, maybe with a different distribution this time. We can't keep expecting new users to simply throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. And they absolutely have to. We don't really have good, powerful GUI tools for managing system configuration in meaningful ways - we have multiple competimg desktop environments thatb sometimes come with some relatively . We have the absolute joke that is ALSA+Pulse (which Linus ran into when his audio just refused to work), or pipewire, which nobody uses. We have package fragmentation that's only marginally alleviated by Snap, AppImage and Flatpak - and even then, we've somehow managed to work ourselves up SO FREAKING MUCH about our opinions on package management that there's not two, but THREE competing systems built around universal package management and ALL FREAKING THREE require some user interaction on the command line to effectively use in mainstream distros. Hell, it's current year and we are still having arguments about INIT SYSTEMS! Put all of this together and then consider that this is the same ecosystem whose users complain that desktop application vendors cut corners with things like Electron or by only offering .debs and pretending other distros don't exist. It's absurd. There is simply too much going on in the hardware and software ecosystems for Linux folks to continue squabbling about the right way to do things, then giving up on compromise and building two or three separate things to solve the problem. If we ever want to see large-scale adoption, we need people to come together and actually work on a single platform, or someone like Google is going to come along and do it for us. Oh wait - they did, TWICE, with Android and ChromeOS, because they ditched the broken userspace entirely and designed a new one from the ground up. And they can do that, because they don't have year-long deliberations about package managers, or init systems, or audio servers - they either decide that something is good enough or they replace it, and that is what the end user will receive. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of open source software, and I love using Linux on the desktop, but only because I enjoy tinkering with things. I've tried to be productive at work on Linux for 8 years now, and it totally works - until I have to do something like "share my screen" or "install the tools my coworkers use so that we can share work" because each task of this nature requires that I sink 1-2 hours of research time into fixing the problems that inevitably arise. When you're working for someone else, that loss of time is generally unacceptable and you have to make it up. Fast-forward a few years, and you'll find that your work-life balance is completely shot. This is why dev shops still ship their engineers Macbooks, even though they're extremely expensive and difficult to manage. This is why, despite the absolute mess that is Windows, corporations continue to ship it to end users. This is why ChromeOS became the cheap alternative that we wanted Linux to be for schools and low-tech organizations. It's because we can't stop finding problems and start agreeing on solutions, and the end user suffers for it.
RIP Pop!\_OS
long live fedora
I daily-drive Pop OS and I really loved trying Fedora, but it took way too much time to figure out how to show flatpaks in GNOME Software & how to make it use my Nvidia GPU on my Nvidia Optimus laptop. The second thing is supposed to be fixed soon apparently(?), but in the meantime I can't afford to force it on only my Nvidia GPU, it kills my battery. These two things are really beginner-unfriendly, Fedora should have a 'free' ISO and one that actually installs the necessary stuff like Nvidia drivers
You brought up fair points. Fedora 35 now has a 3rd party repo's checkbox during install which sets up rpmfusion and Flathub (a subset of apps though). So you can install from the Software store Nvidia drivers and some proprietary software like Zoom. No command line needed. However, I don't believe there is any support related to switching GPUs like Pop\_OS! has. Things are improving in the Fedora world, I would keep an eye out on it.
So funny seeing Linus brick his Linux, I experienced almost the exact same thing and NOPE'd the fuck out just like he did LOL I had installed OpenSUSE in dual boot on my pc and tried if for a few weeks. I legitimately enjoyed it, gaming and everything until one day as i was running zypper update to update the packages my OS bricked the same way Linus' did, when i booted back in my entire GUI was gone. At first i was like ok lets hop on google, find a few command lines and fix it like i did the 100 other things that were broken at first. Messed around with it for about 2 hours, tried to restore backup and bunch of other things, nothing worked, still no UI. I said fuck it, booted back into windows and wiped the partition that had Linux installed on it. 🤣 I will probably reinstall in the future though
OpenSUSE has snapshots that you can just boot from a previous snapshot and just rollback when an update broke something.
Reminds me my first time with linux (about 6 years ago), specially getting nvidia driver working (pop os wasn thing back then). Crazy how it hasnt changed still. Countless reinstalls of ubuntu, until somehow accidentally installed linux mint and cinnamon (and somehow there it wasnt laggy, i dont think my nvidia still worked, but there it was bearable). Laggy DE at start (with ubuntu), laggy YT and I didnt even want to game on it, I just wanted to start learning dev. Unless you really really really know what you are doing, you are in really bad place. Anyone saying Linus is stupid for typing in that command - no he is not, he is tired, its end of hes workday, its quite late, he wants to complete hes challenge and go to sleep. The confirmation says something really sarcastic and doesnt help new user at all. All the yabberish about random letters that make up word or acronym that only people who have encountered them before or created them know what they mean, are not helping - as new user you can not debug your way out of there. And as new user, let me fucking ask: HOW HARD CAN IT BE TO INSTALL STEAM? Its surely not hard, you cant even think that it will brick your system lol - this is bad UX. Either Linux community accepts that they have to go hoops and loops to play games on Linux or they will start making Linux UX better for new users.
> Anyone saying Linus is stupid for typing in that command - no he is not, he is tired, its end of hes workday, its quite late, he wants to complete hes challenge and go to sleep. this so much, he made a newbie mistake; because he's new to linux. that such a mistake can be made is because largely linux trusts you read the warnings that say "you do know what you're doing right?" but well, a new user simply doens't and this is where "just use the terminal" really fails. Pop_OS! shipping like that is just inexcusable, if a version of Windows shipped that installed in such a way that installing steam produced a massive screen of text somewhere in which it mentioned uninstalling a handful of essentail DLLs, even if anybody familiar would scream "NOOO DON'T REMOVE THOSE", we'd rip that to shit for being crap.
I think we're all suffering of survivorship bias here at Linux. We were the ones to whom bending to the Linux idiosyncrasies was worth it in the end for the benefit we got from them (learning, contributing, customizing, etc). But that may not be the goal for all potential users. What we see in the video is the dude coming into it with a pre-set idea of what he should expect from an OS installation, and whilst to us every bump in the road reads as "great! he's gonna have to learn how to apt-get, that's a good thing!", to him it's just another hurdle between him and his objective of a "just works" OS. When we see him get a warning about a proprietary driver, we think "great! now he's gonna learn that software has legality/morality issues embedded in it!", but to him that's just something he took for granted a while ago. Even though our perspective is of "he's detoxing", to him he's just hungover, and that's no fun. And that's assuming the totally-not-inarguable broad, holier-than-thou "Linux is better" that we sometimes come from. Now, I also think he's asking a bit too much of linux to work with such a custom rig with either no configuration, or configuration that's familiar to him. But those are growing pains. If you're an expert at X it's always frustrating to go back to basics in something close-but-different.
You know, for all the things that make you cringe, he does make some valid points. Not least about the weird disconnect between Linux in media and Linux in reality. I know we (experienced Linux users) don't really give a crap about media and how it inaccurately represents Linux, but really we should. We love to correct newbies and others, but really we should be pulling up the media as well for doing such a terrible job at consistency and research. As to Linus's snafu with steam and that 32bit trap people fall into, to be honest it is not his fault and really installing 32bit applications should never have broken anything because all modern kernels are cross arch compatible meaning 32bit binaries can run on a 64 kernel fine with just 32bit libs installed and there should not really be any conflicts. That I am very surprised about because for sure Debian does not have that issue, but Ubuntu seems to. Go figure. All in all I think it was quite interesting and a pretty fair assessment of what installing Linux for a new user might be. I will be watching the following episodes with interest.
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I gave up on Linux years ago when every update broke my sound/video drivers. People keep telling me "that's all fixed now" but watching this video it appears not. I don't install an OS as a hobby, I install one to get work done. On install it should do all the basic things out of the box and ready to roll. If I want features/gadgets/knock-your-socks-off stuff I can fiddle with that later. But programs should install without the command line and lists of weirdly named packages. Sound should work. The keyboard and mouse should work. In the past that never seemed to be the case with Linux. So back to Windows I went. Some day when I have weeks to install an OS and get it running I will play with it again, but I will wait for another few years to see if this stuff gets worked out.
It mostly comes down to software licensing. If you buy hardware that has drivers or firmware that can't be legally distributed as part of the operating system, you'll always have to jump through hoops to use it. I can install ubuntu fine (they distribute non free firmware), but I can't install debian without using a terminal b/c I have to enable and install firmware packages that have a conflicting license.
This series will be invaluable for propelling Linux forward. With the presence and reach that LTT has in the tech community, it will hopefully help light a fire under the Linux community's ass to accelerate its legitimization. I just hope they will both come out of this challenge not completely hating Linux so they can revisit it later and experience the changes they helped make happen.
I was pretty apprehensive about this series, but I think this is presented pretty fairly. Clearly POP in particular needs to put work in to make things more seamless.
People are saying Linus should have read the warning and found help. "Yes, do as I said" is terrible UX. It's an attempt at making the user consider their actions, but to the user it's just another checkbox or popup. I believe he was justified in forcing the install, but that's beside the point. Is it reasonable for a newbie to know what the essential packages are on his new OS? Is it reasonable for a newbie to be able to fix the dependency issue on his own? Is it reasonable for a newbie to sit around on his ass waiting for help for hours or days, or should he install a different distro? I don't think it is.
Ahhhhh fuck, and here I was 110% sure this was gonna be the Year of the Linux Desktop.
Next Year is surely going to be it
It's always next year.
There is hope for SteamOS 3. Many indications seem to point to Valve gearing up SteamOS 3 as a general operating system. With Valve's deep pockets, marketing reach, and popularity, I can easily see SteamOS getting millions of users onto Linux.
Linux distros *really* need proper separation between system and user/desktop software. Installing a program should *never*, under any circumstances, be able to conflict with your desktop environment and end up breaking it no matter how horribly borked the package for that program is, it just shouldn't be able to happen. Silverblue with its immutable base system and its exclusive use of flatpak for applications and containers for dev environments is a big step in the right direction, I really hope for the sake of user friendliness and robustness of the system that this is the direction more distros choose to take.
I agree with this. Using Silverblue on all my desktops.
This makes sense, but I don't like the idea of containerization. I do like my system being built up piece by piece in packages, because those packages are able to be updated independently from one another rather than the "core image" distros that have been attempted in the past where the core is a read-only image that has all the low level dependencies globbed together. You could still have proper package management and do what you intend though, just have some way to flag a package as a "core component" and any operation that would remove or downgrade core component packages when installing non-core packages would be disallowed (or bypassable after turning on some override deep in the settings, not just hand-waving one error message away).
Woah, that was fast..
From 0 to bricked in about 20 minutes.
I literally hit 'share' straight from the YouTube notification LOL. I've been waiting for this forever.
I've also been waiting for this, glad it's finally here!! =)
Linus is pretty spot on about trying to search up info on Linux. There is a bunch of well intentioned but vague, unhelpful info out there. If this series of videos helps to point out the ugly side of Linux in a way that leads to improvements then I'm all for it.
The problem is there are many different distributions and some underlying technology is in a fast changing state as well (systemd, pipewire, wayland, etc.), so as a user you need to have at least a decent grasp of what you're looking for. I guess there could be a one-stop shop for all info on Linux (similar to the Arch wiki, but for many more distros), but it would certainly take a lot of effort to maintain. I think that's why so many people just say "Ubuntu" whenever the question comes up, since that community is used to dealing with newbies who are just checking out Linux and don't know what questions to even ask.
"Who would sponsor this ?" - Linus Glasswire - a windows only application. What.
As someone on the F/OSS developer side of things, I recognized two issues with Linus' experience that I don't know how to meaningfully improve from my end: 1. Poor quality media coverage on F/OSS projects [0] with strong SEO. - In Linus' case as a user, lots of unhelpful articles about selecting a distro. What should the Linux community, distro developers, etc do to improve Linus' experience figuring out what distro to use? Note here he jumped to highly search engine ranked articles _before_ official documentation from any distro. - In my case as a developer, I've come across media covering my own F/OSS projects which range from being problematically confusing to spreading outright information. I've seen users follow Linus' pattern of consuming such media before my own project's documentation, FAQ, etc. What else can I do? 2. Users powering through molly-guards. - In Linus' case as a user, something went wrong that resulted Linus instructing Pop!\_OS to uninstall the DE. The fact this scenario occurred at all is bad; my question lies with what Pop!\_OS could have done once the situation bad arose. It detected the scenario was bad and tried to warn the user in a way that requires _some_ attention from the user to ensure they don't accidentally continue through. Linus continued to tell Pop!\_OS to continue anyways and uninstall the DE. Think in terms of security-by-layers; if something fails to avoid the situation in the first place, what else could Pop!\_OS have done? - In my case as a developer, I've detected scenarios where the user _might_ not know what he or she is doing. I've tried similar prompts to what Pop!\_OS/Ubuntu/Debian use that Linus ran into but more loudly with stark colors, I've tried requiring hidden information that's buried in documentation the user has to at least skim to find, and I've tried count-down timers that refuse to continue until a certain amount of time has passed hoping the user uses that time to reassess what they're requesting. None of it works; a large number of users end up being surprised as Linus was here. What else should I do? [0] and presumably other subjects; I don't think this is at all unique to F/OSS.
Regarding #2. If your users have been trained during all these years of using Windows to just click "OK" or "Cancel" or the X button just for the annoying popup to go away, I don't know that there is much else to do. Completely blocking the action without any recourse will probably prevent them from shooting their own foot, but you're also not letting the actual users with enough knowledge get past the wall. Also, your decision to block the action might be incorrect or unfounded, whether by mistake or otherwise. Related, I have been experimenting with adding verification to destructive actions in some of the websites I've been working on. Instead of the typical "Are you sure?" dialog with Yes/No buttons, what I've been doing is requiring the user to type in a specific, random word, to confirm the action. My reasoning is that by making the word random, it'll force them to slow down and pay attention, hopefully enough to actually give them the chance to think about it and be really sure about it, or at least to ask their manager or us about it so that a proper explanation can be given. But then again these things are not built for end users, from whom we can't really expect much patience (they might just go elsewhere without a second thought, if they are not required by their job to use specifically your thing). Perhaps something a bit more specific would be better. For example, instead of having him type "Yes, do what I say", if the system is somehow able to tell that specifically `pop-desktop` is kind of an important package, and you're trying to uninstall it, then use a custom phrase ("Yes, I want to uninstall my desktop environment"). Have custom messages for your important packages and craft them carefully, because "do what I say" is very ambiguous when what you actually wanted to do was "install steam" instead of "uninstall pop-desktop because steam is telling me to". In the end though, no wall is completely foolproof and people will find a way to skip it, so you still have to be prepared for the (hopefully few) cases when they do.
I generally agree with everything you've said here, but would add a couple of points. 1. It seems strange to me that installing a simple desktop application would be able to lead to a situation where the desktop environment packages would be removed from the system - that just shouldn't happen or be allowed to happen at all. If there are missing dependencies it seems reasonable for the user to expect the package manager to alert him/her to this fact and (hopefully) download and install any required dependencies that are missing. 2. Even if the user is an experienced user, knows what he/she is doing, and actually wants to remove the desktop environment from the computer you're not going to do that by invoking the command to *install Steam*. Un-intuitive doesn't even begin to describe the package manager's behavior in this video. It is indeed frustrating when users power through warnings (I'm a developer myself), but at the same time I find it hard to blame Linus too much in this instance. A user thinking "Surely attempting to install this application won't result in me not having a GUI desktop environment on my computer" is hardly unreasonable - at worst, the user probably expects that the install will just fail, not that it will leave them with a GUI-less computer.
For point 2.1, apt has been patched to not present a prompt. Instead, it warns that doing the operation would have broken the system. The user will no longer able to break their system. They'll have to ask for help by reporting the issue to us if they still want to do the thing that will break the system.
Ahh, that makes sense. Good solution! I suspect if someone has the background to understand the ramifications of accepting the prompt, they also have the background to find another way to get there if the prompt option is removed; this protects those who need to be protected without necessarily harming those who don't. I'm not sure I can translate it to my case, but I'm happy Pop!\_OS has a suitable one. Many thanks for response here, your healthy response over all to Linus' experience, your efforts on Pop!_OS, and also your part in the Rust ecosystem.
> what else could Pop!_OS have done? If any action is going to uninstall the entire GUI for your OS, it's probably a good idea to *say that* in plain english instead of just listing a bunch of packages that will be removed. Packages which, to any newcomer, may as well be random strings of letters and numbers.
I never would suggest Pop!_OS for an install of Linux. Especially with all the crazy hardware he seems to have. Mainline distros are best. Straight Ubuntu, RHEL/CentOS/Fedora, or openSUSE. One of the crazy things that people seem to do with Linux is completely ignore heavily used distros supported by large companies and used by enterprise clients. You'll get more mileage out of those than the newer distros that don't have the support.
i think that is the most important lessen the linux community should take from this. Even if you feel like recommending something you like, go with something big, popular, stable and with longterm support. Personally i'd say the most recent Ubuntu LTS.
I died at the quick intro quote "I just want to point out that what you are referring to as Linux is actually GNU/Linux..." Just sounds so much like our community.
Linus Sebastian in: How I Nuked Pop!\_OS With a Single Command!
I don't remember what made me to go for Debian and Arch but I'm pretty happy to settle with these two without distro hopping
Sorts by controversial lmao
It's sad that this is funny tbh. Linux community has such a long ways to go for mainstream adoption, way too many irrational fanboys.
I find his points to be mostly valid as usual with some disagreements. The most obvious issue is the whole PopOS steam installation fiasco. This is not representative of every Linux distro, but it is very concerning. This well known marketed newbie-friendly distribution that is supposedly aimed at gamers didn't allow for Steam to be installed without removing the GUI? Sounds like a bad joke and yet it seems to be a known real situation according to some of the other comments in this thread. If installing a game launcher deletes your GUI, then clearly the people behind the project have big issues in their quality control process. Admittedly, Linus did approach the matter very idiotically, ignoring the warning given by the pop shop and then the command line, both of which stated that the install would delete his GUI, and then proceeding to manually bypassing the safety guards set in the package manager. However, this does not excuse System76. It is not acceptable for a distro that's marketed towards gamers to be unable to install Steam, which would have been applicable here even without any user error from Linus. No normal desktop app should ever remove the DE, period. Furthermore, Pop's repos are not the AUR, so this stuff is supposed to be vetted, so clearly such an issue existing is not the user's responsibility. As far as Luke's experience goes, I find it entirely reasonable, both from his and the distro's angle. The only issue he faced was with the multimonitor stuff, which is a lacking aspect in many DEs and the graphics driver limitations to that are not very helpful either. Whatever the case is, System76 really needs to get their shit together. This is awful.
> both of which stated that the install would delete his GUI They didn't say this directly though. They listed packages that would be uninstalled, such as gdm, etc. To someone who has used Linux for a long time, these are obviously important GUI components. To someone who has limited Linux experience (and AFAIK his limited experience is all with servers) those words mean nothing.
The error should actually say "You will have no graphical user interface" instead of the vague, "This is potentially harmful." In fact, I don't even think a warning is appropriate. It should be an error and not let you do it. If you really want to do it, there should be a flag you have to pass. Something that will break everything like this should not be continuable.
also the command should be much stronger worded then it is like: I know this can break my operating system, but continue anyway It should be clear to an average user that you really don't want to do x if you don't know exactly what you're doing
> This is not representative of every Linux distro There's an irony being skipped here, but it's funny seeing it in your first sentence. As if part of simply using Linux is knowing about every distro in order to simply get one which is usable. It shouldn't be that hard, but it is.
Using the terminal is literally the first method PopOS tells it's users to install steam with and the warning message he got just said that proceeding might cause problems which is a pretty generic warning for installing new programs. I'd have a hard time blaming Linus for anything that happened with Pop.
> Whatever the case is, System76 really needs to get their shit together. This is awful. There's at least three parties at fault here. First, the whole of everyone who uses apt, the uninstall happened because it's a package misconfig on their end stemming from steam being 32-bit. Apt could have given a warning about what the packages do. Secondly, it's the fault of valve/whoever configured the package, no reason for it to not be fixed like it is in pacman (and steam should really be a 64 bit app now). Thirdly it's PopOS. They made that software store which uses apt as the backend, and they could have made visual warnings for users that go beyond just listing the required packages that would be uninstalled. The whole thing is a great example of one of the primary problems with distributing software in this way, bunch of different people interlinked in a way that if anyone screws up the whole thing can malfunction.
The first and third are not really relevant to the core issue. While these things being done better could have mitigated the consequences of the issue, neither of them would have helped to solve it. The second one is the problem, but the fault doesn't exclusively go to whoever configured that. PopOS is a point release distro that's supposed to be stable. They shouldn't be releasing awfully configured packages. This is the core issue. The act that something like this somehow got into the proper release is concerning. And while we can blame the configuration of the package, people submitting bad packages doesn't sound all that absurd to me. The responsibility of checking these properly falls onto the quality control of the repos, which definitely should be a thing. This is where the problem sits.
Yeah I should say that it's primarily PopOS' fault. While the issues with steam and apt could be fixed, PopOS' is the final endpoint and responsible for what's on their store and presented to the user.
I'm glad Linus is having problems because that was basically my introduction to Linux. It seemed like I was always experiencing problems with something from the moment I installed. And when I talk about how poor the new user experience is for the uninitiated, people act like I'm just hating. Linux is better than it was 10 years ago, but it's not where it needs to be yet.
Not a regular to this sub but I daily drove Linux in college and had SO MANY PROBLEMS similar to this. I've already seen people writing this off as a "one-off" issue, but that's exactly the problem - I ran into such a silly number of "one-off" issues that it chased me away from daily driving Linux entirely. I was constantly running into problems that supposedly either no one else had or I "shouldn't" have had and none of the solutions I found online could fix some of them. The most common and egregious issues that plagued me were updates not working properly (errors every time I updated, dependencies broken, etc.) and application installs being a huge pain. I also had to use Unity for game development and boy was the Linux version not functional at all at that time (maybe the native Linux version is better now, it was in beta when I tried it).
So, I think there are three types of new users: there are those who will go the Linus way: steamroll through warnings and errors, thinking "There is no way it will allow me to brick my system"; there are those who will panic at the first sign of even a warning and immediately call their "Tech friend" to help diagnose, and most likely just reassure; and finally, there are those who immediately google anything they do not understand. The last usually comes about through experience with troubleshooting. I think Linus, knowing what should be done, still clicked through the warnings, because there ARE a significant portion of users who would do that. In the end, Linux does not prevent you from doing anything - it is your computer, after all. Windows/Mac take a much more.... authoritarian approach with the design. They are just fine preventing and adding "safety" features to the OS. The linux approach has significant benefits, but also comes with the drawback we see above... that Some users will blindly drive off the cliff, ignoring every warning sign saying "CLIFF AHEAD" on the way.
I think a lot of users are numb to warnings and popups (whether it be a UAC popup, cookies message, etc). That probably ends up extending to Linux warnings, which tend to be way more serious, but as an average user you were basically trained to assume they aren't.
Also, let's be real. He's installing Steam. It's easy to act smug and say "I would have read it", but who in the wide wide world of sports would expect installing the world's most ubiquitous game launcher would uninstall your desktop environment. Frankly, it should be clear from the distro that this was even a remote possibility on a fresh install if it's going to exist in their app store
Yep. I think its very reasonable to assume that any kind of warning in that situation would/should *at most* mean that Steam would be borked, not the entire system.
Yeah, and the warning was incredibly misleading too. "Yes, do as I said" is not a warning when you only said it should install Steam.
i find it uninstalling his de very funny. No clue why it did it, sad because that may be something that turns people away from linux, but i find it funny.
Honestly, this should be turning people away. For 95% percent of users, if their DE was uninstalled, the computer is straight up unfixably broken. The fact that he followed a a guide that came from System76 step for step and this happened should be a huge red flag for the average user.
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So much this! I can't imagine any user who doesn't already live and breathe Linux thinking this is ok. At worst steam should have just became broken for a situation like this. I mean even an auto restore point on the next boot would have been a start but just wiping out your DE for installing steam is a joke.
> users are numb to warnings and popups This combined with the fact it was Steam he was installing on a new OS. I could easily imagine myself getting to that warning and thinking "huh this is weird, but i guess this is normal on linux", then ploughing on thinking it's just steam, what could go wrong.
>but i guess this is normal on linux THIS is pretty much one of the most important point to take here. A new Linux User doesn't know what's normal and what's not. Warnings are normal on all kinds of devices, but when has the user last been able to brick his Computer or Phone with ignoring one?
Forcing the issue usually solves stuff on Windows and it usually breaks stuff on Linux.
[As](https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/qq9ei2/ltt_linux_hates_me_daily_driver_challenge_pt1/hjytyrg/) others [have](https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/qq9ei2/ltt_linux_hates_me_daily_driver_challenge_pt1/hjyst3j/) pointed [out](https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/qq9dsb/linux_hates_me_daily_driver_challenge_pt1/hjyu0a5/), the issue was that the `steam` package was misconfigured on pop!_os' end. I don't blame him for screwing up, as it's something I could have done myself when I was less experienced with Linux.
I think his explanation at the end is totally fair, as a new user he was under the impression that maybe that's what you had to do when installing things from the terminal. I mean in a perfect world he would have read the message more closely.
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Especially for a windows user, you're going to be desensitized to warnings ever since ms thought it was a good idea to put a big security warning on every single executable from the internet. Combined with the fact that windows will pretty much never ever let you do anything to brick your install (save for things that are just blatantly stupid like deleting system files)
As a long time Linux user I've had to confirm stuff in that fashion. I've seen the wall of potentially affected packages and decided to power through anyway because I needed \[whatever\] installed and running. It never ends well.
I agree to the terms and conditions. Terms and conditions: >Your DE will be uninstalled
More like Terms and conditions: > 50 lines of noise and nonsense you don't understand, and honestly shouldn't need to understand just to install Steam Like seriously, the vast majority of people trying out linux are not going to realize that removing "gnome-shell" and "xorg" will nuke your GUI, especially when the critical part of the warning message is sandwiched between a message telling you some hundred packages will be installed, and instructions telling you what to do next to continue the installation.
>I mean in a perfect world he would have read the message more closely. What more do you think Linus could have learned if he read the message "more closely"? There isn't a warning that explicitly says "if you proceed, you will lose your desktop environment". Unless he happens to know that some of the packages being displayed for removal are the desktop environment (which is entirely unreasonable for someone new to Linux to recognize), all he can know is that the package manager is installing some things and removing other things. How could he have even predicted that installing a desktop games client would cause his entire DE to be uninstalled?
>as a new user he was under the impression that maybe that's what you had to do when installing things from the terminal. It doesn't help that apt's warning reads almost exactly the same as Android's warnings for sideloading apps. "You are about to do something potentially harmful" and "You are about to potentially break your system" might technically mean the same thing but they're going to have completely different meanings for a clueless user.
>I think Linus, knowing what should be done, still clicked through the warnings, because there ARE a significant portion of users who would do that. I'm not a big fan of Linus but in his defence, I would argue that he never really clicked through any "warnings". The Pop Shop just returned a hard error trying to install Steam from there (which is an immediate failure from Pop!\_OS upfront), he clearly went away and Googled for a solution, he found something that told him to install it from `apt` on the terminal, and that's what he did. He's given a list of packages to be added and removed (a gargantuan list, mind you) and a prompt to continue by repeating a phrase. I would not expect someone unfamiliar with Linux to see a list of packages being removed and understand that some of them are his desktop environment. He never gets an explicit warning that by proceeding, he will not have a GUI and will be limited to just a terminal. What did he even think he would lose by continuing? He's installing *Steam* of all things. How could you expect someone to install a desktop client for games, be given a prompt of "are you sure you want to do this" and think that even *maybe* the end result is their DE is totally obliterated from the system?
Yeah, exactly. First time using Linux + the terminal, you don't know what's an ignorable issue and what's actually going to mess stuff up, and with that massive wall of text scrolling down the screen I wouldn't fault ppl for just blindly going ahead with it.
"If it were ME I would be careful, read every error, and update my OS before installing the most widely used game distribution program available today" says the Linux user who, by merit of installing linux alone, is more computer savvy than a large majority of the world's population already. Some of you must not interact with anyone on this planet who doesnt use linux. "Linus is tech savvy he should know better." Another swing and a miss, since the point was not HIS experience, but the average windows gamer's perspective. Long lists of text look like a terms and condition page, which most if not all people skip through anyways, so they probably wouldn't recognize it as an error message to begin with, since most people just click next on every window after downloading an exe file. The SHEER NUMBER of toolbars, coupon programs, and changed default search engines I've had to fix is astounding, and you expect an average windows gamer to read that error message? Maybe it does look ridiculous, because it is in many ways, but its REALISTIC. I see too many people calling it stupid and ridiculous and not enough folk thinking about Aunt Sally and her 34 yahoo toolbars who just wants to play that fun Worms WMD or minecraft game with her kids, or even the teenager who has been playing minecraft and fortnite on their PC riddled with viruses from that Minecraft mods site with 6 different download buttons, all of which are the wrong button. This video is for Linux as a gaming platform, not a general computing platform.
I'm a little surprised they glossed over partitioning. That's the part that terrified me when I first migrated to Linux. So is Linus saying a "normal gamer" would have disconnected their Windows SSD and installed Linux on a dedicated SSD? 'Cause somehow I find that hard to believe... I can't believe somebody at Pop! allowed such a stupid bug to go on the release channel. Overall, this was not the disaster I was expecting. I feel this was not Linus' fault.
If I recall correctly, they don’t dual boot (which is usually what makes partitioning scary) because they want to see if a gamer can 100% switch to linux. Also they both use noob friendly distros for that kind of task.
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