6 Things I HATE about using LINUX
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- Опубліковано 25 тра 2024
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#linux #opensource
00:00 Intro
00:35 Sponsor: 100$ free credit for your Linux or gaming server
01:28 Parts of the Linux community
02:34 Packaging formats that all do the same thing
04:47 Hardware support and choice
07:31 The Linux Desktop is still seen as a niche market
09:38 Stability and lack of inter-project communication
10:40 Battery life is just not up to par
11:52 Linux is still the best choice for me
12:55 Sponsor: Get a device that runs Linux perfectly
13:53 Support the channel
I'm deeply annoyed by some parts of the Linux community. More specifically, I'm very annoyed at people who just won't let others use what they want. Whether it's WIndows, macOS, a specific distro, or a specific piece of software, you always get someone who will attack these choices, say it's crap, that you're an idiot, or that what they use is better.
Second thing that I really hate on Linux is the software management. I hate that we have to find out which packaging format a specific app uses after it fails to show up in our software stores. There are just too may ways to install an application or a tool.
All a packaging format is supposed to do is get you an app or a tool, and add it to your menu. That's it. Put the files in the right place, and let me mindlessly run the app. Why do we have so many formats?
Next point of contention is hardware. I wish we had more choice for hardware that runs Linux. We do have plenty of great manufacturers, like System76, Tuxedo, Slimook, Starlabs, and a lot of others. But they all have the same problems. First, they don't always ship worldwide. Second, they don't have all the choices to completely serve everyone. Where is my powerful ARM laptop with awesome battery life? Where are my dedicated AMD GPUs? Where are my nice chassis colors? Where are my peripherals that work well with Linux?
Third, they can't produce at the same scale as more established manufacturers.
And I won't even mention specialized hardware, like audio devices, stream decks, drawing tablets, fingerprint readers, and others. Manufacturers, make Linux drivers. Now. The market is big.
Which nicely transitions us to the next issue: I still hate that Linux is seen as a second rate choice, or a small, niche, enthusiast OS on the desktop.
According to some 2022 stats, there are as many devs that use Linux than macOS. We're not a small platform anymore. In 2019, 47% of the world's population had a home computer. Not counting phones. We are around 8 billion people on earth, so 3.76 billion have a computer, and 2.7%, so 101.5 million people use a Linux desktop.
Another issue that drives me crazy is Linux's stability. Just look at the GRUB problem on Arch. Or look at GlibC breaking easy anti cheat. Or look at the "steam removed my desktop environment" on PopOS. Or look at GNOME extensions, broken after each GNOME update.
Final point that I really hate on Linux is the battery life on laptops.
No 2 ways about it, in all the laptops I tested, battery life isn't great. I never reached more than 7 or 8h, and that was with the biggest laptop batteries, 80 Wh or more, and on 50% brightness with the CPU scaled way down. - Наука та технологія
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i use arch btw
@@paladin80lvl no one cares
@@AaronTechnic shut up
but systemd is so shit it's actually given rise to a whole class of linux malware!
2:35
Situation : There are 14 competing standards
"We need one universal standard that covers everyone's use case!"
Situation : There are 15 competing standards
yup
Linux devs need to get together and decide on a solution. Right now it's like there are cars driving forward on both sides of the road: neither is inherently wrong, and the transition will take some time for one side, but they have to decide on which side of the road they drive
There's a relevant xkcd for everything, no?
("xkcd: standards," comic no. 927 btw)
@@terrydaktyllus1320 would you ever consider making videos to help educate people who want to use gentoo but are put off by the alleged complexity
Yes, that is indeed what happens when nobody has the authority to actually _enforce_ any of the standards. We should all be very glad that at least the Linux _kernel_ is managed by a single team.
For me there's two, I guess. 1.) that GUI apps often aren't as feature rich, polished, and plentiful as in Windows and macOS, which is also part of: 2.) when things doesn't "just work". I don't mind tinkering when I am in the mood to do so, nor do I mind re-learning some things so long as that thing is easy to do. But when I *have* to do things like chroot, manually set up snapshots, manually build stuff, or hunt down random dependencies (Linux packages or Wine settings) when I just want to the thing already mostly done for me, it gets real frustrating. The recent grub and glibc breakage, for example, was very annoying - thank god Garuda has a GUI tool to fix it, but I'd rather not have it happen in the first place.
Sameeee....these are my main problem with Linux. But no one seems to open mouth about it.
If you ever say that Linux apps don't looks as polished and beautiful and aren't as feature rich as Windows or MacOS, you'll get bombarded saying "why do you care when the program just works?? who bothers?" .....but it's the same community who rice (decorate) their Desktops to top level and spend a large amount of time making their lock screen and Desktop and terminal look beautiful.
And also the dependency hell is ......well it's actually a hell.
So true... Why I have to take more than hours to let xrdp relay the sound...
Worse GUI applications is a direct result of having a great CLI.
On a tangent, I like to tinker and mess around with Linux, but sometimes I just want to get things done maybe I'm doing homework or want to play videogames. When that happens it's really frustrating
Me and my computer are both too janky to bother with snapshots when I have everything backed up and installing and configuring my OS of choice doesn't take me more time than ranting about my 50 Mbit/s internet connection 🤣
I daily drive an overclocked Pentium E5200 from 2008 with 4GB of DDR2-800 C6, meaning that I need to have the most efficient OS in terms of idle load AND usability, so I never bother with snapshots when a freshly installed OS always runs better (my OS of choice eats only about 450MB RAM when freshly installed)
However, most people have a fast-enough PC not to care about the same shit as me and they usually aren't *that* enthusiastic and just want to get their work done - and I respect that and must agree that it can slow you down sometimes.
If you take it as entertainment though, something like Arch can be a lot of fun 😆
my two problems with linux: the lack of good mouse acceleration settings (the acceleration curve isnt great, i miss the one windows has) and the lack of middle click scrolling
Funny that, I've never had a problem with a middle scrolling wheel. I have a cordless Logitech mouse
@@SalisburyKarateClub "Middle-click scrolling" is different. On Windows, click with the mouse wheel and then move your mouse up and down. That starts scrolling the content.
Middle-click is a separate clipboard on Linux, so browsers don't support using it to scroll. Really annoying when KDE on X doesn't let your control the number of lines scrolled.
@@mikewhy709 middle click scrolling works for me on linux when i changed the settings, autoscroll IIRC
I'm really happy that you made this video, since it really shows the many flaws that, not only some users straight up refuse to believe, but also give the devs a better insight into the current usabilty.
This is something that is often forgotten over time sinnce it's natural to forget issues they might had in the past as well.
Hey Michael, great content!
the only thing keeping me from going all in on Linux is the Adobe Suite. If Adobe made their software for Linux I would have zero reason to ever boot into a Windows machine again.
@@modulusruptura That is adobe's fault to not port it. If you can, use its alternatives
For me linux would be perfect if finally X11/Wayland would catch-up so I could get HDR and 10bit like windows, plus if we finally could get streaming services to support 4k on linux without fighting with DRM
The main problem with DRM is that most distro devs think DRM is malware and refuse to put it on systems, and make hard to install them on purpose.
how can you stream in HD from amazon prime or hbo max? not even 4K, simple 1080? i know firefox extension for netflix
@@talkysassis It's Linux, Privacy comes first, always.
@@terrydaktyllus1320 It's a total gimmick, I've got 4k devices but the content available in that resolution is so few and far between I just opt for 1080p content lol too much investment for so little payoff.
DRM is evil, avoid it wherever you can.
Stay safe and have a good day.
1 the graphics Drivers
2 the community (ex. Asking something about Ubuntu and they tell you to use arch instead 🤦♂️)
3 the graphics drivers
use arch
Add to that crappy audio drivers. Like, it's impossible to get audio recording to work with my DAC on Linux. Oh and Gimp is not a viable image editor, not until they fix the broken clipboard.
ontop of this, there is no actually good mpv frontend similar to vlc. Vlc on its own is a buggy mess because it doesn't support dark themes out-of-the-box and the skinning engine has been bad for many years.
I use arch btw
Whats your problem with graphics drivers? We re already in the 21st century. Nvidia is still not open source, but runs perfect otherwise. AMD drivers are now integrated directly into the kernel.
It's not we hate Ubuntu it's just you can get others distro like Manjaro, Garuda, which are beginner friendly and works with Arch, Ubuntu have way less performance and privacy than others choices. Even PopOS which use Ubuntu base is better for games because you have drivers installed by default.
Windows 11 is used by many people and guess what ? It's a shit update. When you need something just do a bit of research before asking questions because it's really easy now.
And yes NVIDIA graphics drivers suck, strange than AMD works perfect xD
As a Japanese major at University of Hawaii, the biggest sore spot for me has been CJK support.
Hey, Manjaro, if I run the installer in Japanese, I may want to have an IME to let me type in Japanese out of the box. (The Cinnamon version straight up had no font for CJK text OOB.)
Mint does this, but it's poorly integrated with other keyboard layouts and the icon showing what my layout is doesn't go away in full screen.
Pop!_OS has the best implementation I recall... but the console uses a different font by default that turns CJK characters into mojibake. Every source I look for on a switching to font that doesn't do this seems to be about an asking for an IME on the terminal (which would be nice but isn't what I meant). (EDIT (2 months later): I tried using a program called zhcon but it would either freeze or fail to display kana properly, depending on if my laptop was hooked up to the TV. Also, the documentation is old and hard to find.)
「仕方がない」と言わないでくれ。
Yes it was a real struggle for me to get Japanese IME on Manjaro KDE. I was able to to do it, but it was way more work than it should've been.
I started with Manjaro myself, I was so annoyed by how hard it was to set up different input methods and fonts for non-latin scripts, probably my biggest annoyance with Linux ever. Fortunately, this is changing for the better, with distros such as Fedora having CJK pretty much set up by default with very good integration too.
@@DMSBrian24 I guess you have more Linux experience than me
Installing a Greek keyboard "just worked" and Pop!_OS doesn't display tofu characters for greek letters in TTY mode. It seems to just be CJK, and only because the default font is different
めっちゃわかる。
I cannot even type CJK characters at some applications, which almost drove me crazy when I was using Linux Mint first time.
By the way, Ubuntu's default input method is Ibus but it's really buggy.
If someone wants to input and type CJK, I will recommend Fcitx5 for them.
I think I spend a weekend trying to make English, Japanese and Russian to work at the same time. My previous poison was anthy, but current method have shifted towards something else by default and it didn't work well. I don't remember the issue, but I remember it was not as easy as in windows.
While Linux has multiple packaging systems (for various reasons), one of the big problems I've found with Windows is the way you end up with so many apps installed to launch and update each piece of software. I presume the Windows app store partially addresses this, but I have many on my machine. Even with Steam, I find many of my games are actually installers for the games.
or you could be a normal person and not do an apple and restrict apps only onto a certain launcher and allow people to download the exe and who cares about updating it. i say if it works then who cares about the updates. all they really serve are potential small insignificant fixes in a sea of options to mitigate that
@@cooleyYT I used Apple for many years and never had problems. There are alternative launchers and updates were easy. You might be happy running old software when there are bug updates, new features and security patches available, but I prefer to have the better version.
@@alvamiga yea but what if it gets taken off that store? what then?
@@alvamiga for windows you might want to look into "winget upgrade --all" if you haven't already. it used to be a powertoy but is now built into windows 11, and useable in cmd/powershell/terminal. it's also available for win10 but not built-in iirc
Winget and/or chocolatey also solve this issue.
To me, all those reasons proof that every OS has its own fair share of issues and no one should really be blamed for using what drives their boat.
Yep!
*prove
*Linux OS 😂
@@stephenrochester6309 Pretty much every Linux user can rapid fire issues with windows just as much as they can with Linux.
Thing I like about you, Nick, is your personality and humour make what would could have been an angry complainy video into something lighthearted, with thoughtful critiques and a few well placed jabs that cause a giggle, rather than offence. I think the thing I hate about Linux the most is the tribalism, like you mentioned at the start. A close second would be the perception of Linux from outside. You highlighted many of the myths that are commonly believed. I came from macOS, and remember a time when the mac was 2% of market share and it was the same deal. Everyone who wasn't a user had some opinion on it that was just completely ignorant. I think Linux's fortunes are only improving right now, and I'm seeing a lot more interest in it. Big thanks to Valve for making gaming so good, but also to Microsoft for making windows so bad that people are considering Linux for the first time - I've converted a few myself and they love it.
Hey the goal wasn't to make everyone hate me 😅
Yes, I guess Nick's delivery is one of the main reasons I like this channel. "C'est le ton qui fait la musique". Plus it's nice to get a lot of info about other distro's than the one I am using. So, thank you Nick.
humor
Totally valid points, and while I've learned to live with or avoid them myself, I hope for a future where that isn't necessary anymore. The one about there being too many competing packaging formats tho, that still bugs me to this day. If I'm on Fedora and can only find .deb packages, I'd honestly rather just build from source than deal with the debris of trying to convert between package managers. Honestly, that's one reason why I love Arch (and I know Fedora or Ubuntu all have package building utilities, I'm just giving my personal experience as an example): even things you build yourself can still be kept track of with your PM if you use the pkgbuild system (or your distro's equivalent).
But yeah, I hate having my system cluttered with .deb files, flatpaks, snaps, pip packages _and_ raw git clones (not to mention when you go into programming, where you have ruby gems, rust crates, etc); if I want to do a system upgrade, I shouldn't have to check every disparate manager.
Getting the app packaged in .tar.gz and just having it lying in a folder like a windows app never failed me.
Like TOR.
I find that Pop OS seems to be doing something right with power use, at least on System 76 laptops anyway, which makes sense. My laptop from them does actually get 9-10 hours from moderate use.
Funny thing about hardware support:
My new laptop, I ordered it without the OS so I could save 100 euro by not getting Windows included
And I installed Linux, but I had to install Windows about a month later to run some software... the touchpad did not work, it did not show up in the device manager either. I had to email the customer support from the website I got it from and they sent me a zip file of all the drivers, then it finally worked
But it works flawlessly on Linux out of the box!
@ExtraTNT oh gosh ...
Pretty much all the hardware I have ever tested on Linux has actually worked flawlessly and sometimes better than on Windows, which is pretty amazing. HOWEVER, if there's additional software to control the hardware (e.g. software for remapping your keyboard or controlling its lighting), chances are that you're out of luck. Which is pretty sad.
@@oShinobu This is why I get keyboards and mice that have the ability to save their settings on board, so I can setup the way I like on a windows install and it'll save to the keyboard and the settings apply on Linux too
I did try to do the same thing, but didn’t get it as easy.
I got my surface go 2 without an os to save money, trying to get a Linux tablet, didn’t work out very well, I mean it was ok for like a month or two, but there was glaring issues, like touching expand window would leave mutter… iffy, sometimes the window would appear over everything, sometimes I’d get no menu, and every time my panel would just stop working Period.
I think I would’ve made it through if one thing didn’t happen, *My Window manager (Mutter) breaking*. I honestly don’t know why that happened atm but I restarted my computer after installing Virtualbox (Pre-Waydroid Days) and saw only my wallpaper, at the moment there was no fix out for it, so I was at a standstill which would be fine if I didn’t need the computer, I could just toss it in a closet for a Month (When the problem got fixed) or something, but I didn’t have such time, Finals were due in a week and I had all of my notes on there. So I had to chose the most effective route and back up my notes, Grab my USB, and hop to windows.
@@naraydaniels7832 Yeah
I heard that surface devices are hard to get Linux to work on flawlessly. I saw a video on UA-cam about it one time and it seems once you get things to work, it's a nice experience. There was also some stuff that just wasn't able to be fixed though
I agree that there are too many packaging methods, but I honestly stopped caring about it since switching to endeavourOS. I just type paru software-name, then I can either install the package that's in the arch repo and if it's not there, it's probably in the AUR. If it's not in the arch repo OR the aur then that's pretty damn impressive lol.
The problem with one packaging format is that some developers would prefer one over the other, some users would prefer another one. So some software might never be included if there was only one.
I'd honestly think variety is the best as long as we get the software that suites our needs.
luckily if theres something not available, checking out flathub may actually give you the results you want.
a nice example is the aur version of stepmania, which fails to compile.
the flatpak version runs without any issue, though
literally the biggest reason I use arch. I never worry about packaging format, I just "yay -S " and sit back. All the ubuntu/debian users are busy hunting for a PPA, flatpak, snap, appimage, tar.gz, installation cd, usb drive, source code leak, transmission from the stars, while I've got it installed in a minute because some legend created a PKGBUILD for it and put it on the aur.
It's better to rely on flatpak than the AUR for any actual software, over-reliance on the AUR is the biggest cause of arch systems breaking. AUR is awesome for fonts, themes or some small, obscure applications but if you start using it for anything major, you'll often have to deal with delayed updates (which can cause client downtime), constant recompiling, packages getting abandoned, stuff failing to build because of dependency issues and if you rely on it for your system components, it's only a matter of time before it breaks down on you.
Pamac is pretty good as well. I use it as part of my Arch system installations and it makes updates for _everything_ braindead-easy. Also leads to me doing some pretty braindead things but if I make a mistake I can usually fix it or wait for a fix.
Hi Nick, I have also faced big issues while upgrading my distros, and that happened multiple times. But the thing that I hate most is about having tons of different tools for the same purpose, where each of them fail in some different aspect (like in your example about package managers). I always feel that, if they joint efforts, they would be able to accomplish even more beautiful stuff.
9:45 You are totally correct there.
Linux world gets bigger and bigger and stuff interconnects more than ever.
Flatpacks guys ! Devs pack everything (stable & beta branches) and release it in a 1 month cycles.
That would give people time to fix stuff and would streamline distros
I love the "things I hate in Linux" videos as they shed light on things that can be improved.
They don't shed light on anything, all of it should be deleted.
@@DudeSoWin I see a possibly-hardcore Linux fanboy.
@@DudeSoWin I'd like to disagree. Tho I don't work on anything specific to Linux, as a developer every feedback about my software is welcomed, as long as it carries some valid arguments.
So please let me know why pointing out flaws in Linux (or any software) should be deleted.
@@DudeSoWin /Cope
@@bigbay1159 Don't feed the trolls
I agree with everything that has been said in this video actually. I hope it will be useful to adress those issues. My biggest problem on linux personnally is that the gnome software center, while looking good and be fine feature wise (although there's room for improvment), is just totally unstable. It reloads everytime you install something, which is very annoying when you install several apps at a time. The info takes way too long to load, and everything feels slow and buggy on an otherwise fast machine. The updates are also a nightmare and I end up doing them with the terminal in the end. And sometimes it won't even launch at all, I need to manually kill it. I love the potential of this app store, and I'm sure we can do better than this. I hope the changes in gnome 43 will fix some of those problems.
Yeah it feels like a buggy mess... I actively steer clear of it despite loving the idea
If this helps you Synaptic is easier to use and let's you add a bunch of packages before checking out and installing them. From what I recall it doesn't look all that inspiring but it's amazing for managing dependencies, having descriptions of packages, and letting you grab everything you need before installing them all.
Software center is garbage on Ubuntu.
@@Simmons101 Agreed. I use Synaptic myself from time to time as I don't want to go use longer APT commands to display long descriptions and dependencies on the terminal.
The funny part is that even the Microsoft Store is a buggy mess. Loos like nobody can built a functional store (aside from mobile phones).
Very good video, very accurate, and fair. Thanks for doing it. I have nearly the same experience than you, Nick, using and working full time on Ubuntu since around 2005-2006 and sticking with it for about 15-16 years, personally and professionally. Up to recently, with the launch of the Apple Silicon chips, I stopped using Linux as a desktop, because I just couldn't make it work. So instead I started to use Mac with Multipass (from Ubuntu) in order to develop in a virtual and persistent environment that would be a "normal" Ubuntu, in order to obtain the same behavior on the dev environment than on the servers. This setup works like a charm
Note on the battery life thing. Sure most distros don't do it out of the box, but a program called auto-cpufreq is amazing at preserving battery life while giving you performance if you need it. Envy control is a program that allows turning off/on your external GPU on your gnome menu (through an extension and cli tool).
Also on the packaging issue front, I personally never found this to be a big issue, I think different programs benefit from different packaging formats. Like I wouldn't trust a proprietary app unless its a flatpack with permissions I can easily control, but I wouldn't want core system utilities or cli programs as a flatpack because flatpack isn't built for that. App Images have unmatched portability, but it's complete lack of system integration or package manager makes it so that I wouldn't want to use it for most apps.
I agree with the other parts though. I do wish linux could do better in some aspects but some issues can't be solved easily due to its open source and free nature. Like there are too many projects out there for all of them to effectively communicate with each other, centralizing everything could solve the issue, but it would also mean changing the "free" nature of linux.
power management I agree is still a problem that I struggle with. I'm still tinkering around with what works. So far System76-power on its own does pretty well, I've been testing that with auto-cpufreq and powertop, tlp others to see what does the best. Tbh I wish distros would have this figured out out of the box or at least have a "laptop" set of packages to install when you want to have it setup for you.
Agreed that there is is utility in maintaining three types of packaging formats: native, portable, and in between/sandboxed. We only need one format of each type, though. Snap can go die in a fire, and the Deepin people are off their rockers. I have no idea whether deb, rpm, or arch is intrinsically better _as a format,_ but that's a rather moot point: all three are so well-established that it's unlikely that any project using one will switch to another any time soon.
I've gotten a 2x performance uplift on battery from my legion 5 on linux compared to windows
@@freevbucks8019 I've fixed most of the issue on my AMD Acer Nitro 5 with Pop OS. On Windows the audio drivers were completely broken on windows 10 and 11 with no hope in sight. Windows 11 bogged the CPU thanks to poor optimization. Just not good experience and it was a supported device
@@freevbucks8019 pro tip: turn the igpu reserved memory down to 512mb in uefi settings, it just takes up ram and doesn't make anything more stable
I agree with Nick regarding battery. Everything on Linux should be GUI with easy point and click solution for everything thing even for the complicated things.
did you use tlp, autocpu-freq like apps
@@jothiprasath nope,
Everything on Linux *should have easy GUI and point and click solutions available.
Big difference there :)
Both Windows and macOS have troubleshooting that drops you into a CLI, this is the nature of computers. I am tired of people saying that Linux is dumb for making you do this. Linux has graphical utilities that work similar to the other ones, but sometimes the name doesn’t give clues on what it does. The biggest issue is that not all hardware is supported by these GUI apps. This is why CLI is given as a solution to your problem as it is the only consistent solution between distributions. We need to bring these issues up with the different desktop environment teams to get a proper solution for GUI, as they have the resources and teams to continue solving issues like this (there has been improvements in this area for KDE and GNOME, just make sure that when you ask for help that you say which one you are using and you might get the GUI way of fixing your problems).
My laptop gets double battery life on Manjaro Xfce vs Windows 10. Manjaro converted me to Linux so I haven't tried anything else on this system yet to compare to.
For apps, I never really had a problem since everything that I need is available on Linux, that was until a few days ago when I realised when trying to subscribe to a VPN that a Linux client was missing for Nord, I ended up importing theOpenVPN configs to Gnome settings and now it works even better than the app, but I doubt a normal user would be able to figure that out. My 2 in 1 laptop works relatively well but the the pen and fingerprint reader do not work. I also find some communities to be unnecessarily toxic. I found that Linux works great for nerds and absolute noobs but the inbetween which is most people. In my experience, battery life is great, longer than Windows, until I start web browsing; the lack of hardware accelerated video decoding is the thing that I hate the most.
....? there's a linux client for Nord what are you talking about? I use it all the time lol they have a package for all the major distros and it's also on the AUR
Surfshark runs on linux also
So agree with the Packaging format issue (4:37). That was what was so complicated when I first came to Linux in 1990s, but it's better now. At least, I don't have to do my best to try & compile everything from source. Just having the different graphical package managers, is such an improvement over the command line. Honestly, at least, we have Snaps and Flatpak.
I've had a lot of success running Linux Mint on Dell laptops. I agree with all your points, save one: I actually like the fact that there are so many app packaging methods. It goes to show the flexibility, opportunities, and choices available to Linux developers and users. Though, I believe, that eventually, one platform will ultimately merit the most popular place on most, if not all future Linux distros.
I hate how un-VM friendly some distros can be.
True. I've experienced that with distros that have desktop envrionments that are dependent on hardware acceleration of the GUI. Examples are those who use GNOME Shell and KDE who are pretty unusuable and sluggish on VMs. There may be some workarounds by using a hardware passthrough of a GPU but that is not something most people's hardware support or even have another GPu to do so sadly.
Hard to believe. I would expect they developed the OS as a VM.
which distros are you talking about?
@@dm8579 at the time, I was talking about distros like ubuntu, fedora, and redhat who have a lot of trouble emulating sound while using wayland passthroughs on VMs such as VMware and virtualbox on windows. It would always stutter or lag in one way or another. Debian was the only sane choice I had at the time that produced sound relatively well... except on windows 11. From what I know now it was probably a hardware virtualization issue but I've since moved on and and no longer rely on sound through VMs, choosing to just use Hyper-V. I hope that answers your question.
@@maliciousfry Thanks for the answer, now I understand you better.
What baffles me is Companies that sell low cost Computers with Windows $200-$300 and they are so slow and really unusable. They should instead sell them with a light Linux distro that would improve usability by quite a lot.
Hi Nick. Your videos are so great. I recently ordered a Lenovo 14w for $149 (really excited to find a good deal) and will be installing Manjaro GNOME when I get it tomorrow. I am so excited to set up a full Linux laptop for myself (I already have a Windows laptop). Thank you for your videos.
Good video. I agree. I would pay for applications in a heartbeat if they had first party support and continued updates. The AUR is nice but there are tons of problems finding some things that actually work. A unified way to applications across all distros would be nice. Especially since I change up distros once in a while when I get bored with one environment.
I've been using GNU/Linux for 4.5 years now, starting with manjaro and at the end of the last year switching to the mighty Arch.
I had to learn a LOT to be able to make that change and even though I haven't yet bothered making my printer work with Arch (seriously, even though Manjaro isn't my distro of choice anymore, the printer support is outstanding), I can now easily install Arch in a few minutes and the GRUB thing was so instinctive for me that I absolutely forgot it even existed because I thought my 14 years old overclocked Pentium E5200 pooped on GRUB or something so I just took my thumbdrive with Ventoy, chrooted and reinstalled GRUB without even realizing it was an actual issue for more people that might make someones computer actually unusable 🤣
And now almost without realizing, as Nick said the GRUB thing, I ran a quick "yay -Syu" 😆
For me, probably how the GNOME desktop environment (and other DEs as well) handles Extensions by default.
There's simply too many choices and gotchas that if I were to tell a friend to download an extension, it's confusing enough that I would have to specifically guide them through how to do it. There's the GNOME Web Store + browser extension, GNOME Tweaks, and the GNOME Extensions app; each one of these has a specific set of things it doesn't do that the others do but they also share some functionality.
I would like to see some of these tools consolidated with a tool like mjakeman's Extension Manager to have a single default tool to manage, browse, and install extensions in one place.
Every once and while, it's good to step back and look at things objectively. To your points:
1. I agree that the Linux community can get pretty toxic at times, but I would argue that it's because we're all on the Internet. All Internet communities always have their toxic patches. Whether it be for gaming, politics, TV shows, music, etc.. We're no exception to this rule, but I do think that sometimes we allow it to continue more than we should. Perhaps if the good people in the community would step up more and oust the bad ones or at least call them out on their BS we could tame it a little better or at least show that we're trying fix that negative image.
2. Yeah, it's crazy how many times the wheel has been reinvented, but I'd rather have a lot of wheels to choose from than be stuck with one method. I can go either way on this one with valid arguments to be made on both sides.
3. One needs to remember, Microsoft doesn't play fair. A quick Google search and one can find that they are known for shady business deals where companies get kick backs for supporting Windows or for putting the Windows options first on their website and the Linux options tucked away where you have to look for them. Over the years they have been caught, but they've also become much better at either hiding those deals or just evading any laws on the books about them.
4. As for the market share of people running Linux on the desktop, that number may seem very big, but it's really not. Of those 100 million people, how many of them are likely to be customers of the companies for proprietary software? 100 thousand? 5? All of them? Compared the number of Windows users out there that are potential customers, how does that number stack up? Now what is your ROI for developing a Linux version of the software? Can you make enough money to justify it? There are a LOT of software applications that can run just fine on Linux through WINE, but unlike the gaming scene there's not a lot of media attention around it. WINE has been around since 1993, but all the attention is on Proton...because that's where the money is right now. Look at how often a game is advertised to run well on Proton vs how well an application is advertised to run perfectly on WINE.
Perhaps if we in the community started advertising that X application can run on Linux just fine without needing to learn the command-fu on the terminal, we'd have more people willing to come over and bring the applications they use with them. Maybe desktop environments need to have a WINE manager similar to bottles to make it easier for people bring what they had with them? Just some ideas to toss around.
5. Stability? What's that? All systems break and crash eventually! :P
In all seriousness though, this is one of those things that hit people differently. I've heard people tell me that Manjaro (with its 'quirks') is more stable than Ubuntu for them. I've had people tell me Manjaro crashes too much on them but Ubuntu based distros like Mint and PopOS never crashed on them. At the end of the day, it's a roll of the dice. Everyone has a different combination of software and hardware all trying to work together. Standards are good and can keep everyone on the same page (when they are followed) but they can also limit you so it's also good to see things done differently even if it initially breaks a lot of stuff in the process. When bugs happen, it's a learning experience (to put it mildly). When severe bugs happen and things really go wrong for a long time...yeah we need a new direction and luckily for us, there's no shortage of distributions out there we can choose from.
Speaking of, the lack of communication between projects I something I expect the distribution maintainers to be stepping up on. They're the ones that need to take the code from all these other projects and turn it into a working system. If an update on software A breaks software B, they should hopefully be able to work around that for us before putting the update in their repository, and/or go to the project developers behind that patch and submit a bug report and tell them they broke compatibility and their patch isn't working. The distribution developers sit in between the end users and the developers for all the individual projects so one would think they would have more pull with them.
6. As for battery life...That's probably related to point 5 IMO and it goes back to inter-project communication. The distributions are the glue between these other independent projects IMO, so I suspect they're working on this very issue. For all we know, System76 may surprise us when they finish their Cosmic desktop rewritten in Rust for PopOS, but I suspect it will take a distribution's development team to figure this one out regardless. Maybe they'll have to invent a new way to manage power on the system, or maybe they'll find the right way to get all the software in the distribution working together in a way that doesn't run down the battery.
7. Pointing out Linux's problems is not a sign of wanting to ditch it for MacOS or Windows. It's a sign of love for the platform by someone who wants it to improve. :)
There's a difference between stability (not changing) and reliability (not crashing). Arch is reliable if you keep it updated, Manjaro crashes *because* they don't want the latest packages.
I abandoned my plans for Linux PC 5 years ago because games just doesn't work on Linux with WINE, and the communities in several distros have been straight up unhelpful. They don't seem to understand that 100% game library working is important.
It was a mission-critical goal for a special project to build a Linux PC that have a server role where there's more than one sandboxed instances that are remotely accessible by thin console clients that I can access either an instance that contains my entire Steam library, or the instance of my bigger library of games where it does not require an account to run and comes from various storefronts like Steam, GOG, and Itch.
While Linux remained a broken and somewhat playable mess, I am using Windows through a separate drive partition to do my actual work for college, and I have been accumulating my productivity and drive imaging software.
By the time 3 years have passed and it was 2019 and Step 1 of the Project still didn't work as intended, it was time to write off as a bust, wiped the drives and incorporate them to Windows.
And I have maintained an anti-Linux stance since then, and those Linux communities are as unhelpful as they are 5 years ago like Linux is some damned gospel when it's not and requires prior practical experience and knowledge to put them together through tinkering or college education. The only way to make me change my mind is to get that project working again, and Valve's work with Proton is essentially the last hope I am getting out of this, but even then I may just end up getting a Steam Deck which bases its OS from a Linux distro, where if it effectively replaces my previous attempts of Linux thin clients. The project would be buried and I permanently advise against Linux in my recommendations.
For me the problem isn't that their toxic more that they (we) are elitist or to be more accurate the toxicity comes from elitism.
On the market share thing firstly I agree. Secondly I'd like to point out that even if you get a paying customer for proprietary software and even if the percentage of paying customers is the same as another OS, 100 million potential customers is obviously potentially profitable but actually if you could spend the same amount of time and target the other 98% surely its just economic sense to target the larger group.
Stability is weird Linux is more stable (historically) and less stable. I'd argue if you don't update a Linux system it is much more stable than windows. The stability issues don't come from what is running now, they come from changing the platform under peoples feet. Windows stability though I believe has vastly increased over time in the terms of being able to leave a machine up and running.
With regards to your last point. With the toxicity mentioned in the first point there is the impression that any complaint about the system is from someone whom shouldn't be using the system to begin with. I agree with you but I'm not sure the community does.
for #1, i think this culture of mocking everyone who doesn't use the exact thing that you use is quite prevalent in tech circles and i don't think it's just an internet thing.
for #2 it's a matter of opinion
for #5 i've been pleasantly surprised that fedora, arch, and debian maintainers are quite communicative with one another especially about potential issues that would eventually affect other distros downstream. so it's probably a good thing if stuff breaks on fedora/arch since these are the canary distributions that should prevent breakage on say, ubuntu
As a super casual Linux-user who is looking to spend some more time actively considering my setup and choices, I thought this was really helpful for figuring out what my painpoints will be and what to pay attention to! Your channel is really nice and helpful, thanks! (Even your sponsors are fine, big thumbs-up on that, hope this keeps working for you)
My main gripes are updates that brakes my system, functionally required restarts for trivial things and reduced battery life on my lenovo laptop.
Started using Fedora on my main 2 machines around 6 months ago. And i am mostly happy with it. I am a developer, using VScode mainly. Regret getting that Nvidia Gpu tho. Would have been so much easier with a Radeon.
I am very very happy with driver support. In my case far better then windows. Any random USB soundcard or printer i give it.. boom! Works.
I can have 2 screens now! That was insanely hard to handle just a few years ago.
Steam. Proton is huge for Linux. Just want to play some good old Red Alert.. Or have a decent play with Red Dead 2. Works damned fine now! Proton is actually so good, i find the compatibility for older games on Linux to be better then on windows.
Mainly that it is not Windows or Osx, that is 100% of the reason why i live with it.
Yeah 😂 Proton is really nice. I installed Fallout3 on Ubuntu and it worked without any bullshitery unlike on Windows. Almost died from laughing when I saw that. Suffered for several hours on Windows 10 to run Fallout 3 but at the end every time I got into the game, all I could see was a black screen.
@@nidfnix6228 Man yeah. The times i have had to go to old hardware on windows Xp or older... I for one really hope for a Glide to Proton emulation, i am ancient and would like to play 3dFx games. :P
For me:
* configuration of my ultra wide gets lost with each update
* VMware Workstation breaks regularly
* non working fingerprint reader
* Worse power management
For me it's integration and software availability.
There are often problems on Linux builds that aren't there on the Windows Version.
And some software just isn't available on Linux.
It's fun but I switched back to Windows after a few years but I use WSL for most things nowadays. It was a real game changer for me.
Ça fait plaisir de voir un français faire des vidéos sur linux. Surtout s'il fait d'aussi bonnes vidéo
Merci 😁
@@TheLinuxEXP I have had French classes during two years and I have really important problems with this
Something that is a complete deal breaker for me and reason I still mostly use Windows is file managers. I rarely hear that when people talk about windows, but the file explorer is really nice compared to anything available on linux.
For example I have fedora, and the nautilus file manager has so many limitations, from the top of my head it can't create files by default, you can't right click in list view because there is no empty space, you have to meticulously google to find how to integrate apps into it, sometimes you just can't, you can't click the path and copy it or enter a new one, the progress bar is laggy when moving large files, you can't group by file type, it is hard to set up additional drives to show up automatically, there is no indication that you've pasted a file, only a tiny circular progress bar in the corner and if an operation already exists you basically don't know if you pasted or not.
And I can then try using different managers, but there isn't a single other one that uses the gnome theming properly which makes them look uglier, and they usually don't have one or more feautures I listed either. Also changing the default file manager was an absolute pain before, now it appears to be possible, although it still requires googling and entering a scary terminal command you don't understand.
The best linux file manager I found was Peony, it looks clean and works fast, actually enjoyable to use, and has all the features except gnome themes (although that means it is stuck in light mode which is annoying) and it has a big chunk of UKUI dependencies. Now the huge issue for me is that it isn't available for fedora. So yeah, for now I don't have a good way of managing files outside Windows
Oh yes, this touches on the main point which is that ** people want to do work ** and this means interacting with their files. Why KDE/Dolphin still does not have file previews like Win Explorer after all these years (i.e. can see and page through a file right there in the view pane, not just a fixed image of the front page) is a mystery to me. The KDE devs seem to spend a lot of time on visual tweaking on plasma, over and over and over again, but these most central and vital apps do not advance on core functionality. I used to use Directory Opus because Explorer lacked lots of useful features - and Opus is exactly what a Linux user would appreciate (filters, bulk rename, preview, you name it...).
There are lots of other things that could be done to massively improve experiences - seamless full text indexing of NAS volumes, verifying file copy ops so those invisible copy failures don't lead to backups being full of holes (yes, thanks Dolphin...), enabling "copy my files and preserve ALL the metadata on the target", etc etc.
Nick - can you do a video about some of these core functional challenges and whether there are some tools that do a better job or if adding a few extensions like Recoll (KDE has the wonderful KIO system that is woefully underused compared to 3.5 days) can make some of this working-day pain go away? Suggestions please....
I've been back and forth between windows and linux, and have been rather impressed with winget recently, most specifically it's search: it feels like it has everything, and doesn't require me searching up the package name before hand like I've resorted to frequently with flatpak. I just use the common name, and if there's multiple options, it prompts me.
I understand it works completly differenly then package managers on linux as far as how the installations are actually handled, but I still feel like there's a lot they could improve in the search area. Could possibly even make a 'meta-package-manager' that has searches multiple package managers, and picks the best one based on some kind of priority list or database.
The package management issue is probably my number one gripe. Even though on Zorin everything is supported out of the box, it can be frustrating to choose which one to install. For example when I wanted to install Spotify, I tried the Snap package first. It did not want to connect with my Spotify Connect devices. Then I tried Flatpak, and it worked fine. sometimes its the other way around. The repo packages can work well, but sometimes are not well updated.
I switched between Linux and Windows for multiple times. I started with Mandrake Linux many years ago, tried SUSE, used earlier versions of Ubuntu for some years but always got back to Windows. Windows is always annoying in many ways but it works. Linux means tinkering and reading articles and spending too much time in learning things that a user maybe shouldn't need to know.
At the moment I've abandoned Windows 11 for being stupid, slow and full of bugs, so I'm back to Linux with Fedora this time. I really hope to stick with Linux even if many things are more work. At least the hardware seems to be absolutely no issue anymore with a HP laptop and desktop🙂
I love watching your videos! Always informative and entertaining 👍
My story is similar to yours, played around with Linux Mint and Slax in the past but due to issues went back to Windows. Now though, using Linux the tables have turned. Windows 10 generally gives me more issues than Manjaro Xfce does. Also using a HP laptop, no hardware issues at all! HP even has official Linux software for many of its printers although it's different from the Windows software and lacks some features.
Things have improved a lot with Linux and Windows keeps getting worse. There are also massive differences between different Linux distros. Some work almost straight out of box while others require tinkering.
Thank you Nick for reminding people that we have many issues to resolve. Linux is great in many areas but still has plenty of room to grow. We absolutely shouldn't bury our heads in the sand.
My 2 cents here would be:
The community's over reliance on the cli and conversely lack of love for the gui.
The seemingly irrational fear of words like "proprietary" and "telemetry" in cases when it would be beneficial(like efficient and necessary design of aforementioned guis)
The general fragmentation in everything: from distros to package managers to desktop environments. And yes i understand the usual argument that devs want to work on what they want but it's frustrating to see lack of polish in everything.
I mostly agree, though the fear of proprietary isn't so irrational in my opinion. see this: ua-cam.com/video/Lv5xHfZnk4s/v-deo.html
@@terrydaktyllus1320 The condescension and hostility in comments like yours, is exactly what drives new users away and keeps Linux from reaching its maximum potential. While you make some valid points, that doesn't negate OP's and other users' experience, and certainly your negative attitude doesn't help your argument. Love your username btw.
@@terrydaktyllus1320 Having a computer as a tool that works and keeps working the way you are used to without constantly studying and fixing it is a valid use case. If your very OS requires frequent attention it becomes either an annoyance or a toy, definitely not a serious tool.
Which is the sign of the better developer - "I have a 100 like-minded tinkerers who keep fixing my software for themselves over and over again" or "I have 500 happy users who run my software smoothly for the most part" ?
Despite all what I've just said, when Windows 7 finally becomes unusable for me, I''ll rather wrestle Linux than letting myself get molested by Win 10 or 11.
Like you, I also love my Linux. I have used Linux Mint for almost the past 10 years. While it is a pretty polished distribution, my complaint also revolves around the software management system. My problem is with simple office products in the management system are several updates behind the current level. Libre Office is a common software used by all distros, and yet Linux Mint's version is still two versions behind. There are still a few windows applications that I can't find a similar product for LInux, and only for those I still have a dual booting system. But as I said, I like the steadiness of Linux and I will not go back. Good Luck!
All excellent points! My biggest gripe is that the majority of linux distros lack support for a FOUNDATIONAL function, mouse scroll speed settings. I mean mice and trackpads are one of the most crucial mechanisms we use to interact with our machines. You'd think that would be one of the first things implemented in a DE. Wayland has hit or miss support depending on the distro and xorg, the best you can do is 3rd party hacks like imwheel. It's hard to expect others to take linux seriously as a viable alternative desktop OS when it lacks native support for basic stuffs like that. Anyways, always enjoy your vids. Thanks!
oh trust me, as a mac repurposer in the linux world, I can confirm hardware support is pain, I just spent the past 3 days in driver hell because my wifi unalived
I hate how nothing just works on any distro on my Lenovo legion 5
Contact me, I run Linux on my Legion 5 and with the right distro is runs perfectly. Stay away from Fedora and Arch based distros. PopOs runs perfectly. It wants kernel 5.16+
@@wvbosch wouldn't Arch have a 5.16+ kernel? Idk about Arch based distros
@@TheMasterOfSafari yep they do and they do work, but takes some effort with Optimus for switching. POP has a special Nvidia ISO making things much easier. Tried Fedora today running kernel 5.19 which works perfectly, but Wayland is not ready for Nvidia yet, had some very nasty surprises this afternoon with urgent word processing that had to be done and Wayland was a disaster.
9:00 there is no cross platform system for drivers though. The only cross platform way is to push the driver to the kernel, which requires a lot of openes.
we need an extra cross platform manager for drivers IMO.
What you have done is this video is great, Nick. The humour you use to speak about Linux subjects that are not easy to talk here is why I felt and subscribed to your channel.
Because I hate SNAP (it creates loops that were slowing my old pc) doesn't mean I hate Canonical. While they are not perfect, I like what they do with Ubuntu. Same thing for KDE: I have tried KDE and I didn't like it, but it doesn't mean that I have to tell KDE developers to kick the bucket. I'm more like a user who doesn't want to modify the GUI and I love the Gnome interface on PoP!_OS. Being critical is one of the key thing in life in my opinion, being cynical isn't. While hating things (that also applies to outside) is human, being a trashy person to people who do things I have isn't at ALL. I think Windows is bad for multiples reasons, but I'm not making fun of people who use it and if they like it. Also, inside the Linux community, there is harassment being made to people on the base of what the user is using. If you want to use Ubuntu, Alpine, Debian, Arch, Manjaro, Fedora, Gentoo, Mint, Tails, Void, Linux from scratch, Raspberry Pi OS or an other one, GREAT. If you are proud of what you have choose, you could post your system in subreddit for Linux or on The Linux Experiment Discord server. But, we don't to make a war for that. Also, as a Nvidia user on Linux, I hate the drivers Nvidia puts on Linux. Having the same performance on my integrated GPU, and sometime better performance, than on my dedicated Nvidia GPU in some games is one of the issues I have, and I think I'm not the only one with that. For issues I have, I prefer receiving help and tutorial on how to fix it than receiving threats.
If the Linux wants to grow up, some people here have to keep their mouth close (to put it in a polite way)
Thanks foe the kind words :)
One of the most appreciable thing on Linux Mint I found is the Driver Manager app. It just scans the computer and lets us choose the necessary drivers. An absolute essential thing that every other distro should have.
That's probably the only thing I would recommend Manjaro for 😆
For me:
1. Packaging is messed (a lot of fragmentation)
2. Doesn't always just work (OOBE)
3. Drivers
Drivers work great as long as the device maker follows standards or supports their products like intel or amd. Nvidia and realtek are historical outliers
If fragmentation was such a problem, then different desktop environnements is messed
ok, this might be a stretch, but given your profile picture being an arch logo - this is no distro which just works "ootb". you can see it as your tinkerer distro which you can change to your liking without any interference of already installed tools.
for that, fedora, popOS, or arch-distros can help you get going.
@@Tb0n3 you get a watered down experience compared to windows (like RTX or DLSS)
@@terrydaktyllus1320 Its really complicated to manage software not in your distro repos(uninstalling, upgrading etc..)
I had a wifi adapter which was really hard to get drivers for. It just worked on windows
Long time Linux user / developer here. Good points. For software installation, some apps are just bypassing it to keep it simple. For example, Equinox3D is installation-free. You just unpack it anywhere and run it. No need to be root, no files changed in your system.
I'm using garuda and that exact issue with grub happened to me. I had no clue what the problem was at the time, but knowing that it wasn't something I did myself makes me feel better.
1) Community oversells Linux, and Linux under-delivers as a result.
2) This also relates to number 1, but too many of us try to hide the flaws about using Linux, or at least aren’t as open with them. This only causes more of a headache for new users when they encounter them.
3) In some cases, we have to compromise certain things with the OS (whether that be gaming, etc). Whilst we may be able to sacrifice some aspects of what we do on Linux, we shouldn’t force others to do the same.
4) We need to understand that Linux just isn’t for everyone, at least not yet. I know this also relates to previous points made, but we need to be more honest about the state of the Linux desktop, as well as come clean about the flaws the Linux desktop still has, overall just keeping things with reality.
5) Its up to others whether they want to install and daily drive Linux, not us.
Regarding 4), I'd say Linux is for everyone, but not everyone has the ability to set it up in such a way that the final product fits their exact needs without compromise. The flexibility of Linux is what I love about it, whether I want to set up a laptop for a friend of my mother or a work colleague, they are both completely content with their laptops. That being said, a 68 year old woman would have NEVER been able to figure out how in the fuck to install Arch. That is the part where I agree with you again. Using Linux if it is customized is for everyone, but getting there? Whole other story.
@@Finkelfunk I agree with you. At the end of the day, some operating systems make like life easier opposed to an other. The OS is a tool which is used to complete tasks, and with that in mind, you might as well as use the best tool for the job. For my use case, Linux is, but I’d be lying if I said it was for everyone.
But the battery life thing is opposite for me. I get more battery life in linux than in windows even in gnome de
While what is said is great for you, not everyone here can say that. Compagnies should put their power management drivers on Linux. Most of them don't and it is sad
one single packaging format would, i think, only work if it allows you to modify the way it installs to your specific use-case. take for example the choice between installing a package with all dependencies included or a package using shared libraries. either you choose to eliminate dependency issues or you choose to save space and potentially improve performance by reducing disk load.
the different package formats don't exists because every one of them tried to fix the mistakes of the others, but because they handle packaging in a different way and support different functions.
there's still too many though, but it's also a part of what makes linux free.
Hi Nick, you’re absolutely right. I also run in this grub issue with my Laptop running Arch. Honestly, I think this Grub error was a big nightmare for Linux and brought it back to underdog, because if I’m a newbie and run in this issue with Grub I fad up and go back to Win or Mac.
Gnome irritates me in some ways, but this group is one of my biggest hopes to see the Open Source community also care about the aesthetic user experience, with the fact that it's not enough for a software to be useful and powerful if it looks a Windows 3.1 application in 1993, a visual mess, what Audacity looks like. The days when Free Software is all about being functional are long gone. The community needs people who care not just about making things work , but in the pleasurable experience of using it . I'm not demanding that you, a skilled programmer, should learn UI design to beautify your app. I'm talking about some of the biggests Free Software projects that could be much better in this regard.
I agree with you ease of use needs more priority then it actually receives and for making things look polished and beautiful all we need is a set of prebuilt components and libraries sure they will be opinionated but they would make developer's work much easier and app UI much polished.
Personally, I think Windows 3.1 had much better visual design than most modern apps. Desktop UI design has suffered terribly from the smartphone paradigm.
@@mrcresseysclassvideos8183 Personally, I think after the advent of smartphones, ui design has become more easy on the eyes, looks better feels better. I never understand why people hate it.
@@falcon-Z That is exactly what LibAdwaita is.
Native mouse scroll speed is something that always makes me angry, the last time I was looking about it there was still people using the IMWheel and the same script. Insane stuff.
I don't know about you, but I use the default scroll speed my whole life and if I wanted to change it, it's just a couple clicks into my settings app in KDE away...
@@Get-Rekt that's why I say "native" because not every desktop gui has the scroll speed ption on their mouse settings.
And don't even think about changing scroll speed on touchpads! It's literally impossible on some machines
This is a good example, because you either get told to switch to a distro that's does have it (entirely missing point) or that's it's not a big deal. The finer details of linux are what make it killer at times, just because it seems small like the speed of the mouse doesn't mean it is. Linux is awesome but far...far from perfect
@@bigbay1159 You can say that everything is far from perfect. Too sad that perfection doesn't really exist 😢
At least we can try to make it better and bring some ❤ into the community of loud flamers and quiet chads 😁
It is okay to have an opinion about something, just please, cite facts, give reasons, etc. so that we all can learn more. You did do all that and I appreciate you sharing your thoughts, it gave me several ideas I would like to pursue and learn more about. Keep up the good work!
Great points in this video. I stick to the distro that I think works best, has the best people behind it, Fedora. My only real gripe is the experience I have when I have to get my HP scanner/printer up and running seems to be different every time. Good stuff Nick!
One of the reasons big publishers and developers avoid native Linux support is not just the small market share but also the post-sale support staff they need to hire and pay. The developers of Planetary Annihilation said they released their game on Win, Mac and Linux. Linux Made up less than 0.1% of all sales but contributed to over 20% of all support tickets, mainly graphics driver errors. You can argue that they developed the game badly for Linux or blame the graphics driver on Linux, but for a commercial product those numbers speak for themselves. This also not an isolated issue. A lot of developers and publishers want to expand their products to Linux but once they add up the numbers for post-sale support for Linux, it makes no sense from a business perspective. More and more and game developers drop native Linux support because the sales didn't even cover the post-sale support costs. Well at least now with proton there might be a solution for the gaming world.
I truly believe that proton is the future of gaming on GNU/Linux and that we will see less and less native games going forward. If you can develop for one platform (Windows) and have it work just as well on GNU/Linux, whats the point of making a potentially inferior native port? There are many games (for example, ETS2) that most people play with proton despite having a native port because the native port sucks ass and the proton version works as expected.
In other words, you need more people using Linux. As more people use it, the more it is worth it for a publisher to install test machines and hire testers.
They will get nVidia and AMD involved to fix those driver bugs.
Like someone else said in another video, why don't more people use Linux? because Windows 3.whatever and Win 95 came first.
People tend to be lazy and are not interested in learning new things.
There are other reasons as well.
@@adwaitagnome But an issue with Proton is that certain third party tools and mods like TruckersMP (for the mentioned ETS & ATS) are not runnable on Linux without a whole bunch of complicated tweaks.
I don't get people that buy a Computer for a lot of money to play the latest games etc. Its really the wrong use for a PC. The PC is built for Processing information, photos, video, light gaming, and doing your work etc All of that is doable on Linux.
@@STONE69_ Everything is a PC, including smartbones and gaming consoles. They all have general purpose CPU with varying features, varying amount of cores and caches. They all have a GPU.
Gaming pushes advancements in CPU and GPU design.
OSes and office applications, web browsers, notepad don’t require much CPU and GPU power.
Also, video rendering and CGI also demand a lot of CPU/GPU power but I’m guessing gamers far outnumber the rendering crowd.
That's actually a nice... therapeutic video, Nick 👍!
I think, arrogance and toxicity have become integral parts of any community, but some members of the Linux community do their best to take it to the next level. Oh boy are they good at doing so 😂! Also HYPOCRISY plays a HUGE role in it. Seriously, everyone seems to be so concerned about privacy, security and devotion to FOSS, so the majority of distros still don't even ship with multimedia codecs. Naturally big businesses assume that Linux users won't use their products, unless those companies change their products to comply with a SMALLER group of clients. Can you spot the problem? But the truth is somewhere in the middle. Average users don't care much about licences, paradigms and other software related stuff. They just wanna use their computers. At the end of the day, it's all about having some work done in time, content consumption or playing games without problems.
Here's the hypocritical part - the majority of people, who can read this comment, is using Google services 😂. I don't shame anyone here. I just want people to be less paranoid, be nicer and more open to other people. Especially if we want our "little disfunctional family" to grow 😊.
P. S. I can write more comments to your older videos, if you don't mind 😉.
I think flatpak is the best for gui and appimages for cli. A single application available in both would be also GREAT. My biggest issue is the hardware availability - extra taxes and poor delivery (common in my country)
On the topic of packaging, another issue is that you can't compile against an older version of glibc easily, which is annoying if you compile a native program.
I don't think I've had any battery life issues. One thing I've heard is that you need to use proprietary nvidia drivers for automatic power saving.
Also specific complaint: when software I use updates too slowly and only work on stable release distros.
I've been using Linux as my main OS for 5 years now (I've been toying around with it for far longer though). Stability issues/things getting broken via updates are definitely a thing, but are easily solvable once the user has aquired enough compentence. Here are some tips to reduce the risk:
Don't update your system daily - once a week is usually enough (esp. in rolling release distros!). This greatly increases the likelyhood that by the time you update your packages, eventual issues have been discovered by the community, were told to the maintainer and are already sorted out by offering a fixed package revision.
Check the distribution's homepage for news before updating - i.e. Arch Linux has a news section on its homepage, telling users about (breaking) changes to packages and whether manual intervention is needed or how to do so before or after installing the updates. Gentoo offers the same with the "eselect news" command.
If you use BTRFS or LVM, create a filesystem snapshot before installing updates, which allows you to easily revert to a working configuration.
yay -Syu
and that's what you call BREAKING NEWS 🤣🤣🤣
checking distribution homepage is such a bs , i mean the need for it , if something breaks the system why even release it? not alone keep it released
when you cant trust it just to press update then it lost its whole point and manual updates is just better
@@orkhepaj Upstream projects can introduce breaking changes - in such cases the user has to be informed and needs to manually intervene - there is no way around that. Packaging or software behaviour is subject to change.
As for faulty updates - these happen on any OS. You can never catch everything during testing.
@@orkhepaj well, the GRUB issue didn't really break any OS installs, it just didn't boot them until the user reinstalled GRUB.
I usually install and upgrade my packages in terminal and it specifically *told* me to reinstall it using grub-install and grub-mkconfig commands
@@Get-Rekt well if you cant boot into the os then it means it got broken
Battery life is most likely tanked by the lack of laptop specific power management config. I remember getting 60FPS on a game in Linux, but the laptop gets pretty hot. Meanwhile on Windows 11 I get around 30-ish with more stable temperature. Now that I think about it, this could be why my laptop prematurely died lol. I should've installed TLP or auto-cpufreq.
My laptop gets double the battery life on Manjaro Xfce vs Windows 10. It's not just the runtime either, if I reboot from Manjaro to Windows, by the time the login screen has loaded up the fan starts spinning up louder and it stays that way. Once logged in I can see the CPU temperature is also much higher at idle compared to Manjaro. I use Intel XTU on Windows to undervolt and intel-undervolt to do the same thing on Manjaro.
@@fenrir7969 Ooo interesting. I'll look into undervolting once I get my hand on another device.
so linux just killed your laptop? nice
@@orkhepaj I'd blame it more on the laptop. Since it has an i7, slim body, yet crap thermal with only one tiny fan. Still, I should have undervolted it.
@@NarendraU23 well it works on win and dies on linux , it is clearly an os fault
Can you explain the “humble bundle” you mentioned in your video? (Around the 9:30 mark) I’ve never heard that terminology before. Thanks
Humble Bundle is a website where you can buy Indie games as a bundle, with a "pay what you want" price.
Linux users consistently paid more foe the sale bundle thab Windows or mac users
I have no complaints at all.
I'm currently typing up on a 2006 Toshiba Tecra running Manjaro KDE with 4 GB RAM and a 120 GB SSD. runs great.
For issue 2 I would just use flatpak and snap since they support all distros. Deb, and rpm is just useless on arch linux.
Not really, they are just archives that can easily have their contents rearranged with a bash script (namely PKGBUILD) and installed in Arch as a pacman package.
My main problem with alternative package management features (like Flatpak, Snap, AppImage, etc) is that it fragments system updates. Sure, it's still better than Windows/macOS, but Flatpaks/Snaps/AppImages can never and will never replace traditional packages. A core system (kernel, base command line utilities, bootloaders, glibc, compilers, kernel headers, NVIDIA drivers, PulseAudio/Pipewire, display managers, Xorg/Wayland, the core desktop environment, and the base flatpak/snap/appimage runtime) can and will never be replaced with flatpak/snap/appimage. This inherently means that you need at least two package management systems installed on your PC, one of which is supposed to auto-update (I think, but it's never worked for me) and are often segregated in terms of where the updates show up (for example, on ubuntu their awful update manager did not have snap updates for a long time and now they don't work a lot of the time). I don't think that Flatpak/Snap/AppImage is inherently a bad idea, but I'm ALWAYS satisfied with traditional packages as long as they are the latest version.
The problem is that all package managers except NIX can't work with two versions of the same package at the same time.
This is a must if you want to keep old software (like games, or old hardware config programs) running with no problem. Look at the Steam runtimes. They use libs from 2012, and never changed. But when you use APT or DNF, if you want to install a lib version, it will just replace the old one, even if some programs require that version to work.
Windows solved that by using the VCredist package, that every program that really needs a specific version can install. But on Linux (except on NIX) that's impossible.
I think having 2 package management systems per OS is mostly fine. As an example - apt would represent system updates, flatpak would represent application updates. Hopefully with that approach casual users will have no need to even explicitly touch apt, the only interaction would be something like clicking the "update system" button. Of course, it isn't the case at the moment.
@@alex_jellymath Absolutely. We just need to wait for flatpak/snap/something completely new to mature and have every developer use it.
@@DistrosProjects Flatpak needs to be friendly to commercial programs for that.
Snaps are crap but most companies choose that because the publishing method is 100% like the Play Store
A few of my own:
- systemd
- systemd-networkd
- systemd-journald
- netplan
- the fact that wayland is almost as old as x11 was when wayland was introduced and still is missing features and has not replaced X11 yet.
- containerized desktop apps
Agree 100% with the video - also started with linux with Ubuntu 6.04 (before few tries with Fedora, but not very successful). All you've said is correct. I do believe that the battery life is directly related to driver availability, as you've mentioned. But what is best is the steps Linux does with every new release of each distro.
The packaging point is one that gets me every time. It would def be super nice for all parties involved if there was one unified format. The worst part though, is when it comes to updating. It was only until recently that I actually noticed packages outside my package manager were not updated (i.e. pip, npm, etc). Luckily there is a super handy tool that takes care of all these: topgrade. You should check it out! I do find AppImages pretty cool, but they require manual downloads, so if I want updates, I need to first recall I even downloaded it as such, and then grab a newer version myself.
The battery is an interesting one. Everyone says linux makes better use of your hardware and is much lighter, but how come that doesn't reflect in battery life?
The only other major pain point I've come across is highly dedicated software not being available on linux. Think music production or any other sort of art related software. It's so sad that I can't use all these amazing tools, but it's doubly sad that people using them are locked away from linux. These tools are probably the major reason they'd never consider switching (just like gaming for windows users)
I have a gaming mouse which I want to customize (the lights, key usage , etc) but the software availability is only on windows. Also I tried to run the software's .exe file via wine but turns out wine doesn't have usb support for devices. I mean it has but the documentation goes above my head.
I've been using my MIDI keyboard through USB in wine and everything was working perfect.
I have a similar thing with my logitech mouse and Corsair keyboard. For the mouse, I use Piper to set the buttons and lights, and for the keyboard, I use CKB-Next. Not a perfect solution, but it is fully functional, and lets me set everything I need.
I basically connected my Razer mouse to a school computer because the Synapse installer can install without any permissions, so even a well-configured W10 couldn't stop me from installing it 🤣
I mapped it and never touched windows on any devices since 😆
@@kuvakei But doesnt support razer afaik
@@omegaroguelp Razer has its own driver and utility.
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 1532:005c Razer USA, Ltd DeathAdder Elite
It's why I bought it. Although I don't use any of it now or have it installed. But when I did it worked and the light is still off. Who thought a light in an optical mouse was a good idea?
i think the package managers fragmentation is the biggest flaw linux suffers from and it is the reason why linux won't go mainstream
It's only a problem if you're distro hopping. The fragmentation only exists between distributions and the reason there are so many different kinds is because there are fundamental disagreements in how it should be done. Most normal people would never have a problem because they would install one and stick with it forever.
I'm not talking about the user, I'm talking about the developers, instead of creating 1 package that works in all Linux flavors, they have to create a package for every package manager, which is unrealistic
@@mohammadshin892 I don't keep up with the developer side but I imagine that some don't need to package as the maintainers will do it for them but a simple tool that packages for everything shouldn't be that difficult to either make or find.
@@Tb0n3 realistically every packaging format has its..."quirks", to put it nicely. so i've seen some projects where for example they were able to create a flatpak on day 1, but appimage took 4 years and still hadn't gotten resolved. or vice versa. there's no magic button to make it all work unfortunately.
however at least dev/rpm releases are pretty standardised compared to the newer packaging formats. those two should be sufficient, arch etc users can build from source lol
@@user-lb1ib8rz4h Everyone can build from source. I ran Debian on my old server and since it lags behind for stability I compiled the kernel and some programs that I wanted new features on. Not very difficult with makefiles. Though everybody wants to be unique there too. Sometimes you need to run a ./configure, sometimes you need to use a different compile install script.
2:35 What if we still had all the package manager formats, but we were able to make them all jive with each other? My point of annoyance is that I may have certain dependencies of my chosen program in Snap, but the app itself is in a .deb, or a flatpak. Currently, I would need to install a copy of the dependencies in flatpak, as well as maintain the Snaps, as well as the software that I have in .deb format, which can quickly turn into a PITA. I personally can't think of a reason why I couldn't have a system where regardless of how I get the system, they all work as one cohesive unit.
Video card drivers and the related X11/Wayland mess is the main problem for me. At some point I got tired of switching between nouveau and nvidia drivers trying to find a configuration that lets me share my desktop screen without clicking 15 times while also being able to suspend my laptop without issues.
And so, after being a Linux-only user since the late 90s, I finally bought a Mac.
I share most of these frustrations. Except personally, I think it's fine for there to be multiple packaging formats, since DEB/RPM/Pacman serves a slightly different purpose to Flatpak/Snap/AppImage, but ideally I wouldn't have to think about which apps are available as flatpak or which as snap; I would just have one built into my distro and a reasonable UI to manage it.
I often say that Linux's biggest strength and biggest flaw is that nobody owns it. It's really just a collection of open-source projects building off each other that distros try and piece together into an OS, which means complete freedom to change what you want about it, but also the confusion of weighing five incompatible programs that do the same thing.
And to repeat my previously deleted comment - Linus Torvalds said "All operating systems suck, Linux just sucks less." And I agree.
(Probably shouldn't have deleted that after you hearted it, but I wanted to actually watch the video and offer something more insightful.)
Also, my favorite Torvalds line is "F U NVIDIA!"
Because Nvidia drivers just doesn't work as effectively in Linux regardless of distro because the secret to their pros compared to AMD are their proprietary drivers that make render and frames efficient. Linux just can't CUDA as good because Nvidia made it so.
@@Aereto when Torvalds flipped Nvidia off it was only because Nvidia did not support Linux with anything but the consumer series adapters. There was no Quadro support. So unless you have a Quadro it has nothing to do with you.
preach it, good sir, shake it up.
re: power management on laptops, or in general - take a look at the tlp project (*edit* nevermind, you just mentioned it!). you won't reach optimized mac/windows levels of 8h+ under light/medium load, but shaving off a few minutes here and there quickly adds up to another hour of runtime.
(my trusty ~8-year-old thinkpad x240 still does up to 4h on light load and modest settings -- with the original batteries (plural). kick it, however, and it'll run dry in under an hour)
I agree with most of what you said I wish there was more support for Linux desktop. I think more people would use if there was. Currently I’m running a dual boot of Fedora 36 and Windows 11 on my other drive. The other thing that frustrates me sometimes is the issue with either bugs or errors I run into on Fedora at times. My system freezes I try to trouble shoot to see if it is certain part I’m using. Running Ryzen 5 3600 with Nvidia gtx 1660 Super
You know what I hate? I hate people who really wish for only one choice for package manager .Ooooh that makes me mad. And I don't think GNOME sucks. It's just made for people who want their desktop and laptop to look and work like a smart phone! Okay, I'm joking, but I disagree with everything you've said here, but I liked the video because it's a fair opinion. 😀
agreed, i use gnome on my microsoft surface, because its the best for touch and pen support, and it feets the best for a tablet-like device
Personally, I kinda disagree with the software distribution issue.
I don't think it should be devs that distribute their own software, and I heavily believe in getting everything from a central repository/collection of user scripts.
This is probably showing a fair bit of bias though, as I pretty much never see any software I want to install that isn't in the Arch repos/AUR, and when I do I create an AUR package for everyone else to use.
Also a bit more bias in that this pretty much entirely excludes proprietary software from being installed (except with a fair bit of work from someone to hack things together).
I've never had issues as well, except when a developer only supports one format and I have to stick with whatever packager the developer is putting their software on.
PolyMC only supports Appimage, which is fine except when I want it to integrate with my desktop, so I had to manually create desktop entries for it.
@@terrydaktyllus1320 I am literally arguing that the devs shouldn't have to deal with software installation...
I'm not sat on my backside, I'm writing AUR scripts for lesser known projects so other people can install them easily
@@terrydaktyllus1320 No worries, have a nice day :3
I agree with you, except for the battery life issues. On my current laptop (Acer Spin 5) I get 2-3 hours on Windows (in battery saving mode) and 6-7 on Arch without any battery saving tweaks. But I have to say, that my sample size is really small and maybe I was just lucky.
If I need a dependency, even if available through the official repo, the name of the package that contains that dependency isn't always easy to find (it doesn't help that the names and what comes with the package differs from distro to distro).
In Windows, those dependencies are usually included as dlls by the installer.
You can search packages in repos by file names. That's what apt-file does. So you need to learn how your package manager works. Or just run a distro with a decent package manager.
Great video. Every point you made is valid. For Linux to become a go to OS for the average users, the community needs to established standards.
Linux doesn't need to become a go to OS for every user. To achieve that it would have to turn into crippleware like win and macos. We already have that.
@@alterego157 You don't need to make an OS a crippleware to make it a go-to OS. Read up on the history further.
I don't use a Linux desktop, just Ubuntu Server as host and Docker. Getting Docker containers is a breeze and setting up using docker-compose is awesome - especially when using Portainer.
I get the problem of having too many ways for software to get put onto a PC, but the problem is, that some want a perfectly safe sandbox, while others prefer the extra speed. Some want to be able to use the CLI, too. And making something, that'd really cover everything, is just not possible.
I also prefer Linux for development, but Asahi is not ready yet and there's no laptop in the world able to perform as strongly and endure as long as the M1. This is why I ended up with MacOS. I'm hoping for Asahi Linux to become as stable as can be.
For the stability reason, we need a control system, with technical review published publicly (like bug reports) for stability/performance/absence of bugs.
In those technical review we would see what has been controlled, and by who. So we could directly see if something has not been checked by anyone (or by reliable people) and could potentially represent an issue. We could make sure that everything is fine before being apply to everyone.
We currently have only bug reports which say if something wrong is known, not if something is not wrong. We don't know if a code has been controlled or not.
Not all codes are controlled the same. Some stuff can sometime being not well controlled.
Completely agree about the package managers! That's been one of my biggest gripes. Also - thanks for making the point that Linux-specific hardware makes a difference. I hadn't really considered it, but it makes perfectly good sense.
I would say for me it's the odd timing of issues during something critical. Sometimes Linux just breaks (desktop) or something stops working that was fine a few days earlier. And then when you need that one thing working, it's such a pain in the ass to get that working in a time sensitive crunch. With Linux I understand this is just life, always fixing the next broken thing but sometimes it's just occurs at the most annoying time
I would buy a Linux laptop if they weren't priced so high.
Pinebook pro is 200-ish dollars but doesn't have the oomph that most cheaper Windows laptops have.
Had to deal with the Glibc thing bricking Insurgency: Sandstorm a few weeks ago. Literally just got done fixing grub on my Arch laptop; had to chroot.
I have become a bit of a fan of the *BSD systems (particularly FreeBSD) for the consistency. Not that I find myself WANTING to use it all the time but it is interesting to learn. Compatibility with latest hardware leaves much to be desired (where Linux usually shines) but stability is really good. I appreciate what each tries to do it is just not as simple for the common person.
I hate when my xbox controller doesn't work on Wine games 😡
I agree with the package management. I am very fond of Flatpack philosophy, and I am a supporter of that method as a package management.
As weird as it seems, I have had better stability and compatibility with Arch based Linux compared to the stable ones (I am looking at you Ubuntu).
I am an end-user and as weird and annoying it is to me, when I tell people that I run Linux, most think I am stuck in terminal, which is not the case for most of the distros now days.
Well said! That sums up a lot of my frustrations. I would love to have the same selections as Windows / Mac / Chrome / Android for hardware. I need a cheap tablet or laptop for just puttering around the web or light shopping wile I watch TV. But I cant afford over a 1000 dollars for yet another device. I could just buy a cheap Chromebook / Android tablet / iPad. I would not do that as all of those choices are really horrible for privacy.
I agree with many of the things you mentioned, but in my top 3 dislikes for Linux is network sharing in a multi-OS network. NAS appliances which often have a Linux-based OS, make this super easy, and it just works. I've tried a bunch of distros for my home server over the years, and the network sharing GUI controls are almost non-existent and I still don't have it working. Also, poor support from major vendors is what keeps it away from being my daily driver, e.g. Microsoft Teams (Preview) does not work with my Elgato Camlink-based webcam, Microsoft OneDrive for Business client that supports syncing with SharePoint folders, etc.
gatekeeping is really strong in the Linux community, Arch jokes aside, Tiling Window Managers evangelist are the absolute worst, I'm 100% cool with you making your own experience and using what you like, but blindly trying to make EVERYONE use tiling window managers by saying that anything else is a noob garbage just destroys peoples expectations about Linux, is NOT going to happen ever... most people like a functional desktop and that's it, regardless of their level of knowledge, I assure you, most of the devs that make all the apps that you use, are on gnome or kde
Stability is the weakest argument here. Yes, things do break during software releases but many of them are fixed in the distros before it impacts the end-user on most distros.
I feel the frustrations about hardware support and laptop battery life. I've been hunting for a decent $1000-ish thin and light with 7+ hours of battery and it is HARD. Alot of vendors that have linux preinstalled have low battery life, and the portable form factors are more expensive than i can afford. I tried a couple converting a couple of windows laptops, but those had issues with suspending and abysmal battery life. I'm gonna stick to debloated windows for now, although i have faith that the linux laptop experience will improve with players like framework opening up so much of their hardware.
It's good to see someone on the Linux side of things talking about the stuff that isn't that great on their OS. In my case as a big Windows user (pretty much a fanboy of Microsoft products. I know, I'm sorry), and as a computer technician, I saw the "Linuxeros" (guys that always attack anyone that doesn't use the same things they use) with their own internal battles about desktop environments, bootloaders, distros, package managers and so on. What was the point of their community if inside of it they will go and destroy each other at the minimum chance?
Using Ubuntu as my main Linux option from many years ago has told me something: Linux can be good for everybody, and you can tweak whatever you like (or don't touch a thing) and be happy with the result. The online documentation is incredible, even when things go wrong (compared to trying to solve a macOS kernel panic or a Windows BSOD). The fact that many of those same apps can be used on almost any other OS is amazing, and if not, there's always an alternative.
Sure, sometimes Linux is more involved than the said other private OSes, but in recent years the movement to go GUI has been really great (and no, those that tell you "that makes Linux weaker" are very wrong. You can still do these with commands as you please, even on Windows!), and the mentality has changed a bit from "Linux is just for pros" or "it's made for old computers", to something usable by anyone who may want to try something different.
Also, the fact that I can run Linux on a Mac that can't support the newer OS from the manzanita, sacrilegious or not, it's just too good for me. A perfectly working 14 years computer that can run everything else but its main OS it's really dumb (even Firefox said: "Nope, that's too old" on El Capitan, even though you can install Ubuntu or any other, and run the latest version of the browser on the SAME HARDWARE!)