to celebrate the exciting launch of Windows 11 luke and i are challenging
each other to ditch Windows altogether and replace our
Windows pcs with Linux for a month and
if either of us caves they have to dye their hair in red green blue and yellow
quadrants permanently easy you might say but i'm not talking
about our work machines that are basically just used for word processing
and web browsing i'm talking about our personal rigs the ones we both use on a
daily basis primarily for gaming has
Linux gotten to the point where it's user friendly enough that any tech nerd
can pick it up and run is game compatibility going to be an instant
deal breaker will any of my other applications even run
who would sponsor this madness instantly see your current and past
network activity detect malware and block badly behaving apps on your pc or
Android device with glassware use offer code Linus and get 25 off glasswire at
the link down below
embarrassingly i have never actually made an earnest attempt to daily drive
Linux and one of the reasons for that is the utterly paralyzing number of choices
you have to make before you even get started now i could just call on
industry contacts or even use internal resources to make these decisions for me
but the point of this challenge is that luke and i should be using the exact
same resources that anyone else would have
and with that in mind right out of the gate i would forgive
the average gamer for making it as far as google hit number one for best Linux
distro for gaming and bailing on the entire deal i mean nothing against the
author of this article i did pick up some really useful information but it is
full of jargon that a non-Linux enthusiast couldn't possibly be expected
to know not to mention seemingly conflicting information
how is it that ubuntu can be simultaneously easy to use and beginner
friendly and a hassle to set up another big one is
that customization gets billed as this major selling point for Linux and
fair enough if that's your thing but speaking on behalf of normies i don't
want a dozen novel ways to do the same thing i want one fast easy one i mean
it's horrible when microsoft scatters system settings all over the place i
think we all agree on that and so we should all agree that it's horrible when
anybody else does it i mean i'm the kind of person who doesn't even
rename my video game characters because it makes it a nightmare to look anything
up if i get stuck and there are a ton of other red flags
let's move on to hit number two here this time from tech radar
supports several controllers should not be a selling point for a gaming focused
product it seems to imply that most of
my stuff won't work and included games
are not the reason that anyone chooses an operating system how how are these
articles so out of touch furthermore the messaging around what
makes an individual distro stand out compared to the other ones gets really
muddy in some places like the way that these articles are often laid out it
sounds like if i choose the one with support for hybrid graphics i'm going to
be giving up kernel level gaming optimizations or that if i want broad
hardware support that could cost me the customization that i crave
but the truth is that that's not the case with a bit of elbow grease the
gaming centric features and tweaks of one distro could be applied to another
but with some exceptions the pantheon user interface for example is specific
to elementary os and for a more gaming related example techradar mentions a
feature of gamer os now called camaro s called the camara app that sounds super
cool it allows you to easily install and manage non-steam games and even roms for
a wide range of retro consoles except that if i wanted an os that
doesn't support multitasking i would invent myself a time machine so that i
could go back and use it but wait hold on the chimera app can be used outside
of camaro s there's even a guide but unless i want to really get into the
weeds i better stick with something based on arch by the way like manjaro or
garuda not that that's going to be my final
answer in spite of its spectacularly stupid name pop exclamation mark
underscore os topped just about every listicle that i found and legitimately
has some compelling selling points like demystifying the notoriously difficult
process of getting my NVIDIA GPU working properly and making installing the apps
and tools that i'm going to need to run my Windows games a one-click affair with
the pop shop if it was 10 years ago and i was looking
for a challenge manjaro's bleeding-edge approach please forgive the occasional
screw-up definitely calls to me and did i mention it's based on arch by the way
but i want to win this thing without pulling my hair out for a month and popo
s looks like a really good bet for that it's ubuntu based so if i really want to
get under the hood that's totally an option but the challenge here is play
games not get your phd in Linux smartassery i on the other hand after a
lot of deliberation decided to go with the daring the
Linux mint with the cinnamon desktop environment as
for how i think that's gonna go honestly i'm pretty confident i've used mint
before i daily drove ubuntu the distro it's based on for about two years back
in school so i'm not scared of figuring out how to install a GPU driver or use a
package manager i'm comfortable getting my hands dirty with grub
but that doesn't mean i'm not a little scared
of you i'm pretty technical and i work in development every day but hardcore Linux
chads are absolutely terrifying
you scare me i really want this to go well
because i still want you to like me when this is all over got my drive ready and
Windows couldn't possibly have picked a more appropriate time to just
bug the crap out it's like it knows what's gonna happen
it won't let me click power
obviously i'm not 100 committed to this yet
so my plan is to remove my existing SSD
from the system it's not a gen 4 drive or anything but
i'm not expecting that to matter i mean what am i going to be doing running
direct storage ah got him okay so this is what happened last time
my desktop kind of you can see where the where it's
supposed to sort of end but it keeps going almost can go over
there so i'm going to right click right below
the the mint logo nothing shows up but
there's the menu if i try to mouse over these i can't select them but if i move
my mouse back to below this m there it is
i found it okay someone knows how to be
right there i was going to see if i can do an easy fix of just
turning off my monitor here to be fair it is not installed yet this is a live
boot environment see if it comes back when i turn that back on
displayport no signal okay i was worried that my Thunderbolt
connection i used Thunderbolt to connect to a dock for my main display was going
to cause problems with the installer because there's no drivers installed or anything so i i hooked up my monitor
that's here in the server closet but
hey there it is just like that my mouse
he no move oh wait where'd it go oh i thought oh wow oh the sensitivity is
just so high that i couldn't tell it was there okay then uh yep that's the one
here we go full name uh yes i just did a quick
restart and turned the side monitor off
and it's fixed to the bounds of the screen and the mouse problem is solved so just
installing directly from the live environment so
i do want the multimedia codex it's nice that mint comes with those not
every distro does i haven't decided which drive to actually put mint on so
i'm not entirely sure where it's installing these media codecs but
it's doing something okay finish the install it wants me to
remove my flash drive
got it and then press enter this is our first login
and we're there check video drivers i
knew i was gonna run into that installing uh mint instead of pop os but that is a
challenge i have decided to undertake it should be okay but we'll see later
i'm gonna go through this welcome manager first order of business is to get our
mouth speed down from over 9000 to something more reasonable that seems
more like it also why the hell is this on by default no obvious indication that
any of my hardware is not working fully
uh even my quantia network card picked up just fine i knew audio was gonna be a
challenge because i don't think the go xlr has any kind of oh this is
interesting output hello
okay it appears to be taking my input right now which is my mic right over
here presumably and turning it into output
blah blah blah yep that's definitely it does this work at least
left front right okay well i've got sound at least i was
looking for a simple way to just list all the hardware connected to the system
so that i could verify if my drivers are installed Linux apparently doesn't
really work like that but i can just install this utility called hard info
not exactly a hardware info substitute but it's a lot better than nothing
of course i don't want to get too deep into the weeds on any of this for now
because the goal today for part one is to pick a distro
get it installed and run a game i will definitely need steam fail to install
steam morning you're trying to remove
the following essential packages what what are you talking about i've
done nothing with this other than install that hard info thing you know
it's hilarious the last time i tried to do anything on ubuntu i ran into this
exact same thing i was told it's super simple you just install it
no you do not this is stupid apparently
this is the solution and i have to type yes do as i say in
order to install it and maybe it will install and launch now
what is the point of having a oh
um hello is my computer just hard reset
what i mean to be clear i've seen some broken
Windows behavior on first install but this is
he's um jim
okay so we've got the the novu or however that's pronounced open source
driver fantastic happy they made that but
we are going to try to move to the proprietary NVIDIA 470 driver
install done just need to restart a few more errors in last time but i think
we're still good genuinely think this is fine yeah nice
okay now Linux mint also has an update manager a new version update manager is
available apply the update it updates and then it finds all the
different updates that we need
pressing the reset button on my computer did not in fact
allow it to come back to life let's try and all the way off and start
again not that i think that will do anything different
from the reset button man if i managed to completely break
this install in 15 minutes that might be a new personal best for me my machine is
not even posting now i have plugged the HDMI cable back in here
let's see what happens hello
hey there we go okay so that's back that's not
my phone battery is only at like six percent but i'm afraid to turn the
camera off now because this ride has been absolutely
wild pretty long oh
hey there we go hello
oh wait what did i manage to completely
nuke my desktop environment like my gui
how just logged in and this is what i got
unto comes with absolutely no warranty
i can see why this was a terrible experience and i
think that's where i'm gonna have to leave it for tonight because i found this other post saying hey yeah i had
this problem this was not easily solvable so i had to
fresh install i don't think i'm going with pop os
again i mean that was you guys were there for the whole thing that was utterly ridiculous
uh continuing to install updates i have turned on my side monitor one minor
issue i can't go over there with my
mouse because my mouse has to go all the way left and then it's over
there so i need to reconfigure the desktops right click doesn't get me
there um so
yeah we'll figure it out you know what no forget it the wife's
still awake so i've got manjaro loaded
up here and we're gonna take another crack at this puppy
to be clear it's entirely possible that i did something completely wrong not
knowing what i was doing and i'm responsible for the os getting bricked i
just also think that with you guys along for the ride the things that i did were
not entirely ridiculous or unreasonable so you can you can be mad at me for
breaking it but just at least acknowledge that it could have happened
to anyone who's not already fully you know well-versed in the black
arts of Linux 3.
okay hold on a second i didn't manage to catch the boot selector prompt
started complaining about usb devices it feels like the old days doesn't it
you know i made a video about our 10 gig
nas using emulax cards
like nine years ago in this very room
a lot of memories in this house mixed feelings on moving
manjaro went straight into the live boot
environment so we're just gonna launch the installer
and good luck everybody i got wine installed through the
software manager i need to get lutress i didn't find lutress in the software
manager so i just went to the lutrus website
followed the command line stuff
and i now have lutress which we'll close
for now and use later the mint software manager had steam
well i selected install it made me put in my password twice
and now it's removing it never stopped trying to do that
removing thing but i just closed the package manager um
clicked onto i'm gonna call start i don't know if it's called start here um
and steam was sitting right there so i launched it
and it seems to be working
so maybe we're fine
okay sweet i'm gonna log in i'll see you on the
other side i just want you guys to be here with me
for the experience so that if i completely explode this one you'll at
least know why maybe you can leave a know-it-all comment
under the video i'm ready i'm ready come at me guys
i'm trying here i'm trying
oh he needs sound anyway
microsoft has a very broken setting situation right now but this is worse
hey is my game controller picked up just like that oh nice look at that why are
the two columns open source and installed
does this mean is this proprietary because that's what i i think i told it
to do x server settings
uh what is x server
x server gonna give it to you what okay all right this seems to do kind of
what we need to do figure this out later let's get steem
let's see if we can get steam i saw something about steam in that
update that made me restart oh it's team runtime hello
we're updating again no problem okay steam installed no problems i'm
going to quickly go to my settings go to
steamplay enable steamplay for all other
titles and then have uh
i guess we'll do proton 6.3-7
and then i'll go to shader precaching and allow background processing of
vulcan shaders okay so we gotta restart steam real quick
i believe ftl has a native Linux version
i'm just gonna install directly and we're gaming on Linux boys
there we go i think i'm
done the first challenge that wasn't really a challenge i suspect we will run
into major challenges down the line library oh yeah oh hey look at that look
at that look at that boom Linux now the game i've been playing recently is cave
story plus is this
is this Linux just like native freaking
let's go boys oh wait my sound still isn't working
yeah i still have no sound honestly i'm kind of willing to live
with that let's just uh
it's on the right and no dice on the controller
even though it was picked up by the system
i guess we need to figure that out now this video ended up a lot longer than i
expected the goal was simple install Linux and run a game and i managed to
screw it up so royally that i'm here hours later still
trying to figure it out this is a native Linux game
let's just
let's just play it and we're gaming
it's running nice and smooth this is a native game so this is really not that
much of a challenge my sound still isn't working still have no idea why that
would be but we're gaming and and it seems to just been a cave story
issue because my controller look is working just fine
i don't i would never attack yeah there you go
hopefully luke had an easier go of it than i did the best part of this whole
thing is that we are just getting started a lot of the games that i want to run like supreme commander forged
alliance appear to have ways to run them discord looks like there's a way to get
it going involves a lot of command line hopefully i won't brick my os
but step two is getting streaming working both luke and i stream we both
need it working if we're gonna run this for a month so uh
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Linus if you guys enjoyed this video you might also enjoy the time i switched to
mac it was kind of a minute ago and some things have definitely changed since
then but it was quite an experience by the way if you've made it this far to
the very end of the video i did in fact figure out what happened with popos for
whatever reason apt-get install steam
um did a whole bunch of other stuff
no idea why it did that i hadn't touched anything and i did not read carefully
what it was doing in my defense a lot of that stuff was jargon that an average
user might not understand and
all i was doing was installing steam i thought this was just stupid hoops i had
to jump through in order to install something from the terminal
um i didn't know it was gonna remove my gui for example
oh