so many trapped in a world they think they can't escape
so many with dread in their hearts as 10
turns to 11. so many unanswered questions
so many to save for some Linux may be the answer they've
been looking for and Windows 11 could be their reason to finally try it
but Anthony you say installing Linux is a complicated and scary process
well here's the thing it's really not
so let's go deeper and see for ourselves how easy it really is perhaps as easy as
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conceptually Linux is very different from Windows pretty much across the
board some of these differences are primarily visual while others are much
more fundamental if you've heard of Linux before you've probably heard that
it's open now evangelists will tell you that that means free is in speech and
this is true in that anyone can take a look at the source code and modify it as
they see fit but what it means in practice is that not only is it able to
support a wide variety of hardware it's also extremely customizable with
desktops that can mimic the look and feel of any existing operating system or
be something entirely unique you get control
not only that you'll hear people say that it breathes new life into old pcs
but why is that the reason is that the open nature of
Linux means that it comes in many different flavors known as distributions
or distros there are distros with lighter or heavier system requirements
dramatically different aesthetics and even different ways of installing
software now here's some good full feature desktop oriented ones if you've
got one that you like best let us know why down below
our example for today is going to be pop os by system 76 which is a good
recommendation for new users not only because it's part of the well-known and
well-documented ubuntu and debian lineage but it's also because it has a
number of features and same defaults that make it friendlier and easier to
get up and running start by downloading the iso now pop comes in two flavors one
that includes the very special NVIDIA driver and one
for everyone else you can use either but it's easiest to
download the iso that best matches your system to reduce the number of steps
required during installation now you could just burn it if you've got an
optical drive and a blank dvd but if like most of us all you've got is a
flash drive you can grab one of a couple of different tools the easiest of which
being balina etcher it's so easy in fact that it's just three steps select the
iso select the flash drive and then click flash for pop os that's all you
need to do but if you've got an image for a different distro for example that fails
to flash this way we look to a more versatile tool like rufus looking at the
main window ignore the persistent partition size
slider for now and look at the partition scheme option
for most people mbr is perfectly fine because it supports both legacy BIOS
boot and UEFI you'll really need to use the advanced
options but the fixes for old BIOS's can help if you've got a very old computer
you're trying to boot for file system you'll almost always
want to choose fat32 now ntfs supports files that are larger than four
gigabytes but it's less compatible overall
you'll also always always want to choose the default cluster size
larger clusters can improve transfer performance for larger files at the
expense of smaller files and vice versa finally you can choose to create an
extended label in icon files which just makes your flash drive show up in a
fancier way on Windows if you fancy like that all that's left
is to click start and wait for it to do its thing if all went well you're now
the proud owner of a flash drive with Linux on it congratulations it's a
penguin time to plug it in and give it a whirl power on your pc and enter the
BIOS we'll need to first make sure the flash drive is shown up
and is first in the boot order and second we need to make sure that secure
boot is disabled otherwise you'll just get this fun
message when you try to boot fedora and ubuntu both support it but as
far as i know every other distro out there including popos does not unless
you do it yourself blame microsoft in most desktop BIOS's
disabling secubit requires the key store to be deleted like this
but laptops all in ones and pre-builts may have a simple toggle save and exit
and you should be booting from your flash drive and you can do it after the
first screen you'll be treated to an impressive looking array of very
technical messages Linux boots up these make troubleshooting a lot easier if it
stops part way through some distros cover them up with a boot screen but you
can usually hit escape to show them again it may take a little while to boot
after the final message so give it a minute before assuming something is going wrong if all goes well you'll be
looking at the popos desktop and an install popos window will come right up
choose your language and region then choose your keyboard layout english us
default will work for most but you can choose alternative layouts here like
dvorak and cola mac next pop os will give you the option of
customizing your install just like lcdstore.com lets you customize your
water bottle with free stickers nice
now if you're super eager to get going you can go through the installer now but
if you'd like to poke around in an environment where you can't break anything now is a great time to do that
by clicking try demo mode this is pretty much the same thing
you're going to get after a default install and it's a great opportunity to
make sure that all your hardware is up and running particularly your audio your
networking and your display driver once you're finished poking around it's
time to come back to the installer a clean install is the most
straightforward so let's go ahead and choose that option choose the drive you want to install to
and then you'll be brought to the account setup screen a username will automatically generate
based on your full name but you can change it if you prefer
click next choose a password then the next step is to install the files once
it's finished reboot and you'll boot right into pop os now if you don't make
sure it's selected as a default boot device in your BIOS it should show up as
pop os like so once you're booted into pop os log in
and you'll be greeted with the post install setup unlike a certain other
operating system this only features a single privacy setting with everything
else being things like typing time zone and how you want your doctor and top
part or looking function i like it best when it's set up like this but you're
not limited to any one layout if you're okay with installing extensions later on
popos uses a common desktop environment called gnome but system 76 76's homebrew
extensions installed here's my layout at home it's kind of a not Windows looking
setup similar to a different desktop environment called plasma depending on
how fresh your iso was pop shop will ping you at this point saying that there
are updates available now this is your app store go ahead and
launch it and click the installed tab to download any updates that are waiting
then you can start to install your apps it's ridiculously easy to do
discord one click obs one click steam
one click needing game performance metrics and
logging grab go relay emulators they've got retroarch dolphin maim dosbox you
never even had to open a browser i hate opening browsers
now that's not to say that the interface is perfect clicking on a category will
just give you an alphabetical listing of software with no sub-categories or
filters which can be overwhelming to say the least when you're just browsing
and advanced users will notice that some under the hood packages aren't listed at
all with no obvious way to change that you can install the synaptic package
manager to get both of those features though the only problem is that it's far less
user friendly thankfully if there's something that you
need that's simply not available at all you can add an extra source in pop shop
settings most software has a launchpad or personal package archive that you can
add there as the name suggests these are curated by the authors or users rather
than the regular operating system maintainers so only use these for
software you trust wine the software that allows you to run
Windows programs on Linux is a good example of this because the version
included in popshop is quite old however the developers have decided to
host their own and provide instructions separately so we'll have to use the
terminal instead now don't worry too much this isn't very
common and because we trust wine we can just copy these commands and paste them
into the terminal like so once you're done go ahead and type this command to
finally install the latest stable version of wine now you can exit the
terminal i also recommend installing wine tricks while we're at it to manage
our Windows settings to be clear you don't need any of this
to run games through steam which launches Windows games through its own
included proton layer after all your installs are done open the applications
drawer and you'll see that they're ready to rock no extra steps required
steam opens right up and you can log in as normal before you go wild installing
games though you should enable proton for all titles under steam play in steam
settings menu click ok steam will restart and you're good to go
cool right like i can just straight up install cyberpunk for example and it'll
work in fact it works really well for a game with a silver rating like it must
have been like a recent update or something i don't know you can check how
well the game is expected to run as well as how it ran in the past
and whether anything special needs to be done to get it working on proton db
the vast majority of games work out of the box although with some caveats we'll
get to shortly but first if you have an NVIDIA GPU
shadow play doesn't exist in Linux and that's a problem
but what if i told you there's a way to get something even better
it's a couple extra steps and we're going to have to use the terminal to do
it but trust me it's very worth it first download the code from the NVIDIA
patch repository and extract the zip file then go to the folder you just extracted
right click the empty space and click open in terminal next type this command
and hit enter this will enable nvfbc or frame buffer capture the extremely fast
method that shadowplay uses to capture the screen and something NVIDIA normally
has disabled for GeForce cards by default that wasn't so hard but we still
had to install the plugin for obs to use unfortunately there's no package for it
in popos or ubuntu right now so we'll have to download it ourselves to be
clear this is one of the last options you want to use as far as installing
software download the code from this repository then extract it go to the
folder and open it into the terminal like before now we need to install some
things before we can actually continue so type this command hit enter enter
your password now type these commands hitting enter after each one and once that's done you
can go back to the files window go to the build folder and copy this file
go to your home folder show hidden files then go here make a new folder called
plugins then in there make new folders that look like this and paste the file
you copied before and you're done Linux veterans will point out that we could
have done a lot of this more quickly if we'd done more of it in the terminal and
that's true the terminal is really handy for a lot of things especially for
tutorials where it's the only truly common factor between Linux
distributions but contrary to popular belief it's not
necessary most of the time it's just faster or easier if you know
what you're doing if you aren't familiar with it using it in short bursts like this can help you
get acclimated and learn what can be done just by typing a few words now we
can go to obs and add the mvfbc source to our scene and look at that high
resolution high frame rate screen capture with very little overhead just
like shadow play if you open up system monitor which is kind of like the
Windows task manager you'll see very little CPU usage you can
combine this with nbang for high performance gameplay streaming and recording too
oh and did i mention that most game controllers just work out of the box the
list of devices that Linux supports is much larger than the list it doesn't and
the majority of those are a result of a company not releasing the driver or at
least not releasing the information relevant for making one from scratch
NVIDIA's much maligned proprietary driver on the other hand works pretty
well and has been getting some serious attention from team green recently with
dlss and ray tracing support and more the pop os comes with the latest drivers
and updates for them come down through the pop shop like everything else
so if installing Linux isn't that big of a
hassle why haven't more people jumped on board
well the main problem at least in the past is that for all the freedom and
control you're getting from Linux you had to give up performance or
functionality or both especially in gaming
but since the release of valve's wine based proton compatibility layer in 2018
things have been exploding to the point where the vast majority of steam games
run flawlessly on Linux with no configuration necessary the biggest
issue for Linux gamers is the fact that many anti-cheat
programs still don't work properly at all meaning that games like pubg apex
legends destiny 2 and rainbow six siege are just presently unplayable despite
working in offline mode this spills over into productivity apps like microsoft
office and creative cloud where their anti-piracy implementations fail to
authenticate thanks to reliance on an integrated internet explorer yeah
disgusting but compatibility is rapidly
advancing so get subscribed so you don't miss our annual ish Linux gaming update
at the end of the day my personal advice is to use the tools
that fit you best whether that's Windows macOS Linux or even something else
entirely and if these compatibility issues are showstoppers for you i'm not
going to wag my finger at you and expect you to find an alternative what i am
going to do though is ask you to give it a try and see if the alternatives work
for you i find immense joy in trying new things
and finding better ways of doing what i like to do and with Linux the sheer number of
different ways of doing things means you're extremely likely to find
something anything at all that works better for you than what you're doing
right now you have only to look for it
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our recent video on how to install Windows 11 to get a sense of how
difficult or not this was by comparison