Co-Pilot, you need to opt out.
Windows update, you will own nothing and be happy.
Ah! Oh, thank goodness it was just a dream.
For a second there, I thought Windows really was getting worse.
It wasn't a dream. Ah! Sorry, I was just scared for my privacy.
I didn't want to sleep in my own bed anymore. What are you doing here?
I heard that Linus was going to save us. Linux, Elijah, not Linus.
He does have a valid concern though. With Microsoft adding more and more bloat
that negatively impacts the user experience and user privacy on Windows,
more people than ever are asking themselves, what can I do?
Well, there's those Windows de-bloating scripts, but those aren't quite the silver bullet
that they're made out to be. And there is Mac, but that's not a great solution for gamers.
That is where Linux comes in. As the rest of the world enchantifies
thanks to the incredible open source community and corporate sponsors like Valve,
Linux just keeps getting better. And I think it's high time
that I try once again to make the switch.
And he's joining me. Hey, Elijah, wake up, let's go.
But tons of games I play don't work on Linux. Sure, but there's thousands of titles that do work.
And besides, it's only a month, that is unless. You discover that you love it so much.
You don't even want to play Fortnite anymore. Maybe the only 90s you'll want to crank
are these 90 degree segues to our sponsor.
The first and possibly biggest hurdle when it comes to embracing that open source life
is the overwhelming number of options. Now, for some folks,
the idea of having so many choices, each catering to a specific user or use case is amazing.
And it is, especially if you love to tinker. But for everyone else,
choice paralysis is a real thing. And with literally dozens of viable options
for Linux distros, not to mention the social pressure that comes from picking the wrong one,
it can be a major turnoff. Last time we did this over four years ago,
I called out how terrible these listicle sites are.
And so did many others in the Linux community. And right out of the gate, I'm a freak.
These are just terrible, terrible options.
I don't expect much from this article. Let's have a look and see if they've improved.
Oh, XDA's article was from less than a month ago, though. And of course, the very first one
is one I haven't even heard of. Nobara Linux, built on Fedora,
quality of life tweaks, controller support out of the box,
POPOS, Fedora's on here.
Open Zusa tumbleweed, catchy OS.
This I've heard of, Endeavor OS, Ubuntu. Good Lord, you've hardly narrowed it down, bud.
Fedora KDE, straight up, that's it. No pros and cons of anything else, just go for it.
Unless you're going handheld, then Bazite. I'd really like a distro I can use across all my devices,
though, so that's AMD, NVIDIA, handheld, and desktop.
Let me see if that happens. POPOS is the easiest. There's shockingly little overlap on these.
I'm on my fourth article now, and three of the six options are ones
that I haven't seen yet. Holo ISO, Geruda Linux, and Manjaro.
Of course, Googling the answer is basically boomer behavior now.
If I wanted to do my thing, and I want to role play as a typical tech-interested gamer
who's looking to make the switch, I gotta fire up chat GPT,
and see what open AI has to say on the subject.
Giving you an essay there? Well, I'm giving it as much information
as I feel it needs to give me a good recommendation. I like to beep.
I want to make the switch to Linux. I have a variety of PCs, each with different needs,
and ideally, I could find a distro that works for all of them.
Recommendation number one, POPOS. Ubuntu LTS with game mode.
Mmm, maybe not the greatest recommendation if it doesn't know what hardware I'm using.
Right, right there, cons. You have to manually install drivers sometimes.
Manjaro comes up again, Fedora. Starts giving me a whole, like,
how-to for some of the systems?
Tips for smooth multi-machine use. Use a single desktop environment,
and the same one across different machines. Bottom line, POPOS.
Ah, I don't know if I'm sure about that. Kinda got burned by them last time.
My approach was to go to Reddit, and I wanted to find someone that fit a similar profile as me,
and I just basically searched for what got the most updates.
But when I narrowed it down to gaming distros, there was really only a handful
that were commonly recommended to me these days. Manjaro, ChimeraOS, CasheOS,
Bazite, and POPExplanationMark underscore OS.
If your preferred flavor wasn't on that list, I promise it doesn't mean that it's bad.
It just means that I didn't come across many recommendations for it. So let's talk about the pros and the cons of those five.
ChimeraOS is cool, but seems to prioritize being more of a console-like experience,
which is not really what I'm going for. And the same goes for SteamOS.
It's still the one that I think is most likely to usher in the year of the Linux desktop,
and Valve has promised to continue chipping away at the desktop experience,
but it's still very much big picture first. Not to mention that the limited hardware support
is gonna be a challenge for, oh, I don't know, 90% of desktop users, including my downstairs PC,
which I'm also migrating this time to ensure that my immersion is complete.
For Manjaro and CasheOS, both based on Arch, by the way,
Manjaro's been around for several years at this point, meaning there's tons of documentation online,
or other independent YouTubers have made videos and guides.
It would make hopefully getting things working nice and easy. CasheOS is relatively new, but because it's new,
it kinda has the same thing. Tons of people are covering it and making guides online about using it.
Both of those could be a bonus for helping me get through this month. Like I mentioned before,
PopOS screwed me over pretty good last time. Though, from my understanding,
that was an insane bug that was present for less than 24 hours,
and I just happened to run up against. In general, it's known to provide
a very friendly experience for new users, and it uses Ubuntu as a base,
which can make it a little easier to find guides and other resources.
Last but not least, there's Bazite, which is explicitly gaming first
and has gained serious momentum over its short three-year history.
Thanks to the baked-in support for HDR and variable refresh rate,
easy integration with non-steam launchers and emulation-friendly features.
It's based on Fedora, which doesn't quite have the same enormous install base as Ubuntu,
but it is still a major distro, meaning, hopefully,
it shouldn't be too hard to find support again. On the subject of support,
there's no real reason that Elijah and I would have to figure
any of this out on our own. We could easily use our industry contacts
to get help with everything from choosing a distro to even getting a bug fix implemented in real time.
But to me, that kind of ruins the spirit of the challenge.
I mean, it's not like the average person would be able to contact Linus Torvalds
for help recompiling the kernel, you know? With all of that in mind, I'm going with Bazite,
specifically the KDE desktop environment. One, it's the cool new kid on the block.
Two, Bazite's documentation seemed slightly easier to parse through,
which for me is a huge W. And three, while it might be
a little bit more limiting than CacheOS, which several people warned me about,
those same people did tell me that it was a little bit easier for a first-timer.
I think I'm gonna take that trade off. Now, some of you may remember from my AMD upgrade two years ago,
I actually installed PopOS at the end. Spoiler alert, I haven't been using it.
I had an issue with my GoXLR, and I spent way too long trying to figure it out
that I ended up defaulting back to Windows 11. It's also worth mentioning
that I'm only going to be swapping over my gaming PC to Linux, not my streaming PC.
I can't afford to have any issues with that, and right now it just works.
And besides, all I hit is go live anyways. But who knows, if this goes well,
maybe I'll be considering swapping that one over. I, on the other hand, will be converting all of my PCs,
which means that I need something that's compatible with both GeForce and Radeon GPUs.
I will be converting all of my PCs to,
yeah, that's where the script ends. I have to actually decide now.
I'm going with PopOS. Just because it blew up on me once
doesn't mean it'll blow up on me. I'm gonna follow ChatGPT's recommendation here.
I'm gonna start with one machine, get everything going the way that I want it,
and then assuming that that goes well, I'm gonna stick with PopOS.
Okay, so who nailed this? ChatGPC got the way I was already leaning.
PopOS was the first recommendation from InterServer,
whatever this is. NVIDIA drivers handled cleanly.
Okay, PopOS. Drive me, daddy.
What, you guys started without me?
My side of this challenge probably won't be quite as bad as Linux's,
since I've been using Arch on my laptop for a while now,
by the way, and I've gotten pretty comfortable with it. That being said, my use case on my laptop is fairly limited,
so this is an expansion forward. I'm in, and I'm going with CacheOS.
The whole reason why I've been running Arch on my laptop was to try to demystify and defang
the scary experience of Linux for some people, because I wanted to show like,
look, I'm gonna put very little effort into this, to be completely honest, and I expect it's mostly gonna go okay.
But the reason for that was because my experience was limited mostly to a browser.
So I kind of want to continue the Arch experiments,
but in a way that the community is mostly flagging right now as better for gaming,
which is going the cache-y direction. I still love Linux Mint,
still use it in a couple spots here or there, just because I find it so like,
easy to get set up and going. But I know there were some comments under last challenge about my choice of Linux Mint,
or like, oh, it's not as updated as other things, or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
because the Linux community loves to just scream about stuff all the time. I wouldn't dissuade you from choosing it.
I'm just kind of doing an experiment thing with Arch and enjoying it right now.
So I'm gonna continue on to cache-y OS and hopefully it goes fine.
It is 803 and I am just about to start my Bazite installation.
Here we go, insert. Oh wait, crap, I gotta put the SSD in.
But I got, hey, you guys like my new server rack? Ah, it's pretty cool.
And Linus made fun of me saying I'd never see it again in the server rack case.
Now, some of you might actually ask why I'm ripping out both of my drives in my computer,
when Windows is probably only installed on one. Well, one thing I won't miss about Windows
is there's this really weird bug. Sometimes when you rip out one drive,
after you've installed it with two in it, it will show up in the boot option in the BIOS,
but it will just fail to boot. I don't know how that is still a bug on Windows 11,
but hey, I won't have to deal with that with Bazite, hopefully.
I have cache-y OS on this flash drive ready to go.
But I ran into a problem. My motherboard has an m.2 slot here,
and m.2 slot here, here, and here. But I didn't build my system.
I don't know where my current drive is installed. It should be installed here,
but it was built by Linus's kid, so I have no idea. And my problem is, that's my system.
This is the Bulbasaur PC, right? Getting to the m.2s behind this GPU is gonna be insane.
Like, doing that without completely joining my computer is not really possible.
So hopefully I can remove this one little strip, and there's no drive there, and everything will be fine.
But if there is a drive there, I'm screwed. For no reason, other than that I'm a sucker for punishment,
I've decided to do my upgrade to popOS here at Whale Land.
I just gotta unplug my boot drive. I treated myself to an Optane drive a little while back,
and I just gotta disable secure boot, and then hopefully this is gonna be completely painless,
and I'll be gaming in like 15 minutes.
And we're off to a great start. Select your drive, can't see it.
Well, I put it in a known good slot. Turns out the drive is bad.
Why are these challenges always cursed? Downside of a multi-monitor setup,
this is my primary monitor, so we're trying to boot into the BIOS right now.
So we're gonna go into Fedora. Verifying shim s-bate date failed.
Something has gone seriously wrong. I've done nothing.
Okay, I think I saw something related to secure boot. It is enabled.
I'm gonna try disabling it. This OS version workstation,
it's past its end of life date. What? I downloaded it fresh from Bazite's website today.
That's a scary warning. So I did take this drive from the office.
I wonder if that's why it's showing up as LTT. Maybe I did happen to grab a drive
from work that had Fedora. I won't mark that against Bazite,
then that was 100% on me. Okay, we're booting up again.
Hey, there we go. Okay, Bazite. Yes, we wanna go into Live ISO
just so I can do the install. Hey, there you go, little Bazite logo.
Oh, this monitor lit up. Hey, there we go. Welcome to the Live ISO for Bazite.
How would you like to install? Oh yeah, so the drive I did grab had Fedora on it.
I wonder if this was the drive I used in the Linus Torvalds video.
Erase data and install. I will say, I think the default background's really pretty.
I might actually keep that. Kind of matches the keyboard colors, you know? While I'm waiting for an install,
I might as well do a merch plug. LTTstore.com, oh God, I punched my other camera.
LTTstore.com. All right, no drive under there.
You can see an empty slot. They didn't decorate over the screws.
W Linus' kids. Gamer time.
Welcome to Cash EOS. I used Rufus to flash my drive.
I got the M.2 installed and now we're here. So far the hardest part was getting it
to boot to the flash drive. I've been super interested in trying Hyperland,
but I think I'm gonna keep that for maybe something
on my laptop or something that I'm more happy
to just play with. You know, try to keep pretty much everything the same as what I'm used to except for Cash EOS
and just see how it goes. You know what, call in an audible. Let's give it a shot.
Lemonade or how I first read it
with my broken brain is Lamline. Sounds cool, looks cool.
Gonna go with Grubb, I'm just used to it. We're in, everything seems okay so far.
I wonder how many times Linus' brick is installed. All right, now that I have a working drive,
this is great, prompted to set up encryption right out of the gate.
You'll love to see it. Pretty painless setup so far.
Don't need this. This looks fine.
We're in, now I gotta play a game. Oh, hey, there you go, a secure boot key added.
Okay, well let's do a reboot. I assume I just leave it on Fedora.
What the frackle is this?
Do I have to do the secure boot thing? Try this again, error.
You need to load the kernel first. Okay, maybe I should read the documentation.
That's the error I was getting, so we're gonna use method B. Disable secure boot in the BIOS before proceeding
and then re-enable it after enrolling the key. I have to enter a command in the host terminal?
Ugh, did I mess this up? You know what, I'm gonna try reinstalling it
with secure boot enabled this time. And, I don't wanna do that.
That takes so long. Okay, well let's try reinstalling Bazite from the beginning
with secure boot on this time and we'll see if something's different.
All right, I've reinstalled it. Documentation says to reboot, enroll the keys.
Yes, it's just universal blue. I think I enabled it.
Hey, there you go. I feel like I just went in a circle, but we'll let it cook.
Hey, we're in. Okay, it did detect all three.
I kinda have a weird one that's off to the side here so I can like monitor chat when I do other stuff.
Oh, okay, not right now, Steam. That's kinda cool, got Steam pre-installed.
That'll be nice. Maybe I'll get a game up and running like real quick. All right, here comes the point where we tripped up last time.
Well, that was painless. I'm almost there, but before I can game with this man,
I'm gonna need voice chat. So, we're getting Discord going.
I already got Left 4 Dead 2 installed. Already, there's some slightly icky things.
I have Discord working, which is super cool.
Really? All right, I'm ready to launch the game.
What is this? What is this? The Linux curse might be coming for me.
Wait, it magically healed itself. Magically healed itself. Well, this is messed up.
I've got my Discord volume at 200%. I've got Luke's individual user volume at 170%.
And I've got my system volume at 150%. And I can barely hear anybody.
No, it's not you guys, it's me. I'm just experiencing Linux things.
But hey, it could be worse. I could be that guy at a LAN
who's not running his game in full screen. Sup, Rob? All right, just rebooted and no game volume whatsoever.
What about like a YouTube video? Okay, okay, that's loud.
That's loud, that's a good sign. That is so bizarre. Okay, let's see if Discord is solved.
If Discord's solved, we're good. And then Discord maybe just magically healed itself?
What's up gamers? Oh, we're good. So did your audio just require a restart?
It's complicated. My system was set to like spit if out. So obviously that was why I was getting no audio in game.
But that doesn't explain why I was getting extremely low audio in Discord.
Yeah, that's strange. It's that problem of like, why isn't this working?
And then why is this working? Yeah, I'd rather have why isn't it working
than why is it working? Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, why did that change it?
Whoa, do you see that? Since I have a dual PC setup in my server rack,
this is my streaming PC that records. I was actually getting ready to record
and it's not quite scaled correct.
Like you can see I'm missing like half my task bar.
That was not a scaling thing. This monitor is not 4K. So I'm a little confused on why it's showing 4K as an option.
I do normally set to 120 Hertz though. Oh, it made everything.
Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, why did that change it? Whoa, do you see that?
It's scaled properly. But you know what scaled it properly
is adjusting the frame rate. If I go to 140 on my OBS capture,
it's not scaled right. But if I change it to 120 and apply it,
now it's scaled appropriately. Like my scaling is the same.
My resolution is the same. Now that I've got these displays configured,
Steam looked like it was already installing. So let's double check that.
Dude, are we gonna get a game going like that?
I know it's not compatible. I'm still gonna download it because I want to try it.
I won't blame any Bazite or Linux for it not working,
but it's one of my go-to games right now. I need to test if PUBG is gonna work.
Do I need to enable the proton compatibility later?
Hey, it's enabled right away. Oh yeah, look, it like installed it right here.
I guess while that's installing, maybe I can get some other apps going here.
Discord, hey, there it is. Oh, Discord is high risk. This app uses legacy x11 windowing system,
which allows it to record all keystrokes, captures. It also has access to the internet,
meaning it could send your data to outside parties.
Ooh, this is very timely. Well, I need Discord, so I'm installing it.
That warning as scary as it probably seems to a lot of people. I think it is kind of a cool thing
that they're letting you know that it might be risky.
So if you're a non-experience user going to download something,
it could give you a heads up like, whoa, whoa, whoa, just so you're aware, for Discord,
we already know they're stealing all our data anyways. I don't know.
Whoa, you can download Edge? Holy cow, you gotta be a psychopath.
High risk. Let's go through audio while everything's
installing really quick. It's showing up is huge.
I hear the mic is going directly to the roadcaster and the roadcaster should just pass out.
Hey, it's being detected. Wow, that was really fast, really?
I'm gonna call my wife really quick. Hello, hello.
Yes, I can hear you. I didn't have to configure anything. That's a lot easier than I thought it was going to be,
but hey, the fact that I didn't have to troubleshoot it makes me very happy.
Just installed it, instantly installed OBS.
I had to restart my roadcaster, but then it worked immediately.
We'll see if the audio is fine. Seems like the audio was fine. Off to bigger and better things,
so I'm gonna get Teams installed here because I need to do a work call.
Well, the Teams call went fine, sort of. The Teams is still a very annoying experience
on Linux regardless of what Linux flavor you go with.
There's no official app. I was using the Teams for Linux open source community thing.
It's like fine. There's some cludginess here and there.
It seems like most of the community agrees that the best way to do it these days
is to just run it through the browser entirely, which I really don't prefer,
but I'm gonna keep fighting with Teams for Linux and see if I can get it working in a state that I would like.
I would say with the install it real quick, I've signed in and it works perfectly.
No, not quite, but at least they're doing it.
Not like Microsoft supporting it, so I appreciate the effort.
Another thing that I'd say is that gaming has been perfectly fine so far.
I'd say this fire is working, is working no problem.
Gaming so far, going okay. No major hiccups with anything as of right now,
but I'll let you know if things change. Well, Control-Alt-Delete doesn't do anything.
Alt-Tab allows me to switch to things,
but my mouse is not there. Like I'm hearing like,
gree, gree, gree, gree, gree, like in my ears. This is so awesome.
I managed to play a game for 20 seconds. I must just be cursed.
Like I just, I have to be cursed at this point. Okay, I managed to find this.
I'm gonna try to end the process, Half-Life 2, I think.
Is this, hello? Delet? Is that not gonna work?
It's not gonna do anything?
Yeah, I have seven people waiting for me because I'm a special Linux snowflake right now.
I don't understand why trying to do the most
basicest of things, launch a Valve game
on a fresh install, manages to be like this.
I'm even on AMD, guys. I'm on AMD. I'm going back to Windows for now
because this is just, it's not acceptable. I have to be able to play the game right now.
Okay, the last thing now, I think, I'm just gonna game.
Ooh, it's got a Borked rating. As of two weeks ago, someone said it's Borked.
So, yikes. I won't blame any Bazite or Linux for it not working.
Judging by how long it's taking, that's not a good sign.
Ah, a month without PUBG. Ah.
Okay, well, let's launch Bellatro. Hey, there we go.
All right, we finished the round, it's the next day and I'm gonna see if I can figure out
what the heck was going on there. Off to a great start.
All right, I'm just playing single player now. Let's see how this goes.
All right, this is how far I made it last time.
Try running it in Vulcan. Unfortunately, there's no in-game setting for it,
but apparently this will do the trick.
And there it is, that was the fix. Not complicated, but definitely frustrating
when you consider that this is a first-party Valve title and the bugginess is so immediately apparent
when you try to play the game. And there's also apparently been an issue since
at least July of last year. To be clear, none of this is meant to discount
the experiences that other people have. It's just to also acknowledge that not everybody has
such a seamless experience. With Left 4 Dead solved, our next challenge
is gonna be Hell Divers 2. We're gonna be playing with the VIPs I've never played before,
so I am finding so much weird stuff, dude.
It like turned into two black Windows that then turned into this.
Oh, whoa, check this out. Why am I cursed like this?
Opening cinematic played okay, and this looks promising other than the weird white line that I have
at the left and top for some reason.
Is the mouse supposed to do anything? It's supposed to do something.
Hold on, here's an idea. Okay, so look up, we can rebind that.
Let's go left click.
Okay, hey, controller works. I guess I'm gaming on a controller, boys.
So I'm gonna install Dolphin. Oh, wait, Dolphin's the name of the file manager, right?
Oh, speaking of files, I should try to mount my network share.
So network, shared folders, SMB. Oh, dude, is it gonna find it for me?
Whoa, it found it for me. Hell yeah, ad, can I pin them to the side?
Oh, I can. Oh, that's kinda nice. That was really easy to mount my network share.
And these are SMB set as default app.
Hey, there you go, hey, I set VLC as a default app. I'm feeling pretty decent right now.
I have my audio working, I have a game running,
I have my SMB share mounted. The most painful roadblock was by far
like getting it to this point. A quick recap on what happened with the secure boot thing
was I turned secure boot off because I thought that's what it needed when the Fedora drive
that I accidentally grabbed from work was asking for it. Then when I installed Bazite, it was,
hey, turn secure boot on, I don't have it on, I have your key, but after I installed it,
I think I might have gotten a little bit confused or chose the wrong thing when it asked me to enroll it.
I needed to make sure that secure boot was on first
and now that it was on when I installed it, it was pretty painless.
I do think it's a little weird that they still wanted me to type universal blue when I was enabling the keys.
I'm not really sure why. I do wonder how much it'll help me in the future
if there's a software or a game that requires secure boot.
I wonder if Linus is gonna have as smooth of a time
or if his is gonna be a little bit worse.
Well, this is remarkable. I'm up to three steam Windows now.
Nope, can't type. After I figured out the control issues, we did manage to get through the entire
Helldivers mission with no further complications. So while I wouldn't call today a success,
it also wasn't a complete failure. And I think I'm ready to do a little bit more Googling,
learn a bit more, figure out what the heck is going on with my steam interface here.
Now it is worth noting that while I am obviously showing a lot of the problems I'm having today,
I'm not trying to make Linux look bad or anything. And there were aspects of the experience
that were much better. For instance, setting up PopOS
involved none of my data being given away. And maybe more importantly,
if you don't like futzing about with things, is I had to do nothing to get all of my various devices
working, no going to the manufacturer's website, downloading drivers, none of that nonsense.
The convenience of the Cosmic Store and it being something I might actually wanna use
unlike the Windows Store, pretty nice. And so far, I've gotta give it credit
for being pretty darn intuitive other than maybe the pressing the power button
to reach my settings. That has like Windows 95 per-her-you-press-start-to-shut-down
kind of energy. With all that said, I'm excited about the next month and I hope you guys are excited to come along with us
and excited to hear about our sponsor. If you guys enjoyed this video,
why not check out the first episode of the last Linux challenge.
Some stuff is kind of the same in that I seem to be cursed,
but other stuff is different. I did get Papa West installed this time.
How are we framed? Is it? It doesn't look straight. I mean, that's probably the straightest thing
about what's going on right now though. Ha ha ha ha.
Are you going to Eep into Box? What are you doing? Penini, were you in the shot the whole time?
Penini. The Honkers Railway?
Oh, it's that Tonkai Star Rail.