Okay bois now that you hopefully watched the video. I have a few things to say about it.
Recommending Pop_OS! and Manjaro to newcomers seems almost stupid.
I don’t have a lot to say about Pop_OS! than that it is a Ubuntu with smoother animations.
Manjaro on the other hand was always a mess when I tried it. Always breaking for different reasons. Last time i tried it was a year ago and i hope they have made some progress as they will get attention now and I am expecting even more threads with people having a broken Manjaro setup in the near future.
Rest of the content was kinda ok but the recommendation to run any command on the internet and it will all be fine is just stupid. Also not to mention neither Pop_OS! or Manjaro to my knowledge have some kind of system restoration functions enabled by default.
to be fare this is a gaming video not a general purpose video in which case if you lose everything and have to reinstall no big deal. just wasted download time. ( should be using a separate drive for games anyways.) i have no real big issue with the recommended OS’s at least they did not recommend steam OS.
but it does give some light to the plebs who have no clue so over all good on them.
yeah I get your point but I feel like recommending to run every terminal command without knowing what it does is stupid without explaining what could happen and how to fix it if it happens.
Been running Manjaro forever now. Not one breakage that wasn’t my fault.
They also have posts on their forum for widespread issues. Anyone running a rolling release should be keeping up with news like that otherwise you’re just asking for problems.
Pop is actually pretty nice and is used on laptops that run Linux with official support so I don’t see a problem there either.
My honest recommendation to a new user however would have to be Linux Mint. Even in gaming scenarios.
I forgot to touch on that. Rolling release to a new linux user is just unreasonable. Even if the system is 100% stable packages break now and then and they will have a bad mouth taste after using it.
My problems were mainly with nvidia drivers and stability on manjaro. Tried it like 5 times, each time got rid of it in the first month.
It isn’t as unreasonable as it may seem. Windows 10 users keep in touch with upcoming updates. Anyone running Linux or trying it should already have a background in that department. I wouldn’t expect someone that doesn’t keep in touch with these things already to have much of an interest in trying Linux.
MHWD is actually really good with drivers. It really automates the process on Manjaro. I have a GTX 970 in my desktop and tend to use Manjaro off and on. As for my laptop, it has a 960m and all has been well with my install for years now with the occasional reinstall for the sake of keeping things clean. I’m not saying it’s absent of issues. That would be ignorant. I’m simply saying I’ve yet to have problems.
Complaining about what distro a new linux ‘gamer’ gets recommended also seems stupid tbh. I understand why both were recommended and I dont see why we should be here gatekeeping because we dont like the recommendation. They’re trying to bring attention to gaming on linux which needs all the help it can get. Neither of those options are bad ideas.
Is it what I would tell a gamer to install? no. fedora mustard rice
TBH, if gaming with AMD hardware on Linux, you pretty much want a rolling distro, in order to always be running a recent kernel. If the decision is between constantly updating the kernel manually, or in reinstalling a rolling distro periodically, due to its perceived greater fragility, I’d rather take the risk of needing to reinstall once in a while. Installing has become trivial, so long as you have a sensible disk partitioning scheme.
Granted, when I tried to install Manjaro about 18 months ago, it was an absolute circus. But, when I installed it +/- 4 months ago it couldn’t have gone smoother. Pop is just another Ubuntu derivative and like Mint, or Ubuntu, itself, it’s easy to recommend to a newcomer due to their large and somewhat more welcoming communities.
Most folks that I talk to who are Linux curious, don’t know how to select a distro and they become overwhelmed with the options. They get paralysed in their inertia, for fear of making the wrong decision. I don’t see a problem with making a distro suggestion to such folks, because the most important thing is that they get some Linux experience. Until they get experience, they have no basis from which to make an informed decision as to what they like, or don’t like.
I have to agree with the OP about executing arbitrary commands, whether on, or off the 'net. As they say, with great power, comes great responsibility!
I felt like they did a good job with the video. They did mention stability and compatibility being an issue still and I dont think they went into enough detail about it but overall I dont feel like they said anything of the things you just did.
I agree, in the pro linux/anti MS crowd, there can be some dubious claims and communal sniffing of each others farts, but man… you’ve got some hate pent up in you on that topic.
Is it just me or did they change the thumbnail for the video? I swore it had the words “enlightened linux gamer” and “microsoft shareholder” on it before.
They bring up a good point though, and microsoft should begin thinking about their strategy because of stadia, if it takes off that is. I still have my doubts about that getting anywhere.
I don’t think microsoft has any cause to be very afraid.
Why?
they have a massive share of cloud computing
they are raking it in with office 365 subscriptions and Azure.
if you’re on linux, chances are you will need to interact with people running office 365 at some point anyway, and will likely be a 365 customer (either paid for by you, or paid for by work) anyway. And that way it is a reliable income stream. Not a copy of Windows every 10 years, but 10 bucks plus, per month.
The client OS is a commodity, and it wouldn’t surprise me if MS are deliberately fucking with the Windows 10 user base to experiment with just how bad the stockholm syndrome is. Apps are where the money is, client OS is becoming irrelevant.
They simply don’t need you to run client OS Windows to be a customer any more - and the money Windows client OS brings in, is insignificant.
edit:
re: compatibility
occasionally i have had better luck running old games in WINE either on Linux or MacOS than i have natively in Windows 10 - so Windows is definitely not perfect there either.
Come on, this is how nearly everyone got their start. I never had any issues and it probably took me a couple years of pasting commands before I started to really have any idea how to manipulate a system via the terminal. It’s a perfectly appropriate way for a casual user to learn. If you started to lecture me about system architecture and C shell and all that stuff, my eyes would roll to the back of my head and I’d turn around and leave. If you said “paste this line and Steam will install”, well, different story altogether.
That’s not what they said. What they said was that provided you are following the instructions of a reputable piece of software, you will probably be OK. Which is true.
So I’ve been running a gaming rig on manjaro for about… 4 months now? It’s mostly fine. The updates can be harrowing and I can imagine a new user can brick their system.
Actually one really easy way to brick manjaro is to install the nividia driver before any system updates. That’s a great way to get a big black nothing on Manjaro.
It’s slighty the bleeding side of bleeding edge. But boy howdy is is updated fast.
I really didn’t know what to think about Pop!_OS. I have been running it for several months as well for that same video (sooooon). And wow, they have much more sane defaults, I think, for the pragmatist.
I worry about Stallman’s “deal with the devil” that both Manjaro and Pop!_OS are making on behalf of the user without really telling them but… we’ll deal with that another day.
I could see recommending manjaro for our audience, tbh, because the experience was that good. If manjaro had an easy ‘go back to 20 minutes ago’ button… it’d be totally fine for new users and they could much more easily learn something
I worry about Stallman’s “deal with the devil” that both Manjaro and Pop!_OS are making on behalf of the user without really telling them but… we’ll deal with that another day.
Three things about that…
First, it’s kinda moot when you’re talking about gamers, which this video did. Until games are Free Software, gamers aren’t interested in the types of freedom Stallman’s talking about.
Secondly, Richard’s point really was about install fests. People who go to GNU+Linux install fests generally do care about freedom and privacy, but installing proprietary things without wearing your devil costume confuses the issue.
Finally, we’ve been “dealing with that another day” since 1985.
To tack onto this, I was originally running Kubuntu for a couple months and then switched to Manjaro, and I’ve actually had a much better experience on Manjaro. I coudn’t ever get Kubuntu to install newer display drivers without just ending up with a black screen, and updating the kernel past 4.18 gave me artifacts in my display. Manjaro solved both these things out of the box. I’ve had one thing break via an update since…December, and all I had to do was roll-back a GLX package.
I couldn’t be happier with it, plus all the packages in the AUR make the quality of everyday usage much better. Instead of trying to install packages every which way, some as AppImages that never update, some compiled on my local machine, some from ppas and the package manager, and some as .deb files, I can just run over to the AUR and download the PKGBUILD file, give it a quick once over, and it’s all set. It’s so much easier to manage. Installing software on Ubuntu is just a total nightmare.
Overall, I’m head over heels for Manjaro, and I have nothing but excellent things to say about it. I think the tales of its perils are greatly overstated.
