DankPods just switched to Linux!!!

Some of my fav quotes:
"Ads in an operating system that you've paid for from a company that owns ridiculous amounts of money is so offensive."
"data, it's like the new gold to people"
"I got the confidence to really jump into Linux after the Steam Deck."
regarding the terminal] "You just see text going across the screen, they're working at lightning speeds."
"I'm kissing convenience goodbye, I just want control."
- “I’m kissing convenience goodbye, I just want control."
  He is in for a surprise when he realizes GNU/Linux is much more convenient than Winblows.
  
  Arguable
  
  It’s as complicated as you make it to be, and that’s gonna vary WILDLY per person lmao
  
  I'd argue this is a wash. Linux is more convenient in many ways but Windows is in others.
- “I got the confidence to really jump into Linux after the Steam Deck.”
  I offered my son (16) to get him an "office" computer for his room so he can do homework and emails and junk. He said he felt so comfortable with Linux because of the Steam Deck and we could instead just get a nicer monitor and a docking station and he will use the Deck as a gaming machine AND office workstation whenever our main computer (also Linux) is busy
  
  I think it should be really clear to everyone now that the Steam Deck is exactly the kind of thing that Linux needs: nice hardware with a well-integrated OS that is designed to be user-friendly and has some guardrails to prevent you from breaking it.

Damn who imagined that gaming would be the topic that made the FOSS OSes relevant. I don't agree on all that steam does but, they really nail it with the Steam deck and Steam Os.
A lot of people have steam deck and it helps realize that GNU/Linux is an amazing OS.
On the other hand Microsoft and Apple are doing their best to try to give more reasons to switch.
- Damn who imagined that gaming would be the topic that made the FOSS OSes relevant.
  Frankly, that's been obvious for a pretty long time now. I've been hearing "but I need Windows for gaming" as people's primary excuse for not switching since literally two decades ago.
- Gaming has been the only pathway to mainstream desktop since forever. I've been around for a hot minute and I remember that consistently, the "real Linux users" for years repeated "we don't need gaming this is an adult OS go back to Windows and play with your toys" and then turned around and whined that no one wanted to use desktop Linux. Valve stepped in and casually created the year of the Linux desktop as a side-effect of just wanting an escape hatch for their business model. Now the casuals and elitists alike will have a better experience via the magic of Marketshare, and all it really took is not listening to people that don't know what's good for them.
  
  What do you mean by an escape hatch. Valve have been messing with hardware and Linux for way longer than the Steam Deck.
- it's a very successful rebrand. people Ive talked to hate linux as a concept but will use a deck
- always has been. the one complaint ive always heard for linux is that it didnt run games and photoshop.
  most games run now, and photoshop is workable on wine if you are not a professional.
  
  Adobe's licensing model is also a paper sack of hot liquid shit. If you're gonna switch to an alternative it might as well work on Linux.
- It actually feels like in a few years, the year of the linux desktop will become real. Not even joking.

the Steam Deck effect.

Funny how he praises immutable Arch + KDE and then uses Ubuntu (Snaps, broken packages, themed GNOME, not immutable)
I hope he finds his way to Bazzite, Aurora or plain Kinoite, as this would suit him way better
- I'm thinking he might be happier with Noridian, ZephyrOS, Sylvanix, or AetherForge.
  I myself have been trying neoNova, specTRAos, and VortexLinux and they're all pretty good.
  ...
  All of these are made up, I think, I just can't cope with everybody and their dog still rolling their own distros (and alternatives to GNOME 3, thank goodness for KDE), even after 25 years of observing it happen over and over again.
  
  I'm saving your comment to name the next seven distros I make
  
  Those are so legit sounding I didn’t even realise until the second part of your comment those weren’t real.
  Granted, I just slap kubuntu on everything because I’m used to managing ubuntu servers and like kde, so my distro knowledge is limited, but still
  
  They had us in the first half, not gonna lie
  
  Those are not individual random 3rd party distros.
  Please read up on that stuff first. I understand how oldschool users find this odd.
  Fedora is the base distro. Legally restricted, not being able to preinstall crucial components. They also do a bunch of annoying opinionated decisions, like Fedora Flatpaks or Toolbx instead of Distrobox.
  Fedora Kinoite: the immutable image of Fedora + KDE Plasma. Very barebones, not really user friendly out of the box, but a great distro. As an advanced user I use it daily.
  uBlue Bazzite and Aurora: take Fedora Atomic desktops, make them compatible with NVIDIA, ASUS, Surface and more. Add a ton of packages, many call that bloat, but it makes stuff work out of the box.
  (Btw. great Distro names :D)
  
  Zephyr is an actual operating system, but it's not Linux
  
  Not all made up though. I've been following this one's mailing list for a while https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zephyr_%28operating_system%29
- He wasn't praising immutable systems, arch, or KDE. He was praising a Linux OS maintained by Valve. Many people, especially those not familiar with Linux, simply want to use a distro made by Valve regardless of the technical details.
  
  What? No. He
  Wanted to configure stuff in a GUI (i.e. KDE, OpenSUSE with YaST does also a ton but often duplicated and distro-specific) and avoid needing the terminal for everything. GNOME is extreme here, as the settings are so restricted.
  Wanted to be restricted in the ability to break his system. This is extreme on SteamOS, but just as stable on other systems like Fedoras Atomic Desktops
  Those were pretty much literally the things he said
- It's all discovery takes a while to realise what you want from a distro. Fully agree the the ublue projects sounded exactly what they wanted
  
  I hopped a ton. Mint, Manjaro, MX Linux, Kubuntu, KDE Neon, Fedora KDE, Fedora Kinoite. Happy landing, and hopping was not fun, it simply was broken all the time.
- I'd been meaning to try out atomic distros. I'm not an expert on Linux by any means but I've been using it on-and-off for about 25 years, and exclusively (at home, at least) for about 7. So I'm a bit more than a noob.
  I do worry if I'd feel restricted inside of an atomic distro. Might throw kininite on a laptop I've been meaning to give to my kid, tho.
  
  So...
  Concept of OSTree or image-based
  In theory "immutable distros" are safer to use. Not easier, but setting up stuff is less hard than fixing a system that doesnt boot or upgrade.
  I am only focussing on Fedora Atomic desktops, which use OSTree (which is a version control system like git, but for binaries) and in the future/currently in parallel bootable OCI containers.
  Both technologies have the same purpose, that your system is an exact bit-by-bit clone of the upstream system.
  Layering
  Now the system needs to have support for modding, doesnt it? Android doesnt, ChromeOS doesnt, I think SteamOS also doesnt? But this is Desktop Linux!
  While many distros use flawed and incomplete concepts, lacking an "escape path" (reset) back to normal (100% upstream with no changes) (for example OpenSUSE microOS, VanillaOS etc), all such distros allow you to change the system.
  The disadvantage of image-based is, that you always base of the unchanged image and then add your changes. On every update, you pull down the changes, open that thing up, throw in your changes, pack it again. This takes time and wouldnt be sustainable for example when using a phone.
  So you kinda need custom images like uBlue. The advantage here is, that all changes are done on a single system and all clients just clone that. Fedora for exmample has notorious issues with an understaffed rpmfusion team and problems in coordination, so you might get sync issues and a critical security update doesnt work because of a random other package conflict.
  or you might get a regression, uBlue could centrally roll that back.
  Apps
  Tbh the biggest issue is with edge cases of Flatpaks, like portals.
  I just now needed to create a signature containing an image in thunderbird. The solution is to copy that image to the internal ~/.var/app/org.mozilla.thunderbird/ container and paste the exact file path there, as portals are broken after app restart.
  Then adding an HTML as signature, it needs to be saved in the same folder and also linked exactly.
  These edge cases are issues. Let alone missing hardware key support, no filesystem sandboxing in Firefox Flatpak (and uBlue and Fedora people think that is fine) or outdated target systems, because Flatpak needs to work on Debian 11 e.g.
  There are also apps on Flathub that are broken, like QGis, or missing apps like RStudio, both known FOSS alternatives to stuff that people really use, and I couldnt even run those without Distrobox, which is also not preinstalled on Fedora Atomic Desktops, and toolbx lacks basic features like separated homedirs.
  Yup, it is a rough field. But the stability is worth it. Also, official Flatpaks are great.

'I'm turning into a penguin'
Good onya mate!

I never heard of this project before but I just looked it up and it looks like it's about vintage MP3 player upgrading? Anyways nice to see more people, especially ones with niche jobs like this one, switching. Linux is slowly becoming a pretty major thing.
- It is actually just an aussie looking at weird audio stuff. He started off with upgrading old Ipods but now he just does whatever he wants.
- I like his other channels for drums / drum history (Drum Thing) and cars (Garbage Time), but notably the main DankPods channel has 1.65 million subs which could bring a load of new people's attention to Linux.
  
  I just checked his video about switching to Linux and I'd say it's going to scare most potential users away more than attract them. His use case is extremely specific and even kinda creepy for a not savvy person.

Their rough new user experience is concerning though. From what they described I suspect many of their "problems" are not actually "real", but it doesn't really matter because they still ended up in a scenario where they thought there were problems. How did they end up thinking that everything must be done with terminal while using Ubuntu? I know in the last ~10 years there's been a big focus on the new user experience, so what more can be done to prevent this? My gut says there are too many online resources that are confusing new users when they try to onboard themselves - especially resources that are old, written for other distros, or written for people who just want to find the command they can copy-paste to do something.
- How did they end up thinking that everything must be done with terminal while using Ubuntu?
  When asking for help in a Linux sub/forum/community, the answer will generally use the terminal because it works across desktops and even distros. It's a lot easier to give one or two commands than it is to work out what distro, what desktop, and what settings the querier has, then describe the steps necessary in that particular GUI.
  This may lead to the impression that the terminal is required for day to day use of Linux.
  
  Maybe it needs to be more obvious that there are many ways to do things in Linux, and give new users a short "learning to learn" primer on how things operate differently in Linux-land, and where/how to look online for help. There are always first-boot popups but I imagine most people are conditioned to click out of them without even reading; forcing people to confirm a couple times that they want to skip "very helpful reading" may cut down on people that play the search engine lottery on what information they use for their first steps.
  Also semi-related, I hope that mainstream Linux eventually "un-stupids" computers for regular people again. I get the distinct feeling that Microsoft and Apple have, at least somewhat intentionally, imposed 'learned helplessness' onto average computer users. "Oh computers are magic no one knows how they work. We are the only wizards that could possibly understand them and we will sell you the solution." Windows/OSX/iOS/etc are so locked down that people have rightfully learned over time that if they run into a problem, there really is no solution. I suspect that's permeating into the new user experience on Linux where people will encounter one problem and throw their hands up and say "fucking computers" instead of using basic problem solving to try another approach.
- How did they end up thinking that everything must be done with terminal while using Ubuntu?
  Most guides on installing things or help on fixing things will offer terminal commands, so I can see how that could certainly lead to that feeling as a new user.
  Also depending on the DE and stuff certain very basic obvious settings are not available in the GUI, like fractional scaling on KDE which has to be done by editing some config file first.
  
  Where do you have to enable fractional scaling in KDE? Worked out of the box for me when I installed that recently. Sure you don't mean Gnome?
  
  Fractional scaling is available, I remember using it from the settings. There is really nothing left to be configured from console anymore, and if there is it seems to be the apps themselves that pose a problem
  
  You got the desktop wrong. KDE has fractional scaling. Gnome which the reviewer is using because he is using Ubuntu needs the editing.

He's ranting about Windows for over a year (technically even longer) now and was promising a video about Linux, glad to finally see it after waking up.

I didnt like very much his video. "You need the terminal to install vlc" wait what ? Ubuntu software library is here...
Also he says he will migrate to davinci resolve once he needs to, but oh boy I've been seeing a lot of videos about resolve on Linux and how painful it is to use (missing codecs, no pipewire support, hates Wayland ...)
- To be fair, the paid version of Davinci comes with the missing codecs. It's only the free version that people have trouble with x264/x265.
- I'm not exactly the typical user here, but honestly Resolve is the best option on Linux. My caveat here is that I run Resolve on my stable box, which is a Debian box, and works beautifully.
  codec support is the issue as a free version, but two things there - if you're editing, mp4 is generally not what you want anyway, and you can just use ffmpeg (or any variety of tools that use ffmpeg underneath but give you a gui) if you've got a file you need that its the only container format.
  If you're doing it professionally, its $300, and worth buying. Much like buying Reaper for the whopping cost of $60 (personal)/$225 (commercial).
  Regarding Wayland support, I think the first release addressing it was around March or April, and is fully supported in Resolve 19. I haven't tested, because my Debian Stable box is not using Wayland, so I personally won't test probably for a few months (or if I get an itch to try it on my 1700x Arch box).
  GPU just needs OpenCL 1.2, so despite some previous snafus (needing nvidia) with GPU, AMD works just fine.

I love that he finally talked about it. He shortly mentioned the switch to Linux a while ago, in a gaming video, and Im excited to see if this makes Desktop Linux a bit more popular.

It's perfectly normal I guess but I'm still not quite used to seeing so many people who don't know much about linux talking about how they use linux.

Not sure who that is, but great 👍
- I think the worst way to sum up his channel is that he reviews MP3 players and bad headphones. You'd really just have to see it, he's very funny.
  
  I think of him as a zillenial version of Ashens.
  
  If it works on electricity, there's a chance I'll yell at it
  or something along these lines he's got as a channel title, and I think it describes the content in a very cromulent way

No idea who this is but actually a great video.
- 'ol mate wade! he works on cars too on his channel 'garbage time'

How weird, I was just thinking about this guy yesterday after forgetting about him for probably ~5 years. I got pretty into buying, repairing, and modding broken iPods for a little while thanks in part to some of his goofy but informative teardown videos. Still have a small box of parts somewhere.
Haven't watched the video yet, but I'll be a little surprised if he doesn't immediately fire up Shrek to test whatever media player came with his distro.

What is a dankpod?
- He reviews/discusses mostly audio related tech (mainly headphones) but also dabbles in more generic mainstream tech like smartphones and laptops. The past few years he's been expressing major frustration with the likes of Microsoft and Apple and I guess for the last few months has moved all his production over to Linux rigs, and even ditched his smart phone in favour of a modern flip phone.
  Also he has a car channel called "garbage time" and a drumming stream called "garbage stream." Very funny guy who's definitely worth a watch.
  
  I'll check him out. Thx.
  
  "He"? I thought it was a brand of headphones lol

So wait, are we really saying it's newsworthy every time one person switches to Linux?
- When that person is a public figure I think it is news worthy. Because it won't be one person but a handful. As I am betting alot of people who follow them will want to try it out as well.
  This is advertising 101.
  Downside is if the public figure has a bad experience it will discourage many people from not even trying.
- You really should check this guy out tho. He's heaps fun to watch!
  
  This entire video is gesturing hands in front of an apple computer. So fun!
- Elsewhere in the thread people say he's an "audio guy", so that's actually kinda neat if he's going to Linux.
  We've made progress on the Linux gaming front, now we need to dispell "Y'but you can't use Linux if you're into sound." :)
  
  Where have you heard that? The whole reason jack exists is professional audio

Onya, Wade, bring more people to Linux.

Ubutu
- M'butu

What exact GUI controls does linux lack that windows doesn't?
- To be honest, a lot of system configuration is better done on the CLI or editing configuration files manually (see the majority of the audio stack). I like that approach way more than Windows but even the System Registry in Windows is more "GUI-like" than editing ALSA files or pam.d files manually (usually on the cli as they mostly require sudo). This scares people.
  
  You want the most common things available in a Settings app(s) as they generally are on Gnome, KDE, Windows and Mac. If we cram too much stuff in there regular people struggle. Finding a good balance is a dilemma for most platforms. You want the less obvious stuff to be available in additional specialist "tweak" apps for more experienced users as they often are on all these platforms but sometimes less so on Linux. Then the really esoteric stuff you have to edit registry settings, conf files and plists as you do on all of them. Linux tends to provide more power and flexibility but requires reading documentation due to the diversity of config methods and locations.
  A Mac user very sensibly contacted me worried about pasting a command to edit a plist into the terminal from a website they found trying to fix an issue. Nobody should be pasting commands they don't understand into terminals. A quick search and I found the GUI toggle to do the same thing. It isn't exclusively a Linux issue. Windows and Mac have complex operating systems underneath and equivalently powerful command line tools.
  GUI config isn't practical for hardcore linux users. It isn't scriptable, we can't store it in version control, it is harder to document, it is harder to use remotely. We have to appreciate that we have a growing number of users where it is worth taking a bit more time and sharing an alternative if one exists. However nobody wants to configure services in a GUI as we want to version, document and distribute this stuff and managing services in a GUI is unprofessional because you lose these things.
  
  To be honest, a lot of system configuration is better done on the CLI or editing configuration files manually
  and this is apparently a "problem"... people shy from the command line and fail to realize "we" continue to use it, not because there is no GUI alternative but because it is simply awesome!
- He's specifically using Ubuntu Gnome, which feels a lot less complete than even Linux Mint Cinnamon. Gnome doesn't want you to customize it at all. I'm surprised they give you a master volume slider.
  
  I used gnome though. IIRC, everything to do with customising GNOME is done through extensions, and all extensions have GUI settings menus.
  My point being, even though it's objectively harder to customise GNOME, it still doesn't require using the terminal.
- For what he said is more that when he search for something he only finds CLI commands, he just doesn't know about the GUI controls.
- ¯(ツ)/¯ , I can do every normal thing I wanna do in a GUI on Fedora

onya m8

@hellfire103 I switched over a few months back to avoid all the new M$ bullshit.
No regrets.

I assumed he was big on Macs for their own sake. It's a thing, for music geeks - and obviously he's a fan of iPods, specifically. Surprised to hear his objectively correct summary of Windows versions.

OK I was with him for the first 4 minutes about why Windows is unusable, but this was so irritating to watch. Hyperactive videos like this drive me nuts, someone talking loud and fast and editing so there is not even a millisecond gap between sentences. But the audio aspect still isn't hyper enough for this guy, no! the video has to be the same way, showing just his hands, gesticulating wildly the whole time. UGH.
So anyway, once I got to where he finally gets to the subject of Linux and immediately launches into the typical bullshit where he says to use Linux, you have to use the terminal and know how to write scripts, I quit watching. Most of these "I tried Linux!" videos are like this. I only clicked on it because the title said he actually switched to Linux.
- I felt the same a year or so ago when he went viral. some of it pretty funny, but it wears off quickly. I binged a lot of his videos, then haven't watched one in at least 6 months. it's a lot of high energy squealing and talking about his battery when he knocks it over.
  
  Awww. The poor pkcell!

Gotta love these videos... they can be summarized as follows:
"I hate Windows so I will try Linux with no prep... Linux is not identical to Windows in x, y, z and therefore Linux is still deficient... Looks like I cannot do everything I could think of without reading a single line of documentation, conclusion, LiNUx iS nOT ReADy!"
- You haven't watched this video, then ;)
  
  I did... he tosses out a ton of misinformation about how hard Linux is. The fact he decided to "stay and endure the hardship" doesn't mean the message he is pushing is sadly misinformed
- However, this guy has actually switched to Linux, and is willing to adapt and learn how to use it.
  
  Sure. And hopefully he can post a follow up video where he correct the misinformation on this first one

Concept of OSTree or image-based

Layering

Apps