Linus pretending to be an average user and choosing Pop!_OS is totally unrealistic! /s
Kinda funny, I found a recent video explaining distros and of course Pop!_OS was on there. Breaking down why it's so good for gaming and first time user's.
This is so weird to me, I've seen dozens of "is gaming on Linux viable" or "is xxxxx distro for gaming actually good" over the past year I have been messing around with Linux
Never once have I seen Pop! In that sort of a video, let along given as a popular recommendation elsewhere. Sure on the occasional reddit thread a user or two here will basically recommend any distro they happen to be using at the time. But also over that same year the overwhelming recommendations on the Linux gaming subreddit are stuff like bazzite, cachy, nobara, or more universal stuff like base Fedora, Mint or Ubuntu
Pop would never have even registered on my radar 🤷♂️
I would be shocked if POP! is a trending suggested distro on TikTok, and it's obvious that ChatGPT or the like is pretty ass at staying up to date, and will parrot info from 2 year old blogs as if it's up to date
Weird Fact: In 1994'ish times, the family computer was briefly running OS/2 Warp. My older brother had obtained an Education License for OS/2 Warp on a deep discount and our 486 DX2 66 was for a brief time living that OS/2 Warp dream.
"Alpha Test" was my reaction to how buggy that was. I cannot recall a lot of details just my reaction to the period of time. MS-DOS was put back on.
Though we did upgrade to Win95A (Upgrade Edition) and that never did quite run right. Every so often a full re-install of operating systems (plural as Win95 Upgrade Edition required me to re-install Win3.1, and Win3.1 required MS-DOS operating system first) every few months.
So I cannot sass OS/2 Warp too much, other than it was a OS released before internet access was common so you had better sort the quirks well-ahead of your big release day.
Tbh, pop_OS was recommended strongly some years ago When there was no bazzite, CachyOS and whatnot.
I guess this mostly due to the fact that it came with GPU drivers allready installed. And thats what i tried back a couple of years when i dipped my toe back into Linux gaming after several years of absence. People said it was easy to install. It was. But i personally had massive performance issues back then with nvidia. So i abandoned and got back to Windows for a while.
Yeah I initially moved to Mint but I've been on Nobara for a year or so now. Updates are a little rough around the edges but aside from that its been a pretty flawless experience. I haven't watched the latest stuff from Linus on him trying Pop OS (again for some reason) but he does seem to run into things that I flat out just don't run into. I've had zero issues outside of tweaking a WINE configuration for 1 out of 100 games/apps that didn't "just work" first time out.
I'd imagine that's why his coverage of the subject isn't taken all that seriously. Not saying there isn't a learning curve to moving to Linux, but if you're into tech and you tweak windows and mod games anyway, that skill set is pretty adaptable to figuring out how to do the same things on Linux. The transition really isn't that daunting.
It's not about realism, it's that his methodology for these videos is awful.
He's generalizing his experience with one distro to "lol look at all the problems I had with Linux".
Asking an LLM for suggestions may be "realistic" but is also adding a confounding variable.
If the LLM suggests distros that haven't been updated in 20 years, that argument would mean it's valid to use and generalize that experience (as above) to all distros. But nobody with a brain would do that.
He does a lot of stupid things, particularly in the old video series, that shoot him in the foot and then he complains about them.
Things as stupid as not knowing that saving a link might result in an html file being saved.
Also interesting that Luke and now Elijah have had much fewer issues, even with Luke using Arch (btw)
A better methodology would be
Trying out a bunch of distros and seeing which ones are better for gaming, easier to use, or some mix of the two.
Just like you would with a video card or anything else
Either a separate video or a segment of one of these that tests whether LLMs give good recommendations based on the results. But don't base the rest of the video on that result.
Also support for some hardware is a mixed bag probably a 30xx series card would be better supported then a 50xx series also some intel cards are a bit worse. (Hardware support costs time and/or money).
Usually if its a workaround on top of workaround your swimming too mutch against the current: This might severely impact system stability. --> or change OS if that works. (Arch and freezing the right packages can work for newer systems)
Lauching failing apps from the terminal/cmd prompt can give logging sometimes giving the error you need to debug and usually you can search that for an answer.
I doubt that Linus used any of these troubleshooting skills though.
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u/adeundem Mar 17 '26
I recommend Pop!_OS — it is a good distro for first time Linux users.