Did LTT Get Linux RIGHT? A Pro Reacts to Their Mistakes

Lionus Tech Tips. Three people, three employees, three people trying Linux again. Now, four years ago, they tried it. I did several reacts videos. And typically, I do reacts a lot differently. I'm not going to play the entire video here because I still want you to go see the original content. I don't believe you should ever play the entire video, but we're going to do some of the highlights of the video, the key points of it, and just react to those points. Uh, that's how I did the first time. And I always try to distill some knowledge in everything doing. So instead of just going, "Oh, that's dumb." Or, "Oh, I can't believe they're doing this." I'm going to say, "Hey, they're doing this." This is what typically uh a more seasoned Linux user would do. Now, me myself, I'm Chris Titus. People know me for my Windows tool, but I've been using Linux for the past eight years. I've recently did a video about that if you want to go check that out. But without further ado, let's jump into me reacting to Lionus trying out to install Linux. And also, we have one other employee and Luke makes another appearance. So, ah, God bless him. Let's see what happens. >> You need to opt out. Windows update. You will own nothing and be happy. >> [laughter] >> I gotta say the intros to these are just fantastic. I love it. Uh anyways, let's go through uh I'm going to skip the first part where he just kind of introduces Linux. 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 4 years ago, I called out how terrible these listical sites are, and so did many others in the Linux community. And right out of the gate, >> these are just terrible, terrible options. I don't expect much from this. [laughter] >> Uh yeah. Yeah. I mean, this pretty much it is. I think this is one of the big things about Linux is it's really hard for a new user to decide these days. It depends on what you want out of Linux. I would like instead of a top articles and this one says for gaming honestly I would just say hey if you're a new user and you have to ask Bazite and if you just want an easy set it and forget it kind of thing that's would be my recommendation. If you like to tinker with your PC and you might want to do some more tweaks and things I would choose Cashios and that's kind of where I leave that. I mean, maybe add like Nara in there, but that's about it from a gaming distro perspective. There are no really other ones like Chamra and other ones that he placed up on the screen. Those are more for just like console or home theater PC type setups article. >> Let's have a look and see if they've improved. Oh, XDA's article is from less than a month ago, though. And of course, the very first one is one I haven't even heard of. No Linux built on Fedora. Quality of life tweaks, controller support out of the box, Pop OS, the door is on here. >> Oh no, I I feel Oh god, Pop OS again. Okay, well let's uh let's let's fast forward to him uh asking chat GPT >> ISO Garuda Linux and Mangaro. 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 techin interested gamer who's looking know what hardware I'm using. Right. Right there. Cons. You have to manually install drivers some. >> So, GPT and a lot of the LLMs are fine. They just kind of take all these listical articles and just say, "Hey, here's what was mentioned the most." So, this is going to give you bad results. where I think LLMs actually are decent is if you get like a dump from an article and maybe you don't understand what the hell your computer's telling you in Linux. I think LLMs this time around in 2026 might be different because whenever he does have an issue, he can use them to actually find out what that error truly means instead of just having to decipher what that error means. So that's where these are actually good for picking a DRO. No, they're they're absolutely shite. Don't don't use these to pick a dro. >> But when I narrowed it down to gaming distros, there was really only a handful that were commonly recommended to me these days. Mangaro, Chimera OS, Cashios, Basite, and Pop exclamation mark OS. If you're out of those five, again, depending on what you want really, I think it's Bazite if you don't want to do anything and you just want a quick setup and cashy if you're more of an advanced user. >> 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. >> One of the biggest things about this too that's coming up and he addresses here and I actually want to play this little snippet because a lot of people like why doesn't he just ask his staff. The one thing I admire about this one, you got to take into the fact that it is entertainment after all, not necessarily education. And two, at the end of the day, he's trying to show what it is for a normie that tries Linux and what that actually looks like instead of actually someone that is very well-versed in uh computers and somewhat literate. [laughter] You know, most normal people, I think, are pretty functionally illiterate these days. And I I would say this is what you're going to see them do. And I I don't think that's disingenuous. I think a lot of Linux users think it is. And when it comes to LTT, I think that's what he's trying to show. So, let me just show that what he says here. >> 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 [laughter] dro 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 Linux Torvolts for help recompiling the kernel, you know? [sighs] With all of that in mind, I'm going with Basite, specifically the KDE desktop environment. One, it's the cool new kid on the block. >> I think that's a good choice. Like, I think that's totally fine, and for a new to intermediate user, he's going to have a decent time. Lionus's choice. 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. Doing all the GP, all the PCs, I just don't think it's a good idea. It takes a while for someone to adopt Linux and find like the little ins and outs. I peacemeal it, guys. Dual boot starting out. Maybe have like a Raspberry Pi, dip into the terminal a little bit. Just dip your toe in. Maybe even a virtual machine in your Windows using Virtual Box or VMware or, you know, pick your poison for a a virtual machine. That's a good way to kind of acclimate to Linux. Lion is this isn't his first rodeo, so it could work, but I really don't like that approach. >> 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 Pop OS. Just because it blew up on me once doesn't mean it'll blow up on me. >> Yeah, Papos is in such a bad state right now. They got a beta release of like Cosmic. They're kind of transitioning. It's just not a good pick and I really don't like Pop OS right now. I could see it being very good like two or three years from now, but I I think it's just a bit rough around the edges for your average user. What? You guys started without me? [laughter] >> My side of this challenge probably won't be quite as bad as Linus' since I've been using Arch on my laptop for a while. >> Oh god. >> By the way, >> I've gotten pretty comfortable with it. That being said, my use case on my laptop is is fairly limited. So, this >> So, Luke the first time around was doing Linux Mint. I really like Luke. I think he's kind of really taken to the whole spirit of Linux. Most the community likes him. Let's see what he has to say here. This is an expansion forward. I'm in and I'm going with cashy OS. The whole reason why I've been running Arch on my laptop was to try to demystify and and defang the the scary experience of Linux for some people cuz I wanted to show like look, I'm going to put very little effort into this to be completely honest and I expect it's mostly going to 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 cashy direction. I still love Linux Mint. Still use it in a couple spots here or there 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 on like, oh, it's not as updated as other things or cuz 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 a experiment thing with Arch and enjoying it right now. So, I'm going to continue on to Cashy OS and hopefully it goes fine. >> No notes. Luke's the goat, man. I got to say I always I always appreciate that and it's accurate. I would say 100% accurate everything he just said up to this point. So, LT walks through a couple drive swaps here. I'm not going to show all that, but the big thing here I would recommend to someone have two drives. one for Windows, one for Linux, especially starting out. Unplug your Windows drive. Plug this in. Um, sometimes Windows likes to overwrite the bootloadader in Linux or at least erase the EFI entry. You can recreate it. And the big one, if you're using Grub, you can easily recreate that EFI entry by just doing a Grub install and then pointing to the boot directory, uh, the EFI directory in your boot. Sometimes certain distros will install it directly on the boot itself. Sometimes they do boot efi. Uh this is uh a sample book or a digital book I made for free called the linksbook.com. You guys can use it, reference it. Uh it's a good resource and it kind of gives all the links to do that. >> These challenges always cursed. >> Downside of a multimonitor setup. This is my primary monitor. So we're trying to boot into the BIOS right now. So we're going to go into Fedora. verifying shim sbate date failed some >> so a shim this is something that often gets confused with many users uh there's a shim that actually gets put so you can use secure boot in Linux now secure boot I don't ever recommend no game that works in Linux is ever going to require a secure boot that's more of a Windows thing actually controls all the secure boot servers I remember lowlevel uh uh lowlevel he does security videos on YouTube. He once made a tweet saying, "Hey, why wouldn't I use secure boot? Obviously, it protects from the boot startup." And I interjected. I was like, "Well, if you're a Linux user, you really don't want to use secure boot because those shims have to be signed by Microsoft because that's the only uh certificate uh server that will authenticate out of the box. Now you could point that server to other places and authenticate that way but this is a very advanced setup and most users will not be able to do such a thing. So Microsoft essentially is signing off on you installing Linux when you use secure boot. [snorts] Uh I hate to say that that's just kind of how it works. A lot of people that's why I don't ever recommend secure boot. I hate secure boot. I think it's a terrible technology on how it was implemented and it was implemented with essentially one company in charge. And if you're trying to get away from Microsoft, you don't want to be using secure boot. >> Something has gone seriously wrong. I've done nothing. Okay, I think I saw something related to secure boot. It is enabled. I'm going to try disabling it this OS version. >> So if you ever disable enable secure boot here as well, one other thing I would mention is it can overwrite the keys that already exist. So if you are dual booting and you disable secure boot, this will uh make your Windows not boot. And the the other thing there is if you have to reenroll those keys, it will usually wipe out the existing keys and you will no longer be able to boot into any operating system that had been installed on that system up to the point. There's not any warnings about this. So don't be disabling enabling secure boot unless you're sure uh you are okay formatting all your existing hardware and never going back to those installs. it. I wish there was a big warning here uh because that's something normal users will really run into and it's a bad thing. We're going to go back to Luke now. He's back on Cashios and uh just when you love Luke, you just you don't think you can love the guy anymore. I just tell you, I I have really big hopes for him. I think this challenge is going to go swimmingly well for for old Luke. the rest of the LTT team, including Lionus, it's not looking great. >> My drive, I got the M.2 installed, and now we're here. So far, the hardest part [music] was getting it to boot to the flash drive. I've been super interested in trying Hyperland, but I think I'm going to keep that for maybe something on my laptop or something that I'm I'm more >> Thailand window managers are really awesome. Hyperland in particular is like the new kit on the block that's really fancy, flashy. I've done a video about Hyperland. I I like it, but I don't daily drive it. I still use mostly older uh window management and I kind of like it just because it doesn't really have any bugs. It's not really massively up todate. It kind You can see it. This is essentially what I run these days and it's just an old school DWM setup. This I know is not for everybody and most people don't want something so basic, but for me I like it because there's no transitions, it's very fast and I never have to worry about it breaking or updating or any of that. So while Hyperland works great, it looks pretty looks way better than what I have here, it just doesn't work as well. And that's why I kind of stay away from a lot of the newer stuff. I'm also trying out Mango uh window manager. That's also kind of uh newer than Hyperland, believe it or not. And that's something that I will be doing a video on soon. I actually like it better than Hyperland. But it's cool to see Luke has kind of a finger on the polls here. Most of the Linux community is raving about Hyperland right now. Me, I'm kind of like, eh, it's okay, but it's not my fave. >> More [music] happy to just play with. I'm going to try to keep pretty much everything the same as what I'm used to except for Cashios and just see how it goes. You know what? Calling an Audible. Let's give it a shot. Lemonade or how I first read it with my broken brain is Limeline. Sounds looks cool. Going to go with Grub. I'm just used to it. We're in. Everything seems okay so far. Uh I wonder how many times Lionus has bricked his install. >> All right. [laughter] God, Luke. Luke's a Chad. I don't even know what else to say. I got no notes again. >> Now that I have a working drive, this is great. Prompted to set up encryption right out of the gate. You love to see it. Pretty painless setup so far. Don't need this. This looks fine. Yeah, the defaults here. And again, this is a beta install he's using. Uh, and I wish he kind of touched on this or maybe he didn't know, but Pop OS is currently baiting Cosmic Desktop environment. This is brand new. It has bugs and I am just scared to death for the rest of this challenge for Lionus. I just know things are going to break and not work right. >> Documentation says to reboot, enroll the keys. Yes, it's just universal blue. I think I enabled it. Hey, there you go. >> Yeah. So, he redid this. As soon as he sticks that Windows drive back in there, I bet you it won't boot for him anymore because he probably erased his en encryption keys for his secure boot. So, uh, that's going to be a sad face. Uh, this is one of the downsides to using secure boot. Again, I I don't recommend it, but if you already have it in your Windows instance, let's say you dual boot and use Battlefield, then Bazite's actually a good choice. But just remember, leave it enabled the whole time. He kind of went through a whole like five minute explanation about secure boot. Just don't ever disable it if you still dual boot into Windows. You can use the shim. That's fine. But wait till you really are very very comfortable in Linux before you just completely format everything and get rid of secure boot in general. 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 kind of 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 kind of cool. I 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 going to 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. What? 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 >> So, what can happen here is sometimes your volume can get kind of mixed in a bunch of different things. Again, this this right here, I have a a section over audio if you do run into problems. Typically, what I like to do, even if I'm using KDE or in his case, he's using Cosmic, they have their own programs for the front end of audio in Linux. But many times what I ended up doing is I use something called pavu control which is this right here. Now I have it just hotkeyed. Uh but I you can just go on your start menu and type pavu control or install it through your package manager. Whatever Linux you have pau controls there. And the big things here is for output devices. What I like to do first on an initial setup turn off like if you don't use HDMI audio just turn it off and then it's no longer an option. Places like Discord can't select this. It's great. Uh, if you don't use your built-in, like let's say I don't have anything plugged into my built-in, I would turn that off. Uh, sometimes I use it for input, other things. Uh, so if you have a separate card, you I have that right here. So, I actually do quite a bit of audio on this particular system, so I can do easy screen captures and those types of things. And also, if I'm gaming, this is a great way to program up your audio. It's very intuitive. Love Pavu Control. First, turn off the ones you're never going to use. Go to output devices. Say, hey, I'm going to be on this one. This little check box here sets it as default. But if I wanted it to go to the in onboard audio, I'd hit this. And now all the audio from this PC would be going from the onboard. Now, obviously, I don't want to do that as I'm recording this. That would mess up the recording. So, that's that's essentially how I route audio. So, I can record this route all the audio through it. All gets piped through Pau and it's way easier than pretty much any of these desktop environment stuff like pretty much anybody in this video is going to try. So, Pau control, learn it, love it. If you need to troubleshoot audio, I have an audio configuration. It kind of goes through some of the CLI commands so you can troubleshoot it a little bit higher and even tie into some of the more terminalbased stuff if you want to go that direction. and also gives some common troubleshooting tips like let's say you have a bad config for your audio. It shows you how to kind of clear it all out and restart it. So, uh just some easy tips for for those that do have audio issues on Linux. >> 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 Alan who's not running his game in full screen. Sup, Rob. All right, just rebooted and no game 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 spitif 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 It's that problem of like, why isn't this working? And then why is this working? It's like, >> yeah, I'd [clears throat] rather have why isn't it working than why is it working? [laughter] >> Whoa, whoa. Why did that change it? Do you 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 taskbar. That was not a scaling thing. This >> So what's going on here? And I I I don't believe he's going to find this issue, but since he's using a capture like I'm capturing what is in this system here and I'm going to show you from the terminal what this looks like. Now he's using whin so it' be wl randar is what he'd do for this command but for me I use a little bit older one. So I'm going to use xrandar. Now mine's very basic but very much the same. Like there's other higher refresh rates I could choose. A lot of the times I only go up to 120 hertz. Now, uh sometimes I'll get a higher option. You know, if I pipe it through like display port, it it'll show me like 144 or 165. And for those refresh rates, I never choose them because I need things divis divisible by 60 hertz because it won't be able to down clock it directly on uh my capture card because this gets split between my monitor and what you see on the screen right now. And that's really important to me because I capture all my stuff. If I didn't, I could just crank up my refresh rate, no problem. But probably because he's doing some type of mirroring like I'm doing here, uh, he needs that divisible by 60 because almost every single capture card out there captures everything in 60 hertz. So that's why you you'd want to do things in, you know, if it's divisible by 60 or not. So 120 is probably what you should end up on. >> Well, it made everything Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. Why did that change it? Do you Wo! 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's the same. >> That's a bit buggy. I mean, honestly, it shouldn't be like that, but it's probably something to do with this capture. Or maybe he's doing a mirror. A lot of people use uh mirror devices. I have one down here for recording because I never really want to get blocked if I'm ever like doing my Mac and I I'm want to go ahead and strip out uh any DHCP uh copyright stuff from that HDMI link. HDCP, sorry. I've been in I've been in it too long. DHCP, but HDCP is uh digital copy uh content protection. And if you use a mirror uh in your system setup on HDMI through your system, it can actually split that out. But if you do this, a lot of times the resolution, especially on Linux, will register at 4K resolutions as well. So if you do do it, there are some downsides. Uh but the upside is you will never get a no signal found. It'll just sometimes freak out, give you too big of a resolution or not display proper refresh rates resolution. Now that I got these displays configured. Steam looked like it was already installing. So, let's double check that. Dude, are we going to get a game going like that? I know it's not compatible. I'm still going to download it because I want to try it. I won't blame any Bite or Linux for it not working, but it's one of my go-to games right now. I need to test if PUBG is going to 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 >> guys, these programs, these publishers specifically don't want Linux users, period. You if it if they don't allow compatibility with the anti-che for these online competitive shooters, it's not a thing. There's been some shooters that allowed it for a little bit or some competitive games that allowed it like League of Legends or Apex Legend, they actually have walked that back and they're no longer Linux compatible. So, if it says it's not compatible, it's not going to work. >> Wow, that was really fast. Really? I'm going to 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. >> A lot of times that happens, you know, on Linux a lot of times there is no finding the drivers and things. Sometimes it does work great. It depends on your hardware. So it again very hardware dependent. There's a lot more hardware support in today's world than there was like four years ago. So, you're going to see a lot less hardware issues than what they encountered 4 years ago. >> 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 going to uh get Teams installed here because I need to do a work call. Well, the Teams call. Oh, we don't care about Teams. Gross. All right. Sorry, Luke. I know you're doing it for work, but gross. >> 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. Oh, just stop picking Pop OS. [screaming] Why? [laughter] No, I bet it's the beta version of uh Cosmic causing some issues, especially with the gaming. Most distros would play this type of game pretty easily. Um but let's see. >> Okay, I managed to find this. I'm gonna try to end the process. Halflife two, I think. Is this Hello, Delette. Is that not gonna work? That's not going to do anything. >> Yeah, I have seven people waiting for me because I'm a special Linux snowflake right now. I I don't understand why trying to do the most basic 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 going to game. Ooh, it's got a borked rating as of two. >> So, they don't actually touch, I don't think, on this part, but he's using Proton DB, which is good. If you see something borked, it's just not going to work no matter what you're doing. It means the advanced Linux users can't get this title working. So, if an advanced user can't do it and you're a new user, there's not a chance in hell that game's going to work. Just straight up. >> It's the next day and I'm going to see if I can figure out what the heck was going on there. >> Off to a great start. >> Closing the gap. >> 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. >> Now you are playing with power. >> Try running it in Vulcan. >> Unfortunately, there's no >> Yeah. So again, Proton DB sometimes you'll have little uh things you can add on like I think that's what he did on that other screen. He just kind of showed it really fast. But Proton DB typically says, "Hey, in this type of game you want to add Vulcan." Is this better than Windows? Absolutely not. There's a little bit more setup that's entitled with a lot of these launch options. So always look up the game you're playing. Sometimes it's like, "Hey, Vulcan." I personally do this even in Windows because I like on for example my Age of Empires. If we look at my Steam and we go to properties, you'll see a couple things like I do Vulcan for Age of Empires as well, very much like he was doing there. But I also add no movies because I don't like the intro sequences on Cyberpunk a lot of times. I skip the launcher. those types of things um are are a good example of why I would do it on Windows is anything after the percent command. These are actually things you can use on Windows. Now, everything here, these are different. I'm not going to go into it in this video, but this essentially just gives me a little bit more performance >> game setting for it, but apparently this will do the trick. >> Like you got to break through this wall. >> And there it is. That was the fix. not complicated, but definitely frustrating when you consider that this is a firstp party Valve title. And the buggess 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 going to be Hell Divers 2. We're going to be playing with the VIPs. I've never played before, so Hell Divers 2 uses InProtect. Now InProtect in particular is not very Linux friendly and I ran into a lot of problems. However, switching to Basite, those people like uh the other employee here that's trying out Hell Divers 2, he's not going to have any problems. He can load it up. I almost guarantee you he's not going to have any issues right out of the gate. But since he's trying cosmic, which is whanbased, all these things are pretty damn new and it's just not going to be a good experience for him. So, I'm gonna save you the heartache from watching this failure. We're going to fast forward. After I figured out the control issues, we did manage to get through the entire Hell Divers 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 Hop OS involved none of my data being given away. And maybe more importantly, if you don't like futing 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 want to use, unlike the Windows Store, pretty nice. And so far, I've got to 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 her you press start to shut down kind of energy. >> I mean, come on. the start the shutdown menu and the settings menus in in Windows like you go to Windows you can rightclick right here on the start menu button and that's how you get to settings eh I mean kind of like I I I mean that's where the shutdown is too I think it's the most intuitive spot for it maybe they could have split it out but then you're looking at another thing in your tray so I don't know splitting hairs there I think >> I'm excited about the next month and I hope you guys are excited to comeong along with us. >> Oh boy. Well, I got to tell you, let's let's recap. I would say overall, I'm here for it. I'm glad they're trying it out. It's really cool to see LT giving it another crack at Linux, especially with all the shenanigans Microsoft's trying. But remember, they're coming at it as normal users with no not much in the way of prior experience. So, while I think Luke's going to knock it out of the park with Cashios, and I like a lot of his picks, a lot of things he was trying, uh, he's going to still have some challenges, uh, Lionus and the rest of the crew trying Linux. I think they'll just be right back on Windows here in a month is my prediction. Um, especially since he chose Pop OS with a beta desktop environment and it just like a fresh beta. I think it just hit beta this year. It was alpha last year. and why Cosmic's uh functional. I guess it's going to just have tons of bugs and it's it's all written in Rust on Whand and all these the whole framework's just it's like building a house on sand. It's just not going to work well for him. So, I don't have any uh glimmers of hope of Lionus making it through. He's gonna have a lot of bugs, a lot of problems uh because of what he chose to begin with. And I know a lot of times I'm like distribution doesn't matter. But I say that meaning if you pick something like what all these are based on, there's really only three distributions in my mind that matter and it's usually Fedora, Debian, and Arch Linux. Uh, and all these are based on those three. Everybody that's chosen a DRO today, Bazite's based on Fedora, Linus', Pop OS is based on Ibuntu, which is based on Debian. And then Cashios, which which Luke chose, is actually based on Arch Linux. So they all kind of go back to those three granddaddies. If you learn the granddaddies, you really don't need anything from these other ones. They're just different options that are chosen. Think of a different program installs and configurations for each system, but they're not really that different. Anyways, that's my take. This is my reacts. Let me know your thoughts down below. I'm I'm here for the next video. It's It's a little painful some of this, but it's meant to be. It's It's also meant to be kind of entertaining in some sections. Uh but I'll leave a link down if you want to watch the full video. And with that, I'll see you guys in the next one when uh God, I don't even want to think what they're going to try next, but we'll see.

Chris Titus reacts to Linus Tech Tips sending three employees back to Linux after 4 years — and this time, the distro choices are bold. Chris breaks down every key moment, shares expert tips on Secure Boot, audio troubleshooting, distro selection, and gaming on Linux, while predicting who's going to survive the challenge and who's heading straight back to Windows. Original LTT Video: https://youtu.be/kluoZ9RhmVo?si=0QfLQTEgH4Z1KO40 I used Linux for 8 Years Video: https://youtu.be/EcKSdZ_ENeg Hyprland Video: https://youtu.be/83ZZp8wJ-UY Key Moments: 00:00 Intro - LTT tries Linux again after 4 years 01:20 The distro choice problem & choice paralysis 02:36 Chris's actual distro recommendations for 2026 04:00 Why LLMs are bad for picking distros (but good for errors) 05:17 Why LTT avoids using their industry contacts 06:18 Linus picks Bazzite KDE — Chris's reaction 07:08 Why going all-in on Linux from the start is a bad idea 07:58 Linus picks Pop! OS — Chris is worried 08:31 Luke picks CacheOS — No notes, Luke's the GOAT 10:17 Drive swap tips — protect your Windows bootloader 11:00 Secure Boot explained & why Chris hates it 12:42 Warning: Disabling Secure Boot can brick your dual boot 13:54 Luke boots into CacheOS — painless setup 15:45 Luke gets Discord & Left 4 Dead 2 running fast 18:30 Audio issues in Linux & how to fix them with PavuControl 22:02 Scaling & refresh rate issues with capture card setups 25:20 Anti-cheat & why competitive games won't run on Linux 27:02 Linus struggles — crashes playing a Valve game 28:06 ProtonDB explained — what "Borked" actually means 30:34 Helldivers 2 & why InProtect is a Linux nightmare 31:46 Linus's honest positives about Pop! OS 33:06 Final recap — Chris's predictions for who survives 34:02 The 3 Linux distros that actually matter (Fedora, Debian, Arch) . ►► Digital Downloads ➜ https://www.cttstore.com ►► Patreon ➜ https://www.patreon.com/christitustech ►► Twitch ➜ https://www.twitch.tv/christitustech ►► Website and Guides ➜ https://christitus.com