This is definitely something that has been coming for some time. Yes, I am a little surprised it has taken this long for a major channel know for hardware reviews for gamers to take this step… I would have thought that the popularity of the Steam Deck, and all of the handhelds that are now running Linux would have been a motivator.
But it seems that Steve is really seeing that there is more of a progression of people not wanting to go to Windows 11, and the issues surrounding Microsoft’s insistence on adding creepy features that no one asked for (like Recall) as the push they needed.
And I agree, Bazzite is probably one of the best choices that they could make. The immutability of the system will allow them to have consistent images that won’t change on them randomly. That is a definite requirement when dealing with this type of benchmarking.
Can we count the mainstream tech tubers in recent months that have done these Linux/Bazzite videos?
- As much as I hate ETA Prime, I think he was one of the first
- PewDiePie
- Toasty Bros
- J2C
- Dawid Does Tech
- Ctrl Alt Rees
- Digital Foundry
- Lon.TV
- Chris Titus
- LTT soon
LTT soon? They made a few Linux videos and still love windows too much to recommend it.
They really seem to be intent on glazing Apple at this point.
Chris Titus
Having his name on one of the most popular windows debloater was just as based.
Honestly, it’s about damn time.
These technical people should be ashamed it took them so long to adopt Linux.
Sometimes you gotta be realistic that the majority of the population wouldn’t have found Linux as friendly as many here are, even today, while Windows or is/was kinda the obvious mainstream choice for running any software… The balance seems to tip slowly, but honestly it took decades.
Even today you’re still all debating which distro that didn’t exist 10 years ago is the best, and which office suite can match Microsoft’s… How am I going to convince my non-nerd friends to use Linux over Windows in that context.
About gaming, it’s a matter of being able to run AAA games without issues, like, no bugs and anti-cheat problems. It’s only since SteamOS that it is getting enough programmers and mainstream attention.
This is the way, but once again it required the power of a dominant company to move the lines.
Let’s put that in a way that isn’t so off putting. It’s the duty of those in the know help those who are not when possible.
No it’s not. There is no duty to anyone. Go to a library or book store and read what you want to learn.
If what you’ve chosen to learn could help someone right in front of you, and they’re asking for help, you do not feel compelled to help them? I doubt that.
Ah, the RTFM argument. So you didn’t go to school, did you? You picked up a book and just started educating yourself?
This is great. Honest people like Steve and Wendell are great for Linux. Let’s make sure, as a community, we don’t give them a hard time about their distro of choice. I think bazzite is an excellent choice to start until they get comfortable digging deeper into the system.
Wendell uses cachyOs on his channel.
Steve shouted his channel out too, so hopefully this ends up being a “separate sides of the coin” for the audience to enjoy (if one is curious about what the other distro is like)
This is interesting because theres not a ton of direct Windows vs. linux game benchmarking, and now there’s about to be. GN churns though a lot of hardware and testing.
And excellent, because being linux, drawing attention to issues increases the chances of them getting fixed, whereas that is hardly the case for Windows.
Arch (with KDE I presume?) + Bazzite is not bad either. There’s a lot of handwaving over they should have chosen this or that distro, but they’re both very popular in the gaming space, so I feel that’s fairly representative of many distros.
And excellent, because being linux, drawing attention to issues increases the chances of them getting fixed, whereas that is hardly the case for Windows.
This is the most important part of this whole thing to me. Imagine Nvidia watching Steve shitting on them for having horrible drivers on Linux and millions of people seeing that.
My game randomly freezes like once an hour on linux. Thanks, Nvidia!
although i prefer the arch distros for bleeding edge and rolling updates. Bazzite makes sense for testing because of the immutable.
A lot of more experienced pc users might end up liking arch distros later in their life, but I would never recomnmend arch based distros to people who aren’t comfortable with linux yet.
NixOS is bleeding edge immutable, but it’s like deep in the weeds
Experienced here, did my time in Arch, learned a lot, perhaps even more than necessary, now retired to Fedora, then Bazzite and Aurora-dev. It just gets out of my way nicely. Something, something, Bell curve meme, plateau of enlightenment meme.
And I would absolutely recommend Arch to a technically competent gamer newcomer as the fastest way to get up to speed.
Horses, Courses.
I (want to) like Ublue distros but for some reason i can’t get drag and drop in flatpak firefox and Thunderbird to work, how do you deal with this, if you don’t mind the stupid question :D
As in between them ? Not something I do enough to care about, and I use Zen and Betterbird, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, but I just selected something from Zen and dropped it into a new message in Betterbird without issue…KDE FWIW. There are still some rough edges with flatpak and wayland, but they’re mostly smoothed now. It’s usually permissions (KeepassXC and firefox is a bitch for example, but doable).
Bazzite was my first attempt at really daily driving Linux. I ended up on Aurora dev and I don’t have any reasons to move to something different.
The U-Blue OSs really feel like the future to me.
Incredibly cool tech, but it just works.
Yup, you can just do your Arch (or other distro-hopping) stuff in a distrobox if you want. Break it, blow it away and start fresh, uBlue don’t care… Switch DEs, that’s a one liner (although Gnome and KDE still don’t play well together, so use a fresh user). What’s not to love?
Bluefin-dx user here. This is the way.
This is genuinely a new era in gaming, so exciting!
Nice.
Very much so looking forward to seeing rigorous benchmarks of GPUs on linux.
That’s great! Love to see more GN and Lvl1 collabs!
