Since Dawid has mentioned PG, This must be posted here.
Haven’t watched the video fully as of writing this but if I understood already, he seems he couldn’t do it
I wish he’d rather titled the video as “Why Linux Wasn’t For Me” instead because its more accurate for all the grievances he has with it.
Most of them are valid but things can be fixed and I suspect the particulars of his efforts especially with his hardware would have shined a light on that.
Thanks for sharing.
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Tl;DW
He likes thinkering, just not with software. So most issuues he doesn’t want to spend hours fixing.
Issues faces
Games not compatibile (anti-cheat)
Ethernet card apparently sometimes to stop working
Audio device issues (input not optimised and not being able to use the mic in games)
Adobe not availble (he is leaving it in early 2026, but can’t before due to cancelation fees)
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Do y’all spend hours tinkering with software to get it to work?
I think that other than a single line fix for Google Earth pro, I’ve never had to tinker or tweak anything in Linux. But I’m also using Mint where things work.
Yes the most I’ve ever had to “tinker” with was getting a modded version of a Windows-only game to work with online co-op. And that was mostly the same tinkering on Windows anyway.
The concept of Linux being endless troubleshooting is ancient at this point. Most of it is just people assuming their Linux distro would work just like Windows and being confused.
Package managers have come a long way, and I think the hardest part of Linux is just getting use it not being Windows or MacOS.
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yes and no.
As someone who jumped into plain arch from ubuntu, I had to do a fair share of troubleshooting but after those troubleshoots, Nothing else is bothering me, I just use my PC as usual. Games I play work fine too…
On my legion go running bazzite, the only troubleshoot I ever had to do was with the Handheld Daemon and Steam remote play making it crash (both was fixed thanks to the community’s help and Opting into Steam Beta respectively) [oh how I miss using this handheld, off-topic though]
and even though I dual boot windows 10 (seperate ssd), I unironically rarely ever boot windows.
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yes but that is probably also due to the amount of linux devices I own. alot works ootb with major fedora/ubuntu distros but it is not rarely that there is a problen with audiocard/input or bluetooth or GPU. especially recently face heavy problems getting to used whisper to runquantized on one of my gpus. it is really not a great experience, though since gpts are no ubiquitous fixing the issues have become rather easy.
When I switched to Linux, I had to mess around with 2 different games. Marvel Rivals crashed infrequently (about once a week) so it was hard to replicate the issue. After the third time, I figured out that when changing settings in the lobby, the game works until it crashes. But when changing the settings in the menu, the game crashed immediately and it was nvidia reflex / frame gen that was the culprit. When troubleshooting the issue, I reset the game’s settings and turned back all the settings I had before in the lobby (including reflex). I guess this was a launch issue with Linux because this was not an issue with Windows (although I didn’t play the game enough on Windows for it to crash the same way).
Getting Star Wars Battlefront 2 to work was a huge pain in the ass. It worked on Ubuntu, but after switching to Fedora, I did the same installation process. I installed Lutris with Epic and EA launcher and proton-staging / proton-GE, installed the game and it failed to launch. And because each launcher requires a different installation, I would encounter different issues when launching the game. Sometimes it would get stuck loading the game and other times, the game would launch, but there was no visuals. I recently installed Bazzite since it was a gaming distro, did the same thing and it didn’t work either. But the next day, there was a new Proton-GE version and after installing it, the game worked? I guess the new Proton-GE version fixed the issue, but I can’t say for sure since the game didn’t work for me for MONTHS.
Aside from those two games, everything else worked out of the box, although I would switch to Windows when I encounter performance issues and vice versa. I didn’t spend any time tinkering with anything else, but I did spend a lot of time tinkering with two different games. In Dawid’s situation, he would have to test how DOTA2 performs in ranked / casual match or compare DOTA2 to other online games to see what was causing the ethernet driver crash. But as he said in the video, he wants softwares to work ootb, and although I’m very happy with Linux gaming, I do understand his frustration with gaming on Linux. I don’t have an issue with the video title because for gamers, Linux might not be for them, especially if they can’t give up games that requires kernel-level anti-cheats.
Also, I’ve never tried Linux for creating content. Even our privacy content creators use Mac for creating content. Probably because it would involve a lot of tinkering to get softwares or audio to work on Linux the same way compared to Mac / Windows. You don’t have to do a lot of tinkering on Linux since most things work ootb, but if it doesn’t, most people wouldn’t start tinkering. They would just switch back to Windows / Mac. When I switched to Linux, I expected to do some tinkering and I’m fairly technical, so I was able to put up with all the technical issues I experienced to get certain games to run on Linux.
Hey, could a Linux-savvy coder make a memory stress test for Linux so I can try again? MemTest86 is no good; I need something like TM5 or y-cruncher. Even after cutting speeds by over 1000 MT/s, I gave up on my quest after an hour, as it felt hopeless.
Saying this as someone who’s infatuated with arch: deciding whether linux is for you is just as much of a personal choice as choosing between mac or windows. There’s tons of reasons why switching between those two is not feasible for many people, like nobody’s going to be salty that a mac user can’t switch to windows because they use logic pro for music production. Nobody’s throwing a fit about a windows user not switching to mac because none of the games they play can run on a mac. Same thing with switching to linux. A lot of times there’s just limitations that don’t make it a good choice for everyone and that’s totally fine. Not to mention that “switching to linux” technically encompasses everything from “switch to linux mint” to “switch to gentoo” which may as well not even be in the same galaxy.
I’m not a content creator and don’t need proprietary software for my hobbies so I’m totally happy using linux. I chose arch as a brand new beginner because I’m very good at self directed research and troubleshooting, I want to learn more about how computers and software function, and I wanted something that would force me out of my comfort zone. Plus the arch documentation between the wiki and the forum is one of the most in depth and comprehensive in the linux cinematic universe, so despite arch’s reputation I figured I’d have a much easier time resolving issues on my own with those in my arsenal. So far in the single year I’ve been using arch I haven’t encountered any gamebreaking bugs that weren’t 100% immediately obviously self inflicted and even those goofs were easily and quickly resolvable using the wiki and forums.
On the flip side I know I have this luxury because my job and hobbies aren’t dependent on my laptop, so if something happens and it permanently screws up my install I have absolutely nothing on the line so I can nuke it and start over without losing anything important.
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