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The Problem with Linus Tech Tips: Accuracy, Ethics, & Responsibility
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this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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Linus Tech Tips
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I've had beef with LTT since his series of videos where he tried to use Linux as a daily driver while making absolutely zero effort to understand any of the differences between it and Windows, then proceeded to whine about how it's not Windows. The part where he broke his system after it explicitly warned him he was about to break it and asked for rather thorough confirmation that he wanted to do so was where I stopped watching him for good.
There's being ignorant and then there's being stupid. I fault nobody for being ignorant of how something works when they first encounter it. I do, however, fault them when they demand changes be made without actually understanding the implications of those changes.
That bit was important to include in the video in my opinion because of the circumstances.
He didn't break his computer while messing around with the kernel, changing system settings by recklessly copy&pasting random commands he found on the internet. It happened while trying to install a very popular software from the distro's official package manager, following what's otherwise standard installation procedure. A lot of people broke their systems the exact same way until that bug was fixed.
We all like to pretend Linux is "there", but it was a clear and important example of how it's not really. Because the user is dumb and the user has no idea what they're doing. At least that's the core assumption an OS should operate under if it is to be used by anyone and everyone. You can't claim even your grandma can run Arch when trying to install Steam can bork your system. And no, warnings are not a valid defense in this case. You will never teach the average user to not ignore those. Unfortunately it's the OS's job to protect the user from their own recklessness, and again, warnings are not always enough. Especially when you're getting warnings while doing something so mundane.
I think he was using Manjaro for those videos. It's a bad distro and I would know because I used it for years. It's more the fault of Manjaro than linux itself.
None of the problems Linus had in that video where distro problems. Most of the problems he had were due to the DE chosen and not understanding it. And that he kept trying to do things in dumb as fuck ways and excused that behavior by framing it, "tHaTs wHaT aVeRaGe uSeR dO." And that was just an excuse for being lazy because why was that the set expectation for the video? It wasn't, he was just being lazy and making a veiled attempt at hiding his incompetency.
He would have been much better off with the default Manjaro DE XFCE or instead Cinnamon or MATE instead of KDE which is made for hardcore tinkerers and doesn't have very great defaults in my opinion. But feel free to point me to the issues you think where distro issues because I've already had these debates on reddit when the video aired and no one could point to a distro specific issue.
Also, Manjaro is a great distro, I've also used it for years on various desktops and laptops. One brand new gaming laptop that no other distro the trackpad would work on and Manjaro worked right out of the box. Not Ubuntu, not Fedora, not PopOS.
Also that website that gets parroted on reddit all the time on why Manjaro is bad and no one should use it is full of misinformation and misunderstanding of the technical issues in much the same way LTT content is always poorly researched and gets things wrong. Almost every single point on that website is invalid. We can get into the technical details, I'm willing to do it.