He is one of the scummiest tech influencers around. He was great at the start, but as time went on, he became increasingly worse. As his channel grew, he started focusing far more on 'entertainment' while neglecting actual, useful information.
I'm sure everyone knows the controversies about him and his channel, but I'll still talk about them.
He and other massive YouTube channels sponsored Honey, a malicious extension. He knew that the extension was suspicious but said nothing for so many years; he just stopped sponsoring it. Massive thanks to MegaLag for talking about this extension, here's the link.
There are a lot of errors in their benchmarks. Gamers Nexus made an amazing video about this and other issues. They have so many errors because the testing is rushed. This is mainly Linus's fault, as he forces his team to produce a massive amount of content just to make more money.
The reviews are biased. It's clearly biased because the company that sent the product also sponsored them. Not only do they have to sign NDAs in order to review products before they hit the market, but they also have an incentive to speak positively so the company doesn't blacklist them in the future. I know that almost every big YouTuber does this, but I don't think they should, and it doesn't result in a fair review.
He didn't want to increase his old friends/employees pay or solve their complains, saying that's how capitalism works.
He bought a private jet. A lot of his employees are poorly paid, and some of them barely get by. On top of that, he tries to justify it by saying that he got the plane for '$0' and that it's actually cheaper using his 'girl math.' In reality, that plane costs an average of $6.6M to purchase, plus $1.5 million to $2.5 million annually in operating costs.
He has many more problems and controversies. I don't know how he has so many 'fans' and why people still watch and support him. He's a scummy, narcissistic, and greedy person, creating videos where he forces his underpaid employees to work on his home.
LINKS:
MegaLag - Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam
Gamers Nexus - The Problem with Linus Tech Tips: Accuracy, Ethics, & Responsibility
Head Pluck - A perfectly balanced mouse review. (Pwnage x Shortcircuit / LTT Edit)
Vex - Linus has a WEIRD Problem
Linnus Tech Tips - The Gamer Jet is Real! and it Cost $0*, The Highest PC Build EVER - World Record
Something I haven't seen mentioned yet is how incompetent he was at trying Linux. Its been like three years since I watched one if his videos so I don't remember the details but I do remember a general clumsiness when it came to interacting with the computer that was really off-putting. Like the command line would say "if you do this you'll have a bad day" and he'd do it and act shocked he was having a bad day. I think with regard to installing Steam? It was embarrassing. Hard to take seriously after that. Then the Gamers Nexus video came out and I never watched another LTT again
I went off him a long long time ago. When he was building "servers" in the bathroom, balancing machines and generally being a useless hack. He is a home user, humping stuff together and never took the time back then to learn how to do it right. The excuse was always "you can't know everything at first" while never actually taking any time to learn, any time to explain what he was learning or any time to teach. So in the end, you get a poor uninformed opinion. It's interesting to see nothing has changed.
As I've developed my opinion on social media, it is a regular pattern. People want to glamorise having a rack server, they don't want to glamorise the time it takes to learn how to rack machines, wiring management, power management, heat dispersal, network interfaces, resource balancing and management. Planning skills, for power, storage, etc.
Hikers want to show amazing pictures of the top of mountains. Not the thousands of hours map reading, training, being exposed to weather.
Gym goers want to show the competition and the physique. Not the hours of sweat, eat, sweat, injury, recover, sweat.
Linus wants to show "wow LEDs dood" but not the time it actually takes to learn to build and use a computer to its best.
He was the NCIX computer guy who started making videos for them, and it went from there. It's not like he was a genius or worked in the industry in operations or ran a netops department. He just sold computer parts at a retail store.
He's just the Dell dude
Holy shit. That's it.
I worked at a shop with a rack of Dell machines all under their care plan. When something went wrong, we had to troubleshoot the issue, determine what actually died, then the Dell dude would show up a day later with a replacement part. He'd fumble around swapping the motherboard (or whatever), make sure it didn't kick errors, then leave.
I remember one time the power supply and motherboard had died. I tried to explain this to Dell tech but they insisted it was just the board. Dell Dude arrived and only brought a board. Of course he couldn't get it running and he was like a lost lamb.
I guess they're like Geek Squad. They need people who know just enough to fumble though, but not enough to demand more pay.
He doesnt read anything. He dutifully follows the command that basically says "Brick my computer's OS" and is surprised when it does that. Ngl that IS something linux should fix, and they need idiots to test it out so they can see things like this outside of their bubble... But why the fuck is the ceo and face of a tech youtube channel running into those problems and not catching it before release?
Its like your doctor getting sick from licking a public urinal.
I never really watched any of their videos before, but over the last year as anti-Windows sentiment was on the rise I was watching a variety of "person tries out Linux" videos as a guilty pleasure and this ended up including the most recent attempt of LLT to switch to Linux. I was aware of how poorly it went when he had tried Linux before from general online sentiment and comments like yours, but only actually watched some of the new attempt (which ended up dragged out into multiple videos that I didn't care to try and keep up on).
The thing that had stuck out to me the most was Linus' insistence on using an LLM to decide what distro to use and how to start. He said that searching this online got too many disagreeing answers and that the various listicles he found before steered him wrong before (though much of his poor experience seems to come from the attitude you mentioned) and that the everyman was just going to ask a LLM what to do anyway (despite likely being trained on exactly the same sources he was critical of).
And on this attempt at Linux, other members of his staff were participating - some even used Linux of their own volition before - but he remained obstinent about not asking anyone for advice and just taking this everyman approach he decided on in an attempt to offer multiple perspectives on the challenge, as he chose to put it after negative reaction. It was just so off-putting to me, you can still make your own decision after asking for an opinion online or in person or after spending a reasonable amount of time doing research online (let alone if it was your job). It gives the impression that, yes, he doesn't really care to actually read into these things and that he had enough of an ego to not want to change his stance.
I had no idea about the rest of these controversies until today though, and it's definitely making what I saw make more sense.