“I got the confidence to really jump into Linux after the Steam Deck.”

I offered my son (16) to get him an "office" computer for his room so he can do homework and emails and junk. He said he felt so comfortable with Linux because of the Steam Deck and we could instead just get a nicer monitor and a docking station and he will use the Deck as a gaming machine AND office workstation whenever our main computer (also Linux) is busy

Damn who imagined that gaming would be the topic that made the FOSS OSes relevant.

Frankly, that's been obvious for a pretty long time now. I've been hearing "but I need Windows for gaming" as people's primary excuse for not switching since literally two decades ago.

Gaming has been the only pathway to mainstream desktop since forever. I've been around for a hot minute and I remember that consistently, the "real Linux users" for years repeated "we don't need gaming this is an adult OS go back to Windows and play with your toys" and then turned around and whined that no one wanted to use desktop Linux. Valve stepped in and casually created the year of the Linux desktop as a side-effect of just wanting an escape hatch for their business model. Now the casuals and elitists alike will have a better experience via the magic of Marketshare, and all it really took is not listening to people that don't know what's good for them.

it's a very successful rebrand. people Ive talked to hate linux as a concept but will use a deck

always has been. the one complaint ive always heard for linux is that it didnt run games and photoshop.

most games run now, and photoshop is workable on wine if you are not a professional.

I'm thinking he might be happier with Noridian, ZephyrOS, Sylvanix, or AetherForge.

I myself have been trying neoNova, specTRAos, and VortexLinux and they're all pretty good.

...

All of these are made up, I think, I just can't cope with everybody and their dog still rolling their own distros (and alternatives to GNOME 3, thank goodness for KDE), even after 25 years of observing it happen over and over again.

He wasn't praising immutable systems, arch, or KDE. He was praising a Linux OS maintained by Valve. Many people, especially those not familiar with Linux, simply want to use a distro made by Valve regardless of the technical details.

It's all discovery takes a while to realise what you want from a distro. Fully agree the the ublue projects sounded exactly what they wanted

It is actually just an aussie looking at weird audio stuff. He started off with upgrading old Ipods but now he just does whatever he wants.

I like his other channels for drums / drum history (Drum Thing) and cars (Garbage Time), but notably the main DankPods channel has 1.65 million subs which could bring a load of new people's attention to Linux.

How did they end up thinking that everything must be done with terminal while using Ubuntu?

When asking for help in a Linux sub/forum/community, the answer will generally use the terminal because it works across desktops and even distros. It's a lot easier to give one or two commands than it is to work out what distro, what desktop, and what settings the querier has, then describe the steps necessary in that particular GUI.

This may lead to the impression that the terminal is required for day to day use of Linux.

How did they end up thinking that everything must be done with terminal while using Ubuntu?

Most guides on installing things or help on fixing things will offer terminal commands, so I can see how that could certainly lead to that feeling as a new user.

Also depending on the DE and stuff certain very basic obvious settings are not available in the GUI, like fractional scaling on KDE which has to be done by editing some config file first.

When that person is a public figure I think it is news worthy. Because it won't be one person but a handful. As I am betting alot of people who follow them will want to try it out as well.

This is advertising 101.

Downside is if the public figure has a bad experience it will discourage many people from not even trying.

You really should check this guy out tho. He's heaps fun to watch!

To be honest, a lot of system configuration is better done on the CLI or editing configuration files manually (see the majority of the audio stack). I like that approach way more than Windows but even the System Registry in Windows is more "GUI-like" than editing ALSA files or pam.d files manually (usually on the cli as they mostly require sudo). This scares people.

He's specifically using Ubuntu Gnome, which feels a lot less complete than even Linux Mint Cinnamon. Gnome doesn't want you to customize it at all. I'm surprised they give you a master volume slider.

You haven't watched this video, then ;)