You’ve made me whip out the bluetooth keyboard at 2am for this, so I’m going to give you the earful, buddy.
Linus isn’t paid by any companies except those that sponser him. Glasswire, Dbrand, Seasonic, watch even 45 seconds of ANY of his videos and you’ll see that. I don’t know what fantasy dimension you live in to make those claims, especially when there are MULTIPLE videos on LTT’s channel explicitly around Linux, complete with collaborations from the likes of Level1Techs. I personally use L1’s guides for my VFIO setup on Manjaro. Speaking of…
Funny you claim that Arch Linux is one of the hardest distro to use, considering for starters, it plain isn’t. Gentoo is, and always will be, the hardest Linux distro to use, then Alpine Linux, simply for lacking GNU utils, and then any and all derivitives of Gentoo, and then RHEL and its flavors. Arch will sit squarely in the middle of the difficulty scale, and even then, it wouldn’t be that much harder from starting with a pure Debian base. And that’s not even relevant because he used the Arch derivative, Manjaro, of which is even easier, and on par with Ubuntu for its straight forwardness. Honestly, if it weren’t for my need to use amdgpu-pro drivers, I’d have just done Ubuntu myself on my gaming rig.
You apparently didn’t read watch the videos yourself, because Linus did do research, and concluded to start with Ubuntu derivative Pop!_OS thanks to their previous review and quick looks of products from Linux hardware OEM System76. Linus even iterates that he made a mistake in not reading the fine print, but that’s an easy mistake to make if you have the expectation that a tested and working application should work. At what point should attempting to install Steam ever throw up a wall of text indicating that it might delete your desktop enviroment? It shouldn’t, that’s the problem. System76 have already begun efforts to remedy this. Sure, it’s because he’s a big important techtuber, but don’t play the card that he’s intentionally trying to make Linux look bad. People like Richard Stallman already do that well enough.
Linus opted for Manjaro and had a better time right away, considering there was no “Yes, do as I say” or even an Install button needed to get Steam going for him, as Manjaro bundles the software, and fully functional versions of the free drivers and proprietary nouveau and amdgpu drivers in. Manjaro, based on what you’re saying, should have been a worse experience, but that wasn’t the case! Funny that!
Anyway, they’ve concluded their challenge, and Luke at least has already decided that he will be keeping Linux for his work laptop, because as both of them emphasize, Linux is fantastic for normal day-to-day use. It just struggles in the field that made them take the challenge - gaming. Playing games outside of Steam can be a headache because Wine just isn’t up to par, and even games with Linux versions (like Valve’s own Dota 2 and CS:GO) can be completely broken with models that have incorrect polygon rendering. So whether it’s a game or software, regressions happen. Wayland, the main display server for Sailfish, and what Valve intends to ship with the Steam Deck in a month’s time, has been stuttering pretty poorly in OpenGL applications from my experience in Manjaro. The stutters stopped as soon as I gave in to using old reliable X.
I’ve been trying to blaze the Linux trail for a while myself, and I’ve gone back to Windows regularly because too much of my software, not even exclusively games, didn’t work in Linux and no viable substitutes were there. 2022 is the year where I am dead set to stay in this lane, eagerly awaiting the early access 10iii SFX, and to be frank, it’s going to be hard. I’m up for the challenge, but I’m lucky enough to have all the free time in the world and nothing mission critical to do with my hardware. See it from the perspective of a family man running a multimedia company with direct involvement and just accept that Linux is not ready for normal people.
I can’t recommend anyone I know, either immediate family or friends and colleagues, to try out Linux in general, let alone Sailfish OS. Even as passionate as I am to see the community and support grow, I can tell you the average person wants convenience, and Linux is the polar opposite of that unless it’s bundled up in a tight package with a venom-laced bow on top from Google.
I think you need to listen to Bryan Lunduke’s Linux Sucks seminars. I don’t honestly care for his approach, but if you’re hunting for honesty about Linux because you doubt a normal user’s perspective out of fear for shilling, let me tell you, Lunduke’ll sober you up about just how far off the “Year of Linux” really is.
And since this topic is still about the shortcomings of SFOS, yes, cheaper or free alternatives do exist, but it runs back to that platform problem. You could use Messenger from Facebook, but then, guess what? It’s FACEBOOK. Could use Skype, but oh, MICROSOFT. Hangouts? Wait, weren’t we trying not to use Google here?! XMPP? Your mom isn’t going to learn how XMPP works to send you a jpeg of the dog, get real. MMS is very much necessary, is more complex than just sending photos, and is not in any better condition than it was when I started with SFOS in 2019, and it doesn’t appear to have improved in the 10 years Sailfish has been in play.
@lolek You may not care, but that doesn’t make it a moot point. You must live in a region where 2G/3G reception is both plentiful, and not in danger of shutdown. That isn’t the case here in the US. 2022 is the death nell for the old systems. T-Mobile will have shut down Sprint’s services by summer, so all Sprint CDMA networks will be gone, and they’ve announced their GSM 3G will be sunset by July. AT&T states that 2G and 3G will be shutting down starting next month, and Verizon insists that their networks will be 4G and 5G-only by end of year. Our Sailfish-powered phones here will become nothing more than PDAs without the ability to make phone calls.
Again, this may not affect you at least right now, but the US SFOS community is in a concerning state, and some EU-based carriers are making their own plans to sunset 2G and 3G, so it is flat out impending.
