- [Narrator] So, many trapped in a world
they think they can't escape.
So, many with dread in their hearts as 10 turns to 11.
So, many unanswered questions.
So, many to save.
- For some, Linux may be the answer
they've been looking for.
And Windows 11 could be their reason to finally try it.
But Anthony you say,
installing Linux is a complicated and scary process.
Well, here's the thing it's really not.
So, let's go deeper and see for ourselves
how easy it really is.
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Conceptually, Linux is very different from Windows,
pretty much across the board.
Some of these differences are primarily visual
while others are much more fundamental.
If you've heard of Linux before,
you've probably heard that it's open.
Now, evangelists will tell you that,
that means free as in speech.
And this is true, and that anyone
can take a look at the source code
and modify it as they see fit.
But what it means in practice
is that not only is it able to support
a wide variety of hardware,
it's also extremely customizable.
With desktops that can mimic the look and feel
of any existing operating system
or be something entirely unique.
You get control.
Not only that, you'll hear people say
that it breathes new life into old PCs, but why is that?
The reason is that the open nature of Linux
means that it comes in many different flavors,
known as distributions or distros.
There are distros with lighter
or heavier system requirements,
dramatically different aesthetics
and even different ways of installing software.
Now, here's some good full feature, desktop oriented ones.
If you've got one that you like best,
let us know why down below.
Our example for today is going to be Pop!_OS by System76,
which is a good recommendation for new users.
Not only because it's part of the well-known
and well-documented Ubuntu and Debian lineage,
but it's also because it has a number of features
and sane defaults that make it friendlier
and easier to get up and running.
Start by downloading the ISO.
Now, Pop!_OS comes in two flavors.
One that includes the very special Nvidia driver
and one for everyone else.
You can use either,
but it's easiest to download the ISO
that best matches your system
to reduce the number of steps required during installation.
Now, you could just burn it if you've got an optical drive
and a blank DVD, but if like most of us,
all you've got is a flash drive,
you can grab one of a couple of different tools.
The easiest to which being balenaEtcher.
It's so easy in fact that it's just three steps,
select the ISO, select the flash drive,
and then click flash.
For Pop!_OS that's all you need to do.
But if you've got an image for a different distro,
for example, that fails to flash this way,
we look to a more versatile tool like Rufus.
Looking at the main window,
ignore the persistent partition size slider for now,
and look at the partition scheme option.
For most people, MBR is perfectly fine
because it supports both legacy BIOS boot and UEFI.
You'll really need to use the advanced options,
but the fixes for old BIOSes can help
if you've got a very old computer you're trying to boot.
For file system, you'll almost always want to choose FAT32.
Now, NTFS supports files
that are larger than four gigabytes,
but it's less compatible overall.
You'll also always, always want to choose
the default cluster size.
Larger clusters can improve transfer performance
for larger files at the expense of smaller files
and vice versa.
Finally, you can choose to create an extended label
and icon files, which just makes your flash drive
show up in a fancier way on Windows.
If you fancy like that.
All this left is to click Start
and wait for it to do its thing.
If all went well, you're now the proud owner
of a flash drive with Linux on it.
Congratulations, it's a Penguin.
Time to plug it in and give it a whirl.
Power on your PC and enter the BIOS.
We'll need to first make sure
that the flash drive has shown up
and is first in the boot order.
And second, we need to make sure
that secure boot is disabled.
Otherwise, you'll just get this fun message
when you try to boot.
The DOORS and Ubuntu both support it, but as far as I know,
every other distro out there, including Pop!_OS does not,
unless you do it yourself.
Blame Microsoft.
In most desktop BIOSes,
disabling secure boot requires the key store
to be deleted like this, but laptops,
all in ones and prebuilts may have a simple toggle.
Save and exit, and you should be
booting from your flash drive.
I know you can do it.
After the first screen, you'll be treated to an impressive
looking array of very technical messages as Linux boots up.
These make troubleshooting a lot easier,
but solves partway through.
Some distros cover them up with a boot screen,
but you can usually hit Esc to show them again.
It may take a little while to boot after the final message.
So, give it a minute before assuming
something is going wrong.
If all goes well, you'll be looking at the Pop!_OS desktop
and an install Pop!_OS window will come right up.
Choose your language and region,
then choose your keyboard layout,
English U.S. default will work for most,
but you can choose alternatively out here like
Dvorak and colemak.
Next, Pop!_OS will give you the option
of customizing your install, just like lttstore.com,
lets you customize your water bottle with free stickers.
Nice.
Now, if you're super eager to get going,
you can go through the installer now,
but if you'd like to poke around in an environment
where you can't break anything,
now's a great time to do that by clicking try demo mode.
This is pretty much the same thing
you're gonna get after a default install.
And it's a great opportunity to make sure
that all your hardware is up running.
Particularly your audio,
your networking, and your display driver.
Once you're finished poking around,
it's time to come back to the installer.
A clean install is the most
straightforward, so let's go ahead choose that option.
Choose the drive you want to install to.,
and then you'll be brought to the account setup screen.
A username will automatically generate
based on your full name, but you can change it
if you prefer.
Click Next, choose a password,
then the next step is to install the files.
Once it's finished,
reboot and you'll boot right into Pop!_OS.
Now, if you don't,
make sure it's selected as default boot device in your BIOS.
It should show up as Pop!_OS like so.
Once you're booted in to Pop!_OS,
log in and you'll be greeted with the post-install setup,
unlike a certain other operating system,
this only features a single privacy setting.
With everything else, being things like typing,
time zone, and how you want your Dvorak and top bar
looking function.
I like it best when it's set up like this,
but you're not limited to anyone layout.
If you're okay with installing extensions later on.
Pop!_OS uses a common desktop environment called GNOME,
but System76 is Homebrew extensions installed.
Here's my layout at home.
It's kind of a not Windows looking set up,
similar to a different desktop environment called Plasma.
Depending on how fresh your ISO was.
Pop! shop will ping you at this point
saying that there are updates available.
Now, this is your app store.
Go ahead and launch it and click the Installed tab
to download any updates that are waiting.
Then you can start to install your apps.
It's ridiculously easy to do.
Discord one click, OBS one click, Steam one click,
needing game performance metrics and lagging ?
Grab Goverlay.
Emulators, they've got a RetroArch, Dolphin, MAME, DOSbox,
never even had to open a browser.
I hate opening browsers.
Now, that's not to say that the interface is perfect.
Clicking out of category will just give you an alphabetical
listing of software with no sub categories or filters,
which can be overwhelming to say the least
when you're just browsing.
And advanced users will notice that
some under the hood packages aren't listed at all
with no obvious way to change that.
You can install the Synaptic Package Manager
to get both of those features though.
The only problem is that it's far less user friendly.
Thankfully, if there's something that you need,
that's simply not available at all,
you can add an extra source in Pop! shop's settings.
Most software has a launch pad or personal package archive
that you can add there.
As the name suggests, these are curated by the authors
or users rather than the regular
operating system maintainers.
So, only use these for software you trust.
Wine, the software that allows you
to run Windows programs on Linux is a good example of this
because the version included in Pop! shop is quite old.
However, the developers have decided
to host their own and provide instructions separately.
So, we'll have to use the terminal instead.
Now, don't worry too much.
This isn't very common and because we trust Wine,
we can just copy these commands and paste them
into the terminal like so.
Once you're done, go ahead and type this command
to finally install the latest stable version of Wine.
Now, you can exit the terminal.
I also recommend installing Winetricks while we're at it,
to manage our Windows settings.
And to be clear, you don't need any of this
to run games through Steam,
which launches Windows games through its own
included Proton layer.
After all your installs are done,
open the applications drawer,
and you'll see that they're ready to rock.
No extra steps required.
Steam opens right up and you can log in as normal.
Before you go wildest on games though,
you should enable Proton for all titles under Steam Play
and Steam settings menu, click Okay,
Steam will restart and you're good to go.
Cool, right?
Like I can just straight up install Cyberpunk for example,
and it'll work.
In fact, it works really well
for a game with a silver rating.
Like it must've been in like a recent update or something.
I don't know.
You can check how well the game is expected to run,
as well as how it ran in the past,
and whether anything special needs to be done
to get it working on ProtonDB.
The vast majority of games work out of the box,
although with some caveats, we'll get to shortly.
But first, if you have an Nvidia GPU,
ShadowPlay doesn't exist in Linux and that's a problem.
But what if I told you,
there's a way to get something even better?
It's a couple of extra steps and we're going to have to use
the terminal to do it, but trust me, it's very worth it.
First, download the code from the nvidia-patch repository
and extract the zip file.
Then go to the folder you just extracted,
right click the empty space and click open in terminal.
Next, type this command and hit Enter.
This will enable NVFBC or framebuffer capture.
The extremely fast method that ShadowPlay
uses to capture the screen,
and something Nvidia normally has disabled
for GeForce cards by default.
That wasn't so hard,
but we still have to install the plugin for OBS to use.
Unfortunately, there's no package
for it in Pop!_OS or Ubuntu right now.
So, we'll have to download it ourselves.
To be clear, this is one of the last options
you want to use as far as installing software.
Download the code from this repository, then extract it,
go to the folder and open it into the terminal like before.
Now, we need to install some things
before we can actually continue.
So, type this command, hit Enter, and have your password.
Now, type these commands, hitting Enter after each one,
and once that's done, you can go back
to the Files window,
go to the build folder and copy this file.
Go to your Home folder, Show Hidden Files, then go here,
make a new folder called Plugins.
Then in there, make new folders that look like this
and paste the file you copied before, and you're done.
Linux veterans will point out that
we could have done a lot of this more quickly
if we'd done more of it in the terminal, and that's true.
The terminal is really handy for a lot of things,
especially for tutorials where it's the only
truly common factor between Linux distributions,
but contrary to popular belief,
it's not necessary most of the time.
It's just faster or easier if you know what you're doing.
If you weren't familiar with it,
using it in short burst like this
can help you get acclimated and learn what can be done
just by typing a few words.
Now, we can go to OBS and add the NVFBC source to our scene.
And look at that, high resolution,
high frame rate screen capture with very little overhead,
just like ShadowPlay.
If you open up System Monitor,
which is kind of like the Windows Task Manager,
you'll see very little CPU usage.
You can combine this with NVENC
for high-performance gameplay streaming and recording too.
Oh, and did I mention that most game controllers
just work out of the box?
The list of devices that Linux supports
is much larger than the list it doesn't.
And the majority of those are a result of a company
not releasing the driver or at least not releasing
the information relevant for making one from scratch.
Nvidia is much maligned proprietary driver
on the other hand, works pretty well
and has been getting some serious attention
of team green recently with DLSS,
and Ray tracing support and more.
Pop!_OS comes with the latest drivers
and updates for them come down through the Pop! shop
like everything else.
So, if installing Linux, isn't that big of a hassle,
why haven't more people jumped on board?
Well, the main problem, at least in the past,
is that for all the freedom
and control you're getting from Linux,
you had to give up performance or functionality, or both.
Especially in gaming,
but since the release of Valves Wine based Proton
compatibility layer in 2018,
things have been exploding to the point,
where the vast majority of Steam games
run flawlessly on Linux with no configuration necessary.
The biggest issue for Linux gamers
is the fact that many anti-cheat programs
still don't work properly at all.
Meaning that games like PUBG, Apex Legends, Destiny 2,
and Rainbow Six Siege are just presently unplayable.
Despite working in offline mode.
This spills over into productivity apps like
Microsoft Office and Creative Cloud
where their anti-piracy implementations
fail to authenticate thanks to reliance
on an integrated the Internet Explorer.
Yeah, disgusting.
But compatibility is rapidly advancing.
So, get subscribed, so you don't miss
our annual-ish Linux gaming update.
At the end of the day,
my personal advice is to use the tools that fit you best,
whether that's Windows, MacOS, Linux,
or even something else entirely.
And if these compatibility issues are showstoppers for you,
I'm not gonna no wag my finger at you.
Expect you to find an alternative.
What I am gonna do though, is ask you to give it a try
and see if the alternatives work for you.
I find immense joy in trying new things
and finding better ways of doing what I like to do.
And with Linux,
the sheer number of different ways of doing things
means you're extremely likely to find something.
Anything at all, that works better for you
than what you're doing right now.
You have only to look for it.
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Thanks for watching guys.
Go check out our recent video on how to install Windows 11,
to get a sense of how difficult or not.
This was by comparison.