JayzTwoCents Finally Tries Linux: Reacting to Jay’s Linux Journey with Bazzite

Michael:
[0:00] Hi there. I’ve got another reaction video for you. And this time, we’re checking out JayzTwoCents’s, JayzTwoCents’s, Jayz, JayzTwoCents’s recent video of him trying out Linux. Let’s jump into it.

JayzTwoCents:
[0:12] As you can see, it’s working. It’s working flawlessly. Not because we needed new cables and stuff, but because we switched to Linux. So welcome to the very first Linux video I’m ever going to have made on this channel. I say ever going to have made, because I might do some follow-ups to us trying out this box here that we built. But in all of the time that I had been doing YouTube every of the time since August 26 2012 I have never touched a Linux topic in my life. Why because you guys scare the shit out of me because you guys are some opinionated mother Okay.

Michael:
[0:45] So All right. Well, just to be clear every community has opinionated people and some people who are overly opinionated, but the Linux community is not that bad. I mean, there’s a lot of times where people will talk about it in the sense of like, like toxicity or something. And that can be videos that our YouTubers make or podcasts that talk about it. But most of the time it’s because they talk about it in a global sense of the community as like the Linux community as a whole. But that’s a very gigantic, broad spectrum of different types of communities.

Michael:
[1:21] There’s not bunch of different communities combined together. And I feel like a lot of their experiences that are people who are feeling like toxic experience are localized to certain types of sections and we’ll call them hardcore sections and not to pick on Arch Linux, but they don’t have the greatest reputation. They’re not known for being the friendliest bunch. Of course, there are a lot of people in that community who are great and are very friendly and welcoming, but I’d say Arch is more of a mix. One of the reasons beginners should avoid hardcore sections of the platform, in addition to it being rather difficult to use, some of those sections are not welcoming to new users. With Arch, it’s kind of a hit or miss, more often missing. But when it comes to welcoming aspects, it’s not completely awful, but it’s not the greatest either. There are other sections that are worse. I mean, much worse. There are even some that are brutal to beginners. That’s why you never hear me talking about those sections in my content. Avoid the mud and your shoes don’t get muddy. So I don’t tell people about them. So you don’t go to them and deal with it. And anyway, my channel is like 90% Linux focused. And if the community was that bad, I wouldn’t have made a channel that was 90% Linux focused. Though to be fair, the parts that are bad are very, very loud. So I can understand why some people might get that vibe sometimes. But that’s why we made our community. It’s all about being helpful and kind and all that sort of stuff. So if you’re interested, you can join by getting the links in the description for the discord and the forum.

JayzTwoCents:
[2:49] Yeah how come you’re not using arch linux the last time i touched the linux kernel, was ubuntu back in like 2010 2011 somewhere around that’s been a long time uh that was back when i worked in a software development office and i was bored i had a laptop up and messing around in that but i never got serious about it so well.

Michael:
[3:07] That’s actually kind of unfortunate because if the last time you tried it was back then it’s a very different experience than to now And in fact, it was kind of an unfortunate time to have tried Linux back then because there was no Steam around that time. You couldn’t play Steam games on Linux because Steam was not available for Linux. And you couldn’t play that many games. There was actually probably a few dozen. Now we have 20,000. So it’s a lot different now. So here’s a brief Linux history lesson. back then around 2010 to 2011 there was some decisions made by the Gnome team where they decided to drop Gnome 2 for the Gnome 3 version but Gnome 3 was nowhere close to being ready they just decided to drop Gnome 2 anyway so there was like this kind of a purgatory of sorts time where about 2 or 3 years Gnome 3 was just not usable and Gnome 3 or Gnome 2 had been abandoned so, If you tried Ubuntu around that period of time, you would be trying the Unity desktop that Ubuntu made as a compensation factor for the decision Gnome made. So it’s a very different period of time, because he said 14 years, that’s 2011.

Michael:
[4:21] Especially 2011, because that’s when Unity was first launched. Like 11.04 was the first version of Unity as the main desktop, and it was not good. It got better later on. In fact, 1204 was a really good release, so it only took him a year to get there, but 1104 and 1110 were not good releases. It was very buggy, so if that was the time he tried it, I could see why he did not have a great experience. But now, it’s very different. Very different. Although, by the way, if you’re curious and you want some more Linux history content from me, then let me know in the comments.

JayzTwoCents:
[4:58] Today’s perspective is going to be a gaming system for Linux. Okay. Well, a gaming system built running Linux to kind of just see what it’s like from a very beginner’s perspective. Look, I am not versed in Linux. And what I’m going to ask of you guys, because I want to get aggressive with you down in the comments and start blocking people and stuff, you are going to probably have a different way to approach this. That’s the thing with Linux being open source is the fact that there is a bajillion different ways that you can do it. And yes, what is the old saying? You can tell the people that are running Arch because they’ll tell you. Do you know how many of you told me you’re running Arch in the comments of the video where we were running Bazite? Anyway, that’s what we’re doing today. We’re running Bazite.

Michael:
[5:38] Okay, so that is kind of true. There is a meme of people who say that they use Arch all the time. And it became a meme. Originally, it was just like a joke people were saying on forums and Reddit and stuff like that. And then it became a meme that a lot of people say. And there’s actually another question because it’s not really about whether they’re running Arch. The real question here is if someone is using Arch Linux and is a vegan and does CrossFit, which one do they tell you first? I mean, that’s a paradox question right there. But anyway, Bazite is actually really cool. It’s definitely worth trying. It’s very different from traditional distributions, but if you are interested in checking it out, I highly recommend it. Bazite is very cool. And I plan to make a video about Bazite in the future, so be sure to subscribe if you’d like more about that. But I think that if you’re interested at all in trying out Bazite, you should. Give it a shot. Very good.

JayzTwoCents:
[6:34] Very easy install process. You’re up and running very fast. It was pretty flawless. In fact, that’s what got our stuff working back there Even though I spent another hundred and something bucks on cables. I didn’t need to spend This is the system I built for that So what I actually wanted to say before I started to say I don’t want to get aggressive in the comments If you have you what you think is a better approach for this Please respectfully put it down in the comments, but include some information that’s actually useful not Why did you go with Bazi and not yada yada because guess what that doesn’t tell you anything All that does is come off as a pedantic put-down So, if you’re going to recommend a different distro of some sort, say, I recommend this distro because, and it has a user rating in terms of difficulty 1 to 10 of, put a number. Now, keep in mind if you’re approaching people that are beginners, what might seem like a 5 difficulty to you might be a 10 to someone that’s new. So try to put yourself back in perspective of being new.

Michael:
[7:28] Oops it’s hard for.

JayzTwoCents:
[7:29] A lot of you linux folks but uh bear with me we’re gonna try this here today so here’s the system.

Michael:
[7:33] Wait what okay i accidentally paused it there i didn’t mean to the first time but the second time i did on i did it on purpose but uh it’s kind of interesting because he’s preemptively calling out rudeness of a potential commenters while being a bit rude about it i mean like let’s just rewind that last part i.

JayzTwoCents:
[7:51] Know it’s hard for a lot of you linux folks but uh bear with me we’re gonna try this.

Michael:
[7:54] I know it’s hard for a lot of you linux folks i’m just saying that comes off a little weird if you’re trying to get people not to be aggressive or uh rude in the comments anyway but the other point about level of difficulty that is a good note some people don’t put themselves in the role of the beginner when they’re describing like the difficulty of things so i agree with that i’ve heard people say something as is easy when they’re talking about installing arch or gentoo at long long conversation i’m not going to go into details of how that happened but others have i’ve seen saying stuff like it’s simple when they’re talking about manually compiling something from source code and whatever but my favorite though is when i hear someone say it’s so easy to do once you learn how or something along those lines like once you know how to do it it’s so easy to do yes of course it is duh if you know how to do something it’s very easy to do it anyway that one makes me laugh because of so it’s so ridiculous like it’s basically making fun of itself in the same sentence but they don’t get it anyway i agree that having like a difficulty thing of putting um well putting your yourself in the position of the beginner when you’re talking about the difficulty thing that’s a very good point so So, that part, yes. The other part, eh, little weird. But, anyway.

JayzTwoCents:
[9:17] So here’s the system that I built. It is running a 14700K and a Z790 ITX board from ASRock, ASRock Phantom Gaming. Really because it’s the only ITX board that I have. 32 gigabytes of DDR5 running 6400 mega transfers at CL38. Nothing super fast or crazy. It does have a 240 millimeter AIO that is cooling it. It’s an old Phanteks MPG or MPH240. We used to joke around it’s the miles per hour. It’s got a 850 watt SFX power supply because we are also for the GPU running a 20 gigabyte 7900 XTX AMD card. And the reason for that is Linux support for AMD graphics cards tends to be better than NVIDIA. Although NVIDIA does seem to be improving in terms of the graphics support, at least on Bazite, because Phil actually went home after he did the wall, Phil set this up and set himself up a dual boot laptop that runs Bazite as well. And he was playing Cyberpunk and other games and kind of doing some performance comparisons and stuff and said everything appeared to be working. DLSS was working, ray tracing was working. It was a pretty seamless experience. He also set it up on his desktop, which is an RTX 4080 with a 13700K, and that was another flawless experience for him. In fact, if you’re just in there playing the game and you hand the controls to someone and they’re playing, they would never know they’re playing on Linux. That’s how seamless it is.

Michael:
[10:42] Wow, okay. So that’s awesome to hear. I personally use AMD for the reason that NVIDIA has not been the best for Linux in this era, But… Fun fact, if you go back 10 years, NVIDIA was the best. But then Lisa Su took over AMD and crushed it. The Linux support got so good and AMD just took it over. They took over the crown of the best option for Linux GPUs. So when I bought my hardware a few years ago, it was the best option. But NVIDIA has been finally back on track with support for the last year or two. Maybe a little more, but fairly recent because of some Wayland issues and NVIDIA trying to fight how things were done and whatever. But they finally gave in and started working with the community. So it is a lot better these days. And NVIDIA has been working a lot with various community members and stuff like that to improve. I mean, still proprietary software, but at least they’re putting more effort into it. So that’s fantastic. But it’s also great to hear that the support with Bazite is basically undetectable as being different. So that’s pretty awesome, actually. so I love that and I don’t have it I haven’t had NVIDIA in so long that I have no reference point in terms of like how good the quality of support is but based on the fact that I cover news all the time and I see the updates for the drivers and all that sort of stuff I have seen there’s been a lot of improvements by NVIDIA so that’s good now.

JayzTwoCents:
[12:09] Obviously there’s gonna be limitations to what you can do with Linux now in terms of desktop and.

Michael:
[12:14] Software support you got to look at every individual.

JayzTwoCents:
[12:16] Software you want to run to see if it has Linux installs and the level of support uh that’s going to be supported for the os but like for instance obs does have.

Michael:
[12:24] Well i mean yeah that’s true but that’s true for every operating system nothing can run everything if someone switches to windows from mac or to mac from windows there’s going to be something that is not there that’s just how it is because it’s a completely different operating system it’s completely different software all that sort of stuff i guess to be fair that does happen a little more often than, others with Linux because of the lower market share and all that sort of stuff. But not because Linux can’t handle this stuff. It’s not like it can’t support any particular app, but instead because the app developers don’t bother to support Linux. It’s like a chicken or the egg problem. But with the rate that the Linux platform is growing these days anyway, I think it’s possible that we will start seeing more devs supporting Linux. And I am very excited about that. That is awesome because we hit a 5% US desktop market share. Why couldn’t I say desktop? That’s interesting.

Michael:
[13:20] So desktop market share is at 5% now for the US market. And that is awesome because that’s hitting a very important milestone. And the momentum is also super fast. That’s 1% growth in a year. And that is crazy because there was a period of time where it was eight years for 1%. So one year is awesome. And with all the YouTubers and the podcasters and everybody talking about Linux these days, and the fact that Linux is finally at a stage where it’s fairly easy to use and fairly easy to set up and all that sort of stuff. I am very excited for the future of the platform.

JayzTwoCents:
[13:57] If you want to do live streaming does have a Linux install. That’s like my Insta360 Link 2 camera that’s got the gimbal and all that does have a driver and stuff that works, but it’s unknown yet because I haven’t tried it. Whether or not I’ll get the software to run, which gives me the gimbal control. So it might turn the device into the most basic version of the device. So for instance, my Rodecaster 2.

Michael:
[14:19] Okay. Well, first of all, the OBS thing, yes, OBS Studio works great for Linux. Support is, it has almost everything that the Windows version supports, but I will admit that sometimes there’s a bit of a delay in some of the features. For example, multitrack video was available in version 31 for the Windows edition. And then with Linux, it got it in version 31.1. So there is sometimes a little bit of a delay, but almost all of the features are available in the Linux version. Not absolutely everything, but almost everything. So it just depends. However, that point about the Insta360 software, that might be a problem because there are some companies that support Linux only in the most basic way. That is true. I’m not sure if Insta360 is one of those, but Elgato is one of those where you can use the Elgato hardware. Like I have a Stream Deck and it works great. But it doesn’t use the default like official software you can’t use the the stream deck software from elgato you have to use an alternative and it does work but it’s not the official supported thing so there is that kind of thing.

JayzTwoCents:
[15:23] Which we use in our podcast room yes i know we’ve been podcasting in forever uh hopefully this friday but anyway i digress uh it basically the software itself won’t run in linux which allows me to drag and drop like the roadcaster and pad samples and all that sort of stuff. However, everything else, it’ll work as like a giant DAC at that point, and that’s okay for linux if i don’t care about the sound pads and stuff and programming them because everything we would need that to do is actually controlled on board the roadcaster so all of the the the mixer and and all of the suppress compressors and all that stuff is built in it doesn’t need the software to run however what we do use the software for is when we record the audio and offload that into the software which then transcodes it into an mp3 for us that we upload to bussprout to then syndicate it to all of the podcasting services that is built into the software so we have to figure out a workaround for that it’s not impossible it’s just these are the kinds of things that you take on when you go into an open source os like linux or any of the million distros that are out there versus all the native windows support so.

Michael:
[16:29] Okay we’ll get to that last part in a second let’s talk about the roadcaster pro 2 so the The RODECaster Pro 2 is awesome. I use it myself and I think it is fantastic. And all my productions are using Linux, using the RODECaster. I love this device. It’s kind of pricey, but it’s definitely worth it. Now, Jay is right that the RODECaster app by RODE is only for Windows and Mac, last I checked, which is lame. But RODECaster, like he said, it can do pretty much everything directly on the device. So i’m pointing to my device i don’t you can’t see it because it’s it’s it’s over here but.

Michael:
[17:10] So it’s a fantastic device and it has a little touch screen at the very top and you can, change the different eqing of the microphones you can choose different profiles there’s also some sliders to control like the volume and the gain and all sorts of stuff and you can have different channels that are doing different features and yes there is the soundboard part and it’s kind of interesting because i haven’t tried to customize the soundboard at all so i never even bothered to because i didn’t really it’s not really something i’m using the roadcaster for so i’m not sure if it’s possible in linux to do that but i think i will try it out after this recording and maybe in a future video i’ll talk about it like maybe in a future podcast episode of destination linux or something like that i’ll talk about that so uh subscribe and all that but I do record audio in my Rodecaster, but I also do it through OBS. So one option for Jay is to just record it directly into the computer and skip the transfer thing. That way you don’t have to worry about moving it from the device to the computer. You can just.

Michael:
[18:14] Do that way but i also do record on the sd card so i have like an extra backup just in case there’s some kind of audio issue so what i do is just plug in the sd card into the laptop or the desktop and then just transfer that way it’s a little bit manual so i get why jay would want the full app because it does simplify some stuff like the only thing jay mentioned that i don’t have an answer four off the top of my head is the auto converting to mp3 and then uploading that there’s absolutely converter tools for linux but yeah the the automatically doing it inside of the roadcaster app and simplifying all the process into one app i get it that is more convenient so it’s understandable to feel like there’s something missing there but at the same time i think that it’s not that big of a deal breaker for me and a lot of people i mean he’s not even saying the deal breaker it’s just more of like i feel like this is such a good product anyway this one little caveat is not gonna make me hate the product or anything so but i do want to replay something because i forgot exactly how he phrased it uh because but it’s about the open source thing.

JayzTwoCents:
[19:26] Impossible it’s just these are the kinds of things that you take on when you go into an open source os like linux or any of the million distros that are out there versus all the native windows support.

Michael:
[19:36] Okay, that’s suggesting that open source is some kind of inferior thing. Like it’s like saying that the open source is an identifier for something being inferior or something like that. So OBS is open source and Windows users love it. Blender is open source and a ton of people love it. VLC is open source. WordPress is open source and powers like 35% of every website. Signal is open source, the really cool secure chat app. Bitwarden the password manager is open source and the list goes on and on and plus let’s not forget that linux is the most popular operating system on the planet in every other form of computing than the desktop i mean there’s that little asterisk there but you know it is true linux powers 100 of all the top 500 supercomputers and uh also the linux powers like 80 of the internet in fact the majority of microsoft’s azure service is powered by linux yes microsoft’s own cloud system is powered by linux it’s also the kernel that powers android and so much more so to say that open source is like you’re you’re basically like giving up options or you’re using something less so i don’t know that just kind of struck me maybe that’s not what he intended i mean you know maybe that’s not what jay was intending to sound that way what he’s saying but it kind of sounds like that so you know.

Michael:
[20:58] That’s just it’s clearly not that obviously open source is awesome not everything open source is great but there’s a lot of things that are great that are open source so it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with like you’re accepting some kind of issue you know.

JayzTwoCents:
[21:11] Kind of in a nutshell for gaming pretty good support content creation we’ll give it a middle thumb depending on what you’re trying to do like adobe and all that really isn’t going to work on linux however davinci resolve theoretically does so we haven’t tried it but that’s what we’re reading.

Michael:
[21:26] Okay so So DaVinci Resolve does work on Linux for sure. No, no question. But it is kind of a pain for no real reason. Blackmagic Design decided to support Linux, but focusing like exclusively on the Red Hat family. So if you are running Ubuntu, there is an option, but you need to use a third party project called Make Resolve Deb, I think, D-E-B. And then there’s also the option for DaVinci Box. I recently found this. Someone told me in the Discord channel, the discord server for tuxdigital.com slash discord and uh basically it uses uh distro box and then does one built specifically for running uh davinci resolve it’s not a simple download and install process like it is on windows and mac so it is fair to say that it’s you know and that’s not the greatest option and greatest experience which is annoying black magic design that is very annoying just make a flat pack please Peace.

Michael:
[22:22] Please. Okay. Or just make a distro box that you provide. I don’t know, something like that. Anyway, but resolve does work on Linux and resolve is pretty awesome. That’s what I use. It’s, it’s worth it. The stuff to deal with it’s worth it. Resolve is fantastic. Uh, so I don’t really have that much to say about it, but it Adobe point. Yes. If you want to use Adobe products, that’s not really an option. There are alternatives to everything that Adobe makes, including the video editor like resolve uh but yeah if you if you insist on adobe products that will be somewhat of a problem um.

JayzTwoCents:
[22:59] And then when it comes to like there’s a lot of other programs and stuff that just straight up aren’t going to work on linux at all but fortunately though.

Michael:
[23:06] I mean that’s true just like all the mac apps don’t necessarily work on windows and not all the windows apps necessarily work on mac so i feel like people use this as like a a thing against Linux, when it’s true for every operating system, if you move from one platform to another, there’s going to be compensation issues. There’s going to be things that you have to compromise on. You might not have every piece of software that you want. And that’s true for all of them. And if someone starts with Linux and he moves to other things, that’s still true. There are still things you can’t run that are Linux specific that are not available on Windows. That’s true on all of these things so i feel like it’s always presented in a way that linux is the inferior not having thing but really it’s everything they all do that you know.

JayzTwoCents:
[23:55] There’s like open rgb and a lot of third party support to actually be able to control like your rgb software and stuff or like phil for instance has like the razor synapse stuff and and other razor devices and rgb devices that actually natively worked in linux through a program called open razor that works in linux so you’re gonna I’m going to have to.

Michael:
[24:14] Okay so that’s true there are a lot of alternatives that implement things for linux even if the official devs don’t care about it um but uh actually that’s one of the coolest things about linux community is that you can like when a company says to the linux community our linux dev and says you know this will not work you’re not going to support your platform you can’t have it and then a lot of those devs will say oh is that so watch this and then they create things like open razor which is a great example of that so uh razor is annoying kind of a bit silly in fact not only do they not support linux they don’t support mac which is kind of surprising but they don’t support mac for their heart their software and it’s just you know at least they didn’t ignore just linux but at the same time very weird oh earlier i mentioned elgato that’s another one of those companies but i forgot to tell you what the software was so So know that the Stream Deck software does not work from Elgato, but if you go to the FlatHub and get OpenDeck, Open, D-E-C-K, then that will get you basically a plug and play. It detects it right out of the box. No issues. That’s what I use. Works great. Also, if you have a cam link, it works perfectly in Linux. You don’t need to do anything because they used universal protocols to make it work. So you don’t have to do anything. There probably is some software for it, But if you just plug it in and then open it in OBS, it will find it. It works fine. I use it all the time. So there you go.

JayzTwoCents:
[25:43] Have a your results and your mileage will vary but like I said we’re using Bazite today So we’re gonna set this up over here Phil’s gonna kind of walk me through it because I’ve never done it and by him walking me through it He’s gonna be walking you through it.

JayzTwoCents:
[25:59] Okay, so first thing you got to do is obviously make it install media Yeah, we’re gonna assume that you already have at least one working computer or laptop. Yeah or something or friends computer So what does immutable mean the OS is on its own separate partition that’s read-only from the user Standpoint so you can’t mess it up basically immutable just means It’s a lot more idiot proof than your standard like Linux distribution where because Linux is full power like Like most like arch and all that you can go in there and really mess things up exactly Yeah, that’s arches whole philosophy is that it’s a build your own OS Yeah, exactly build your own piecemeal like you know I mean you get the installer you install what packages you want, etc, etc, Bazelite is like, let’s take an already established distro like Fedora, make it immutable so that it’s a lot more difficult for the user to kind of mess up the OS. And then let’s add all of the gaming specific packages that things like SteamOS and Valve have done. Now, I want to step in real quick. A lot of people had negative things to say about it being an immutable because they’re probably Linux power users, which is why you wouldn’t want that. But this is, again, from the perspective of someone that maybe just built their first system, doesn’t have Windows, doesn’t want to buy Windows. You can get up in gaming with AAA titles like this for free. Now, there’s free ways to get Windows, but this is obviously an anti-Windows type of video here. So it says right here.

Michael:
[27:14] Okay, so there’s a lot to comment here. So this part might be a little long, but I’ll try to go back and replay things if I need to. I hate to be the um actually guy, but that’s not really what an immutable system is. There’s two different kinds of things that are called immutable. One is immutable and one isn’t. So I’ll try to explain that. But they described Bazite fairly close to accurate, but Bazite is not an immutable system. First, if you look at that screenshot, so let’s go back to that screenshot they were showing wherever it is. I’ll get to it. Don’t worry. I’ll get to it somewhere. It’s coming. There we go. Okay. So this screenshot right here, I want to point out something here. They’re talking about the word immutable and what it means. And nowhere in this screenshot does it say the word immutable. Because the Bazite team do not call it an immutable system because it isn’t. But before I explain what that term means, I just want to say it doesn’t really matter if you are new to Linux and you’re interested in trying out Bazite, just go for it. It doesn’t matter if it, if it’s immutable or not or whatever it just enjoy using it. Who cares? Uh, but yeah.

Michael:
[28:29] If you want to know what it is, then let’s answer Jay’s question. What does immutable mean? The word immutable means it cannot be changed. As in, not that some of it can be changed or so, it cannot be changed. There’s no customization, no ability to modify anything.

Michael:
[28:46] 99% of distros or image-based systems that are referred to as being immutable are not.

Michael:
[28:52] Bazite, Fedora Silverblue, Bluefin, Fedora Kinoite, OpenSUSE Aeon, and others are referred to by some people as being immutable.

Michael:
[29:00] And it doesn’t really matter because there’s not really a great word to describe what it is. There’s not really a good term that actually explains it properly. So immutable has become sort of a stopgap kind of ad hoc style meaning. So it doesn’t actually, it’s not a correct definition of what the word means to what the system is, but people kind of use it that way. And the way they described it is kind of accurate to how people use it, but not really what it means. Because you can make changes that are not affected by updates. These changes are typically like files that you put on your user account or adding some apps or, you know, that kind of thing. Not changes to the system itself, but it does let you change certain things. Whereas an immutable system doesn’t ever for anything. For example Roku devices for those who don’t know Roku Roku’s Roku OS is a Linux-based operating system but you can’t change anything inside the OS most people don’t even know that it’s Linux-based it’s designed to only be updated and modified by Roku that is an immutable system so you know there’s the differences now again it doesn’t matter who really cares I’m not going to interrupt the video to correct the use of the word immutable every single time it does not matter to me.

Michael:
[30:24] And it doesn’t matter that much at all. I’m just letting you know, in case you see it somewhere, it’s not, might not be exactly what it means. Cause you might see people say, I’d sometimes say immutable ish because it’s kinda, but not really. And you might see someone say semi immutable. And that’s not really a great term either because you know, then people were like, where do I get an immutable system? You know, anyway, there’s really not a better term to use. So it is what it is. You might see other things calling it atomic, but that’s more about how the system updates.

Michael:
[30:55] We’ll get to that in a second, I guess. But there’s not a great word. So let’s just say, eh.

Michael:
[31:03] Now let’s talk about what bazite is they did say for the most part they’re correct they said that the os is on its own separate partition and that is basically right bazite has a file system separate from the user data so you get a file system that is managed independently from where you store your files like photos and videos and you know any additional applications you install and that sort of stuff it’s not really meant to be idiot proof though as they said because anyone can run any traditional linux standard stuff you know like a standard style distribution and as long as they don’t tinker with it and mess with like fundamental core components it’ll continue to work just fine if you install like linux manager zoran or ubuntu or even fedora or whatever as long as it works on your hardware then it will continue to work if you don’t go digging into the system anyway these kinds of systems though they like bazite they don’t offer the option to go digging into the system, you know, which is still fine because most people don’t want to do that anyway. But I just wanted to point out that if as long as you don’t try to mess with it and tinker with core components, you’re probably going to be just fine. Now, the main purpose of these kinds of systems versus traditional distros is that the development is a lot cleaner and the update mechanism is cleaner. And there’s a bunch of different benefits for both developers and users.

Michael:
[32:19] It uses a method called atomic or transactional updates. And this means that the updates are applied only if all the updates are successful and only applied during a reboot. There are many benefits to this approach. And I know some Windows users are not happy about the whole rebooting thing to get updates, but it is the best way to do it in certain styles.

Michael:
[32:40] And there are many benefits to this approach, such as making it easier for the developers to make it in the first place. And for users, it offers support for rollback. So if something goes wrong, you can roll back to the previous version and be up and running in seconds so that’s pretty good but okay there’s that they said something about arch i wanted to go back to that because well you, yeah i don’t agree with that perspective of arch i mean i do agree the perspective of arch just not the applying arch to linux anyway hold on.

JayzTwoCents:
[33:10] More idiot proof than your standard like linux distribution where because linux is full power like like most like arch and all that you can go in there and really mess things up.

Michael:
[33:18] Okay so you can mess things up in arch and arch is specifically not meant to be used by most people. So it’s important to remember that Arch is not the only Linux because he’s talking about Linux being full power. Arch is full power, but Linux isn’t necessarily full power. Most people don’t want to do that stuff. And as long as you don’t, you’re good to go. But I do want to point out something. The Arch team targets a specific user type and it’s listed on their own wiki it’s so it’s something so specific that it’s just kind of like anyway i’ll just let me give you a second i think it’s seven yeah here we go all right so there it is arch targets competent users who enjoy its do-it-yourself nature and who further exploit it to shape the system to fit their unique needs so first of all that’s using terminology that I don’t think really counts as beginner you know it’s it’s people who are competent or exploiting the system it’s not beginner friendly phrasing in my opinion oh and also let’s check out the about page there’s another piece there that I want to point out so this part right here.

Michael:
[34:38] It says that Arch describes itself or the team describes it as a versatile and simple distribution designed to fit the needs of the competent Linux user. It is both powerful and easy to manage. See that whole easy, relatively speaking, easy, making it the ideal and ideal for servers and workstations. I would not put that on a server. Like, why would you want your server to constantly update all the time? You know, because Arch updates all the time. Anyway, not important. I just want to point out the whole simple part because they actually have a definition of what they mean by simple. So here is the definition of what they mean. Arch Linux defines simplicity as without unnecessary additions or modifications. It ships software as released by the original developers upstream with minimal distribution specific downstream changes. Okay, so their wiki explains their definition to more rather be like minimal. Structure of the system is being minimal rather than simple to use. So yeah, they should just say minimal and then they wouldn’t have to explain what they mean by the term. Now, all of that is not to bash Arch Linux.

Michael:
[35:53] Arch is great for many people. It’s just not great for most people, especially not for beginners. And the way that jay was talking about it was kind of associating all of linux to be like arch and arch is certainly not the baseline for what linux is they are kind of comparing two polar opposite types of systems bill compared bazite to standard linux distributions and jay said linux is full power and jumped the shark right to arch arch is full power yes but the standard linux distros are not a build your own os arch isn’t the typical way linux systems work ubuntu fedora linux mint zoran etc those are pre-packaged systems that get you started quickly right out of the box that’s that’s how typical linux distros work if you want a system that is easy to use and gets out of the way there are a lot of those arch isn’t one of them it’s not a bad thing it just means that this comparison is kind of odd you know that’s why i wanted to take a take a moment and explain the differences between the arch the comparison of how he how jay was saying it not necessarily that jay said he doesn’t know that much about linux and everything i’m not saying this is as like a a jab at jay or anything i just wanted to clarify that not all linux is build your own os not all linux is full power some of them most certainly are arch most certainly is but not Not everything.

Michael:
[37:19] I just didn’t want to, I just want people to be confused about this as in like Bazite and Arch are the only options.

Michael:
[37:26] If you’re new to Linux and you want to get started, check out the description in this video because I’ll put a link to my playlist about getting started and you can just skip all that stuff. I should have probably put that before the rest of that.

Michael:
[37:39] Anyway, I’ll just wrap up this whole section about Bazite structure. Phil said that Bazite is like taking Fedora and immutability to it. Well, Fedora Atomic desktops already did that stuff. I mean, not immutable, as we already said, but immutable-ish, you know. Bazite is more like taking the Fedora Atomic stuff and then adding the gaming and optimizations to that. You know, I’m just saying Fedora has both styles. Not really that important, but there are other options than just the universal blue stuff, you know. Oh wait jay mentioned some that some people don’t like the kinds of systems like immutability and that they said that there’s like probably for power users that don’t like it there are some downsides to this kind of system and they lack some flexibility but for the most part that doesn’t really matter um but you know most people don’t want the flexibility that is available in like traditional distributions um but i guess i’ve spent enough time on this section let’s just move on if you want a dedicated video to this kind of stuff let me know in the comments so.

JayzTwoCents:
[38:33] It says right here own games outside of steam lutris which is pre-installed and other.

Michael:
[38:37] Launchers can only.

JayzTwoCents:
[38:38] Run games from uh most game stores but clean cleanly integrate them into steam gaming mode.

Michael:
[38:43] Real quick it says cannot only that’s kind of like a phrasing to some people might not see like sometimes i’m saying something and i’ll mean i’ll put not and then well i’ll mean to put not and then forget to type the word not or something like that you know this is kind of funny because some people will mess up typing it and mean and it completely means something the opposite of what you’re trying to say or reading it and the exact same kind of thing you know you reading the opposite uh but it’s just kind of funny because i do that in a typing sense all the time where i’ll type something and on a comment and then i’ll read it back and go whoa that should not say that should that should say not here and then i have to edit it and it says like you know edit anyway it doesn’t matter but i just thought it’s kind of funny which.

JayzTwoCents:
[39:24] Includes ea app epic games gog itch.io rockstar ubisoft your dad’s old cds and more so basically it’s like a one-stop gaming launcher os type service but you obviously have other things built into it like you have your browser and a desktop and you can stream from it and all that.

Michael:
[39:42] Yeah i mean lutris is fantastic it’s a great way to run various different kinds of games in fact lutris is also about game preservation so they have a lot of cool stuff for like older games and that sort of stuff it’s a very cool project.

JayzTwoCents:
[39:56] When we download Bazite you’ll see the option for if you click the button up there so it starts with what hardware are you using oh wait what are the other hardwares so desktop home theater pc framework desktop uh oh handhelds okay laptops and then vms obviously all right so desktop, uh what is the vendor of your primary gpu so we’re gonna say amd rx, Plus, oh, it even supports Arc. That’s cool. Arc and NVIDIA. Steam OS. Or what’s GNOME? GNOME is Fedora’s default desktop environment. So the desktop environment is basically the user interface for the desktop mode. So what do we have up here? I have KDE up here.

Michael:
[40:32] Real quick, it was the default. Maybe when they did this, it was at the time. But with the last release of Fedora 42, KDE Plasma also became a top-level option or a top-level addition. so there’s now two options for which desktop you use but the rest of it yeah.

JayzTwoCents:
[40:49] Just because um i have a little bit more experience with it um from steam os this is the big one for basically if you want to run it as like a home theater pc or um by default on a handheld steam gaming mode is enabled so what you’re referring to is do you want to uh do you want steam gaming mode this will automatically log into game mode and only supports a single user yeah which is that like big picture yeah it is It’s exactly big picture. It’s actually, in fact, exactly how SteamOS handles. So I’m going to say no, because we still want this to be like a full- A desktop kind of computer OS, yeah. So then you’re just going to download the ISO. For Windows, I usually like to use Rufus for creating the USB. Okay, so what about like motherboard drivers and like Wi-Fi adapter and chipsets and USB and all that stuff? So that’s the crazy thing about modern Linux is that basically all of those drivers, all support for like most modern ethernet and wi-fi controllers and bluetooth controllers and stuff is all built into the uh the os but for the record like the stigma has always been nvidia support in linux is terrible but at least for bazi and your 4080 and the games that you tried it on it was pretty pretty seamless yeah.

Michael:
[41:55] Okay so i have a couple comments that i wanted to share before we move on um i don’t really recommend rufus for most people because if you look at the screenshot let’s go back uh let’s see look at this screenshot.

JayzTwoCents:
[42:08] So then you’re just going to download the… Okay, so what about like motherboard?

Michael:
[42:12] This is a very non-beginner friendly type of thing. The defaults are typically okay, but it might be confusing and make it take longer. I recommend Fedora MediaWriter. Let me see if I can just open it for you. Okay, so this is Fedora MediaWriter. It is basically a super simple, you just tell it what ISO to use and what drive to use, and then it does everything else and it doesn’t ask you any more questions. It’s just that simple. And it has support for Windows and Mac as well as Linux. So if you want to run it in a flat pack, you can do that as well. I’m not saying that Rufus is bad. Rufus is great, in fact. Rufus also gives you the ability to use like the persistence option. So you can use persistence with Rufus. And it also has, well, by the way, if you don’t know what that means, and also all those settings look a little daunting, just use Fedora MidiWriter. Makes it easier. But rufus is good i’m not saying don’t use it if you like it enjoy controllers.

JayzTwoCents:
[43:10] And bluetooth controllers and stuff is all built into the uh the os.

Michael:
[43:13] Yeah it’s all built in like pretty much the well not the os the kernel has it all built in typically uh so there are some things you still need to juggle drivers for but most of the time you don’t anymore for.

JayzTwoCents:
[43:24] Bazi and your 4080 and the games that you tried it on it was pretty pretty seamless yeah from a windows experience i’ve heard anywhere from like a minus 15% to like 25% performance hit. Although I didn’t really see that in the games I tested, which was like Cyberpunk and Control and a few other titles and stuff, but I haven’t really extended. Yeah, you were seeing a couple of FPS difference. Yeah. In fact, it’s weird because even in Forza Horizon, I actually saw a gain in average FPS. The stigma’s changing finally. Yeah. So I mean, it kind of just, your mileage may vary depending on what game you’re playing and like what architecture of nvidia card it is as far as amd is concerned i’ve always heard that it’s basically either a negligible performance difference or it’s faster in under Linux okay.

Michael:
[44:13] So okay that’s pretty much pretty spot on except for the nvidia support being terrible uh but that thing i guess it’s a stigma that’s happened because i mean it’s not the greatest thing ever but um to me i think terrible suggests that you can’t use it at all and that’s not the case and like i said a long time ago it was actually really good uh in terms of like better than amd maybe not necessarily really good but whatever but amd has crushed it like i said um but you know i guess it’s it is true that nvidia has, improved drastically over the years and it also is important that the rest of that this stuff he was talking about like there’s a some people say like there’s a performance hit and then some people say there’s a performance game gain it depends on what they’re playing and their hardware and all that sort of stuff. But even Nvidia’s has greatly improved in recent years.

JayzTwoCents:
[45:03] So our ISO is downloaded, so you’re gonna go ahead and open Rufus. Okay, so Rufus is open. Do we need to format our driver in? Nope, it’s going to nuke everything that’s on that drive. Okay, disk or ISO image, right? Please select. So that’s gonna be the file, bad light, the ISO. And then just go ahead and hit start. Okay, we’ll be back once the USB stick is burnt and then, oh, burnt, geez. Showing my age now. It might burn it. Once the USB stick is written, we’ll be back and then we will show you how to install it on the computer. So now take it to…

Michael:
[45:36] Okay, um, I still call it burn sometimes. Uh-oh. I’m okay with it. I think I think it kind of works. I think it still sounds pretty cool, though.

JayzTwoCents:
[45:47] Yeah To the system that we’re gonna install Bazzite on. Yep. All right All right, so now he’s got the ESP stick in the new computer and So we’re gonna go to BIOS and choose boot priorities to go to this because this this drive actually has a Windows OS on it So we need that nuked and then obviously we are going to reinstall Bazzite over top of it All right, so we want to make the boot option number one our Voyager, because that’s uh we’re using the corsair voyager stick so if i just restart now it should boot to that drive now obviously based on your os it’s going to probably look different or not your os but your bios it’s going to look different so you’re going to have to kind of if you don’t know your bios very well you’re going to have to look that up and figure out what works best but if you’re building a brand new computer with nothing on the drive then it’ll just boot to the usb stick no matter what yeah so.

Michael:
[46:31] Yes uh you can also skip the boot order by pressing a function key and i don’t know which one it is because depending on your manufacturing hardware it could be uh different so it could be anywhere between like f2 f8 f9 f10 f11 or f12 uh you know i typically i don’t even know what mine is actually i just hit a bunch of them and then it pops up and then i just choose which one i want i probably should take the time to figure out which one it is but that’s like multiple boots and i don’t care i can tap up multiple times whatever um but yeah so or you could just do what jay did that’s also good too.

JayzTwoCents:
[47:07] Oh, let’s see. Install Bazite or test the media and install. Should we? No, I don’t do it. Just extra time. Gotta live life on the edge. So is that Bazite 41 mean 4.1? No, it’s 41. That many versions? Wow. Remember how I said my first experience was in 2003 with Fedora 3? It’s Fedora 41 now, so. So it’s gonna look very hacker screeny. It’s so going for the garbage file.

Michael:
[47:37] Installation so okay real quick uh bad site has not had that many releases they’ve only had a like they’ve been around for like four years or so uh so they’ve had a lot of releases but there’s not that many the 41 associates to the fact that it’s based on fedora 41 although that does explain because they’re using 41 which means this is a little while ago because 42 has been out for a few months now so uh at least a couple months now so you’re now in a situation where the uh there’s a little bit of differences between what is available now and to what they were using.

JayzTwoCents:
[48:10] Destination no disk selected so they select the disk i would set the time and date time zone uh los angeles first now select my drive yep so select a system installation destination, okay so boom storage configuration automatic and then i would check that box that says free up space by removing or shrinking existing partitions because we want to nuke whatever else is on there so okay so click free up space by removing and shrinking existing partition.

Michael:
[48:35] If you’re trying to wipe out what’s ever there so if you want to do a dual boot this is not the solution and.

JayzTwoCents:
[48:44] Done yep we want to preserve any of these partitions like there’s a delete all button Yeah. So do that. Wham, delete. And then hit reclaim space. And then if you want, you can connect to your network right now. Doesn’t really matter. Probably no point here, right? Yep. And then the user will be default Bazite with the password of Bazite.

Michael:
[49:04] Okay so it looks like they’re not changing the password and the username so that is the default bad side and bazi and then you should change it if you are planning to use bazi you should customize the user and password in the installation don’t use the defaults it’s not a great thing to do they’re probably doing it for like a demo purposes and they don’t really care because they’re not going to keep using the same installation but uh yeah don’t do that.

JayzTwoCents:
[49:30] And that’s pretty much it as far as choices during it’s hey none of all those we want to spy on new stuff isn’t that a bit refreshing microsoft is no longer in the business of making os’s the os is nothing but a data mining tool yeah basically i’d love to know the real metrics on how much data microsoft sells and how much money they make on the data versus the cell the sales of windows but you make more money on the sell of the data which means they should just make windows free at this point so you’re paying to be spied on now.

Michael:
[49:57] Yes exactly i mean they give more and more reasons to switch away from windows you know every day uh especially to uh the like the windows recall thing man that’s just them admitting they want to track everything you do on your system i guess thanks microsoft for giving people one of the best reasons ever to get away from windows because that is just horrific what a terrible idea whoever came up with the idea to do this and then took it to the executives and then somehow the executives agreed with it then paid for people to develop it and then tested it and then shipped it or like and announced it at what point did they think maybe people are not gonna like this of tracking everything they do and making screenshots of everything they do on their system. How did that never come up? Such a terrible idea. It is mind-blowing. But on the bright side, more and more reason to use Linux.

JayzTwoCents:
[51:05] So it says reboot system. Click reboot and then take the drive out. I mean, it should automatically change the boot loader, I think, to this now, right? Yep. Perform muck management. What’s muck? So this is for secure boot stuff. You can just say continue boot. It’s a little bitty wheel. Updating cargs. What’s a carg? I bet you’re going to tell us.

Michael:
[51:29] I mean, I wasn’t going to tell you because I wasn’t going to bother. But you asked specifically so that means kernel arguments which is a component of the boot c tool uh cargs anyway and boot c is basically the tool that makes all of the immutable ish stuff work so there you go you’re welcome you did ask for it.

JayzTwoCents:
[51:51] One reboot and should be, was it like a selector that was the that was the bootloader so one of the cool things about bazite and fedora atomic desktops is that you always get the current version of the os and then when it doesn’t update it keeps the last version as well so in case an update breaks you can get in the bootloader and then all right so password.

Michael:
[52:18] That’s that rollback stuff i was talking about earlier.

JayzTwoCents:
[52:20] Where it should be bazite i like that background that’s cool okay system fatal error probably because we need internet it does look very windowsy so far like enough to where you don’t feel lost that’s why i picked uh kde because gnome is more mac like connect to the internet so so firefox is pre-installed so this is an application launcher oh this is very windowsy looking that’s kind of why i chose kde over gnome is gnome is a little bit more mac like kde is a bit more windows like and so if you’re you know used to a windows experience i would recommend ke that works yeah.

Michael:
[52:55] I think that’s a good way of doing it you know.

JayzTwoCents:
[52:58] You can you can buy our merch, our merch is linux compatible wow you can’t get away from the constant steam update or even on linux huh yep okay so at this point you should or should you should by now know how to log into to your Steam, so you’re gonna do that. I’d like to use the Steam utility, or the Steam app to log in, so I don’t have to remember my password. So you see, OBS Studio. Hey, look at that. If they support Mac, they better support Linux. Oh yeah, and it does the, where’s my mouse? It gets all big. All right. Download on Flathelb. Com.obsproject.studio.flatpackref. I’m assuming that’s File Explorer. So downloads.

JayzTwoCents:
[53:45] Oh, cool. Nice. Okay. Wow. That was easy. I was worried that it was actually not going to be that complicated. It was going to be more complicated. But what I’m doing is I’m just trying to see without you showing me, can I navigate to something like, you know, on Mac OS, I always feel lost. And I’ve used Mac for years. But, okay, that’s cool, so yeah, so a lot of Linux programs I would hope would just link you to the right place in the store. So the Discover store is, Bazelite uses primarily a Flatpak style app install. So the Discover store is basically the repository for that. So usually, if you’re going to be searching for an app, you would check Discover first and then, or if you do Google it and then you find out it’s in Flatpak, then you’re Okay, so here’s everything installed here. clearly you can see.

Michael:
[54:32] That okay so pretty much all that’s right i just wanted to make a few comments here because there has been some changes with bazite with what since jay and phil did this video there’s a lot of changes in fact the discover store is no longer being the main store that you’re using uh but i do want to say real quick i’m glad to see jay’s expectation of how something would work you know was so seamless he just did it how he normally would and it worked fine. So that is great. But Bazite has switched away from Discover to Bazaar. That’s the new store’s name. And I actually covered Bazaar on a recent episode of my weekly news podcast show This Week in Linux. If you want to learn more about the store in general and how it works, you can check out the coverage I did there. I’ll have it linked in the description. But real quick, Bazaar is, like they were saying, it is solely made for flat packs, and that’s true.

Michael:
[55:26] Actually, I talked with the Bazite team somewhat frequently in general, but I can tell you they are working on a process to make it even easier to do than what Jay did. So they’re trying to make it so that when you click the install button for the app in the FlatHub that it just launches the page in Bazaar so you can quickly install whatever it is that it you’re trying to get rather than having to go to your downloads folder and then launching the file and all that sort of stuff which is fantastic in my opinion because if they want to if they’re trying to make it possible to just lower the barrier entry and remove as many manual styles as possible then you know better definitely do that but bizarre is a different store it looks different it works differently but it is also not just replacing discover it replaces the gnome store as well as well as being the universal choice for all of the universal blue stuff so if you get bluefin aurora it’s available on all of them so yeah i think bizarre is a pretty cool store if you’ll learn more about it link in the description.

JayzTwoCents:
[56:28] There’s also themes i’m assuming you could re-theme and re-skin yeah that’s the stuff that’s already installed that has updates need to be done so you just auto update it from here yep yeah this looks exactly like i’m used to seeing okay so that actually was very easy to get that so so far this looks very windows like now big picture obviously so if we were to set this to big picture mode whoops which is what right here now where is it uh right here yeah so if you would select that setting that said single user big picture or steam os mode this is what would boot like it would go through all the bazite stuff and then here yep like this is your os at that point well i don’t i don’t care for big picture personally but i just wanted to see show people what that looked like sure.

Michael:
[57:11] Um actually i think it’s a good point to show point that out and like to show it and everything but i think the real value of this feature of bazite anyway is for anyone who wants to create their own like set top box gaming console or whatever so if you have like a spare computer and we turn into a living room gaming console with bazite booting into big picture mode directly like that you’re essentially setting up your own steam machine but really easily so i think it’s pretty cool i also do not typically select that but uh it is pretty cool to have that option show.

JayzTwoCents:
[57:43] Me how to find the games that are compatible with linux because right now this is going to show me my whole library and stuff obviously not all these games are going to work with linux the way the linux runs games um is if it’s a windows game it’ll run through a compatibility layer called proton which is what valve has developed for steam os and the steam deck to basically get support for windows games without having them having the developers have to make a linux native version all of them will attempt to run via proton but um let’s see what happens if i try and run this like super indie game yeah sure.

Michael:
[58:17] Uh real quick uh valve is not the only people it’s a collaborative effort uh code weavers and the wine developer team are all working together to make proton so valve is awesome that they’re funding the process but I just want to give credit to the CodeWeaver’s team and the YNDevs because there’s more than just Valve involved, not important, I just want to give them credit.

JayzTwoCents:
[58:39] Curious. Now, while that’s going, show me though where the store showed like the games that were like tested and I mean.

Michael:
[58:45] Not important to necessarily mention. I just wanted to. That’s what I meant. It is important that they’re doing it because it is awesome. Proton is awesome.

JayzTwoCents:
[58:53] Anything that says it’ll run great on steam deck is is basically what you’re looking for click the click the collections click create a new collection and then create dynamic collection and then if you go to the steam deck thingy you can do verified only which is they verified it works on steam deck verified playable or verified playable and untested let’s see yeah let’s just.

Michael:
[59:15] So this is interesting because they’re having to go through this process of creating this collection thing which is not a great thing you have to build this collection each each person has to individually build this that seems very bad but i tested it myself earlier like a couple weeks ago i’m trying to find out like on my own steam thing and you’ll notice that there’s that there’s a penguin at the top right here so like the very top left of the steam client i noticed this myself a few weeks ago that does nothing like nothing if you turn on proton for uh every game which pretty much everybody does and by default now going forward if you install steam for the first time it will have that there but it’ll have proton on by default anyway that means that button doesn’t do anything because the whole difference is between like a native build and a windows game that you don’t have the ability to run but with proton it kind of just runs tries to run it anyway so that it just it’s very confusing they need to fix it so that that button just creates a collection or you already have the collection or whatever and that way you can do it but because right now you click it it does absolutely nothing there’s no changes whatsoever that you’ll see see.

JayzTwoCents:
[1:00:30] What happens this is a very indie game chances are it should just work as if it was windows, hey look at that it literally just works a completely untested game yeah it’s working just fine a lot different for your last linux experience i’m guessing oh my god so as you can see if you stick to the steam ecosystem it’s very seamless so if you’re wondering what um we’re talking about when we’re talking about a compatibility layer and proton and stuff so obviously a windows game is going to expect windows things like directx and is it emulating the environment it’s not an emulation it’s a translation so what it does is basically translates like directx to vulcan which is the linux native um graphics api and that sort of stuff so the the The point I want to mention about the whole it’s not emulation is that that’s why the performance hit is so tiny and or sometimes even a performance gain. Here’s a true test. This game, the movies has is like 20 years old, maybe in fact, it’s not even on the steam store anymore. It’s just because I have it. So let’s see if this will run. Well, I don’t know.

Michael:
[1:01:42] Maybe it doesn’t look like it ran. But let’s go back to that Proton thing. Proton is awesome. Proton basically makes games you never thought would work on Linux work on Linux. It’s crazy. But this actually reminds me of a conversation I had in the YouTube comments a few days ago. So he was talking about how it sometimes works better. And someone asked, how is it possible for Linux to outperform Windows running a Windows game? And well linux is absurdly absurdly more efficient than windows just from the jump so adding a little bit of extra weight to do the proton compatibility layer on top of linux is still not as resource hungry as windows so that’s pretty much how windows is just so resource hungry that linux can have something sitting on top that’s translating the stuff to run on linux and it runs sometimes better not always not every game is optimized through proton or whatever but sometimes they are just better on linux which is kind of hilarious that a windows game runs worse on windows it.

JayzTwoCents:
[1:02:45] Might be too long this one may not i saw like some yeah until i scrolled over like my so how do we now like force uh exit of a program oh yeah because all the force is told the same okay cool.

Michael:
[1:02:59] Oh by the way that he’s doing this 20 year old game i actually probably like a couple months ago or something i decided to try out one of these really old games i had it was a game from 2008 and it was actually the first game i ever put on my steam account and this was before you could play games on linux so i was dual booting at the time and it was also the only game on my steam account for a very long time because i switched linux and forgot about it entirely and just ignored it because i couldn’t play games so by the time steam comes around, and it comes around on linux i mean i decided to try that game on linux it did not work back then but now it does it not it doesn’t have the greatest thing it doesn’t exactly look how i remembered it looking but it does technically work and it does run the game and you can play it’s uh audio surf was the name of the game for those who are curious uh so super old games can also work through proton not great but it does work so i just thought that was a fun story.

JayzTwoCents:
[1:04:09] Okay so that one doesn’t work okay well locked up was a, is an indie game the last major update was in 2021 now if you want to take the guesswork out of it like you said you can go to uh here right linux stuffs and then we can go to steam deck and verified and playable right that probably our best compatibility there even though we’ve got the yellow so now this will show us all the games that are like verified and playable Yeah.

Michael:
[1:04:41] You shouldn’t have to do all that. That shouldn’t be necessary.

JayzTwoCents:
[1:04:47] For Steam Deck. For Steam Deck, which will translate over to Vazai. All right, here we go. So the last one we just did was an unknown game locked up. This is last played today. Oh, there it goes. And that was an unknown. So just because it’s not on the verified list doesn’t mean it won’t work. It just means obviously there’s too many titles for them to have gone through and tested all of them, right? Yep. Yeah, it plays just fine with that. Yeah, it’s working fine. Okay, now the other launchers. All right, so if you’re going to be running stuff off of Epic or GOG or Amazon games, you’re going to look for Heroic Games Launcher. It’s called Heroic. Yep. Yeah, okay. So download from…

Michael:
[1:05:22] Yeah, it used to be called Heroic Games Launcher, and now it’s just Heroic.

JayzTwoCents:
[1:05:25] Yeah. Lighthub. Yep. Now this is going to translate those other launchers into this OS. Yeah. Okay, so I have to log into each one. Yeah, whichever one you want to download from. So right now, let’s try Rocket League, which will be on the Epic Games Store. Go to library. hey there’s rocket league so nice download nice oh no okay wait alt f4 we fixed it yeah okay.

Michael:
[1:05:47] Uh by the way rocket league happens to be my main game so not to brag champ 3, i’ve i’ve not got gc yet for those who know what that means uh you know it’s kind of a shame but i’m i’m pretty good pretty good champ 3 is still pretty high tier uh but yeah for those who don’t know what that means don’t worry about it.

JayzTwoCents:
[1:06:10] Okay so obviously with all steamworks it’s very, familiar layout enough to where you don’t feel lost if you’re trying to move from windows to this um obviously with uh heroic we could do our other game launchers and then you can use lutris for like ea if you’re playing ea games and such now we’re talking about ea games and online gaming that is where it’s not all unicorns and rainbows because there’s a problem with anti-cheat basically all of the big AAA multiplayer games, unfortunately are not, are just going to be a no-go because of the anti-cheat. For the multiplayer aspect of it. If they have a single player version you can play, but you can’t play like Battlefield 2042 online. They have an offline bot mode and stuff, but so many of these games are battle royales and online only. If it relies on an anti-cheat where the anti-cheat developers have said no to Linux. Cause we’re like easy anti-cheat or EAC. EAC is pretty much the big one. So that does or does not work? Does not work.

Michael:
[1:07:08] Okay, so I’m just going to stop it right there. Not all AAA games are incompatible with Linux. Some are not. Some online competitive AAA games purposefully block Linux because of the anti-cheat stuff. That is true, but there are others that do not. Like Marvel Rivals, for example, specifically made it a point to support Linux, including patches and whatnot. So it’s not correct to say that all of them won’t work, or just because it has online multiplayer it won’t work. That’s not that’s not true either it just depends on what kind of anti-cheat they do and all that sort of stuff also phil said that easy entity doesn’t work on linux it does it doesn’t work at the kernel level necessarily but it does work especially in proton games so the the reason why game companies break linux support is that they want to run these anti-cheats at kernel level and linux doesn’t allow that i mean technically i guess it kind of does but in the same way it allows the user to have control of their system so linux gives the user control not the system control against the user so you can’t install an anti-cheat in that level i mean you can technically but the whole point of these tools is to lock you down from your computer and you can’t lock the user down from their computer on linux so those games just they just those game companies just block Linux altogether.

Michael:
[1:08:29] So it’s actually a good thing that Linux doesn’t let you, the companies lock you down, but you know, some people want to play the games and I get it. But even if an anti-cheat runs at kernel level though, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t support Linux because, uh, Phil said that easy anti-cheat doesn’t support Linux, but it does. And battle. I also does. They both work on Linux at the user level, not at the kernel level. So if a game wants to implement them in that way, they can do that. And many have. And also, in fact, you can have those working on the Proton kernel and the Wine kernel and have those kind of benefits too. So in some ways, inside of Proton also makes it a good system for anti-cheat in that case. But again, some companies…

Michael:
[1:09:13] Are just terrible. I mean, there’s even some anti-cheats that are not even just kernel level anti-cheats. They take it way too far like Riot Games. Riot Games’ Vanguard for League of Legends and Valorant is ridiculous. In my opinion, that thing is a straight up rootkit. And for those who don’t know what that means, it means that basically it has control of your entire system for all the time, for any time, anything it wants to do because like easy anti-cheat and battle eye are kernel level on Windows, but they only run when the game runs. Vanguard from Riot Games runs at all times, regardless, giving itself full access to control your computer at all times. Like, it’s just… No. No. I actually made a video about that topic. If you’re interested in learning more, I’ll have a link in the description.

JayzTwoCents:
[1:10:05] Games like Apex, Battlefield, Destiny, Fortnite, GTA, League, Roblox, Rust, Rainbow Six, Valorant. Again all the big triple a titles that are going to be multiplayer are so even though we just launched rocket league we wouldn’t play a match you could play a match on rocket league it doesn’t use the easy antigen you just listed rocket league though no i said rainbow six oh they said and roblox.

Michael:
[1:10:24] Okay so he said league as in league of legends and he heard league so rocket anyway um but yeah not all of them.

JayzTwoCents:
[1:10:34] Box and rust yeah so so older games like rocket league that don’t use easy anti-cheat um are gonna work fine but yeah as far that’s pretty much the biggest and you were saying it’s not so much the fact that it doesn’t work on linux it’s just they don’t want to take the time to really make it work that’s the or keep it updated for linux that’s the most frustrating thing is yeah like because easy anti-cheat has linux like binaries for their anti-cheat and stuff it’s just the game developers just they see linux and they’re just like there’s 10 million configurations blah blah we don’t want to support it so we just say no so that’s the real downside this is perfect for like single player gaming and stuff uh or non-competitive online games that require the anti-cheat software so so.

Michael:
[1:11:17] It’s okay so it’s not really about the the current the game developers not wanting to support all the configurations because with steam you’re basically just supporting the steam runtime and that’s it it doesn’t really matter and with the anti-cheat stuff it’s really just a kernel level thing they just want to lock you down from your computer that’s what they want and they don’t want you to be able to do anything that they don’t approve of and because linux is built in such a way that the user has control of their computer and it cannot be you cannot be locked down from your computer in linux it just it’s like a no-go for them they consider that not acceptable so it’s either you care about your the control of your computer, or you use uh windows and in the kernel of entities and let them control your computer is effectively what this is so that’s the comparison that’s the difference for me if the game does not want to support linux for that reason i’m okay with not playing that game because i don’t want them to have ultimate control over my computer that seems like a terrible idea to me so that’s just me so anyway.

JayzTwoCents:
[1:12:29] Oh just to kind of recap though so it was you know go to bazite download the iso you downloaded rufus you created the iso we put it in over here did a fresh install all the drivers and stuff you know we didn’t load a single driver everything worked on its own the wireless the keyboard the mouse the graphics card everything because you select all that when you’re creating your installer, once we’re up and running the only things we installed separately was the heroic, games launcher and that was it. Everything else was, oh and OBS. I installed OBS just to see if that would work. I gotta say for a first like i would consider myself first time i haven’t used linux in like 14 years uh and again that was ubuntu which was not like a turnkey solution like this where you just play games so i think if you’re someone that’s like i want to mess around in linux i want to get my feet kind of like dip my toes in but i don’t want to be overwhelmed i feel like bazite is a really good way to start now to keep this video very okay.

Michael:
[1:13:24] So hold on a second So a couple of things. Yes, I agree. Bazite is a great way to start with Linux, because if you just want the system to get out of your way and work, you know, do its thing, run games, all that. And, you know, as long as every app you need is compatible with Flatpaks, then your experience will be golden in Bazite. Bazite is very cool, but not everything works in Flatpaks. So it might not be perfect, but for most people, it probably will be. Now, I also wanted to point out something that Jay just said about his experience with ubuntu 14 years ago earlier in the video i talked about how steam didn’t exist on linux at the time and also the whole gnome unity desktop issue was uh you know so him saying it wasn’t turnkey i mean yeah steam client wasn’t even on linux at the time until like two years after that so you know it’s not fair to compare bazite now to ubuntu 14 years ago that’s just i mean ubuntu is a lot more turnkey now than it was then so it’s just i mean technology moves so fast like 10 years is like a century of advancement and this was 14 years so yeah.

JayzTwoCents:
[1:14:42] Authentic the bazite team did reach out to me after we showed the video wall but I did not respond to them other than to say hey guys thanks for welcoming me to the community they did say if you have any problems or any issues reach out to us uh you know we can help you but um we didn’t have any issue other than the installer like hanged for a second but when we rebooted it continued on so that was the only thing we experienced and who knows that could be some weird like our bios is so out of date the bios is very out of date on this system but uh yeah and then as you can see we’re up and running as long as you know your logins to your stuff. So it was actually very simple. Now I am very aware for all of you Linux elitists, which is so funny to say that this-

Michael:
[1:15:23] Why is that funny to say? I mean elitist in general is like i mean anyone being an elitist at the same for any reason is always just pointless and not really not good in the first place but why was it so funny i’m just curious why is it so funny.

JayzTwoCents:
[1:15:40] Is i have my theory a locked down simplified version of what linux can be linux can be as basic as this or as complex as you want to make it that’s what is an open source OS that’s what that’s all about and that’s where like you were saying with arch and other kernels and other distros how you Build your own OS based on the things you want to you know plug and play in there and that.

Michael:
[1:16:03] If it’s arch and things like that like you know, not all of them are like that.

JayzTwoCents:
[1:16:07] And that’s the thing you can go from this to that or you can add another drive, or partition and have multiple, Distros that you can boot into so if you want to start tinkering this is a really good place to start i think i mean i think just the biggest positive is that as you saw there’s just.

Michael:
[1:16:25] Okay real quick uh i wouldn’t call this a thing for tinkering i mean we talked about that earlier uh it’s great for beginners absolutely great place to start for beginners if someone wants to tinker though i wouldn’t really wouldn’t really recommend this because the whole point of is is of a a system that’s immutable ish is to not tinker with it so you know there’s that i’d recommend starting with a virtual machine if you wanted to do some tinkering because if you mess it up you don’t care you can just rebuild it and make a new one you can actually make a copy like a you know like a once you build a virtual machine make a copy of it and then then work on the the rest of it and once you mess it up you just go back to that copy you know and do it again that way you can learn if you want to that’s a lot better regardless of what system you’re using whether you’re using it in windows and then playing around with the virtual machine or using it linux and then playing around with another virtual machine with linux, that’s a great way to tinker because you’re not to worry about messing your system up so.

JayzTwoCents:
[1:17:21] No bloatware there’s no nagging there’s no like blah blah blah like you know and i mean like watch if you go to it really makes me wish 3d mark worked on here i’d love to know what the i know that that’s another one big thing that i noticed is 3d mark doesn’t work it’s because.

Michael:
[1:17:35] I mean other things work um 3d mark is like a benchmarking system there’s geekbench which works i think the geekbench actually might only be ubuntu based but there’s also occt which recently came out for linux although to be fair i think that uh this video was made before occt was built for linux made for linux so if you want to now jay and phil you maybe occt is a good option to do the testing and benchmarking all that sort of stuff.

JayzTwoCents:
[1:18:05] The system settings and then you go to uh scroll down to uh where’s updates update software is by default manually and if you click notification frequency you can set it to never bother you ever about system updates if you don’t ever want to windows will never do that because that’s how they continue to update the way they steal your data update.

Michael:
[1:18:27] Okay so that’s real it’s funny because yes windows is terrible at that but it’s also important that you do not do that don’t turn it to never you can turn it to never if you want to but if you’re a beginner you shouldn’t do that because first of all linux does not annoy you with notifications for updates all the time it’s not like windows where you have to do an update and you can postpone it for four hours and that’s it and that stuff linux doesn’t do that so the amount of times linux tells you to update is going to be very rare you also can just ignore it and not do it and just wait until you feel like it and so there’s no reason to turn off the notifications that’s just a side point you can but there’s no reason to.

JayzTwoCents:
[1:19:10] Spyware. Yeah. All right. Well, time to go. Guys, I understand this was just a scratching the surface level of Linux. I prefaced that at the beginning of this video. And that’s where I said, if you guys, I would love to know where you diehard Power Linux users feel the next logical leap from Bazite would be for somebody that wants to start playing around. So like I said, please list down below. If you’re going to comment, keep it constructive and keep it useful.

JayzTwoCents:
[1:19:36] Say what distro you recommend, why, and it’s average user difficulty rating would be. And when I say average user, I don’t mean average Linux user, but like average just Windows user, because you got to assume they’re coming from an environment where this is all new. I like the fact that it’s immutable though, because I can’t go in there and break it, you know, like you can go into Windows registries and break everything. Yeah. All right, guys, time to get on out of here. I hope you guys have enjoyed our first touch into Linux. I’m debating potentially doing another drive in my system I just built and Having it be just a Linux drive to screw around with that home. Honestly, I’m really thinking about that while the graphics Do it Jay Time to do it. Yeah, so Anyway, all right guys, thanks for watching Like I said if you’re gonna be constructive down below put that information to be very helpful to not only us But anyone else looking at this considering links for the first time again Like I love the fact that you were just clicking random games in your Steam library of like, you know Who knows where it came from and like how old it was and stuff and it was just working Yeah, most of it didn’t work was the one that was from like 2003 yeah and honestly it might not even work on modern windows either yeah all right guys thanks for watching we’ll see you in the next one.

Michael:
[1:20:40] That is awesome because i mean the game work um like most of the games working and all that sort of stuff it is awesome proton is amazing really and uh anyway uh let’s i’m gonna end my reaction video by just talking answering the question or that for like the feedback that jay was wanting in terms of like what are the options first i don’t think that you really need to play around with other distros. If you find a good distro that you like, whatever it might be, whether it’s Bazite or something else, just enjoy it. It’s fine. You know, you don’t have to worry about that. It’s not a requirement to distro hop to a bunch of different distributions or whatever. If you have one that works, just keep using it. It’s, you know, no reason to jump if you don’t want to. But on the other hand, if you are someone who wants to dig around and learn the platform, then all right, here’s what I’d say.

Michael:
[1:21:29] So let’s talk about like, I’m going to give you a rating system that is more like beginner friendly because that’s kind of what Jay said at the end. So I would say that Ubuntu or something based on Ubuntu is a great starting point if you’re wanting to try out other things because it’s not that hard at all and it’s more traditional style distribution. So if you want to try those things out, as for requested rating.

Michael:
[1:21:52] I guess I’d say that it’s about 8.5 out of 10 um you know for like the beginner friendliness style rating scale so like 10 would be super beginner friendly and the easiest possible thing that doesn’t really exist on any operating system but uh you know that’s where i would say you know 10 would be but then there’s fedora which is almost as beginner friendly as ubuntu slightly less so but i actually made a video about what to do after installing fedora linux to make it beginner friendly so check that out in the description without my video it’s probably a 6.5 out of 10 on the beginner friendly scale and then with my video set at 8.4 to like 8.5 with ubuntu then 8.4 with the fedora and my video attached it’s a 0.1 percent less just because you have to run some commands in the terminal to get to that point but since you have my video it tells you what to run so not that bad just a point one off in that case open suits of tumbleweed is awesome i love the rolling the rolling release aspect of it and also the rollback features that they offer for like the snapshots and stuff but it’s not that beginner friendly like from the jump fedora is a little bit more of a morph beginner-friendly. I’d say OpenSUSE Tumbleweed maybe is like a 4.5, maybe a 5 out of 10.

Michael:
[1:23:20] Tumbleweed is not bad, but it’s not user-friendly.

Michael:
[1:23:23] There’s a ton of distros, so let’s just skip to the extreme sides for the most popular ones. You’re not going to cover everything because there’s too many for this video, and this video is probably already pretty long. Let me look at the recording time.

Michael:
[1:23:36] Yeah, this video is pretty long. So… Um let’s just jump into the arch side of things right so arch linux gets a two out of ten on the beginner friendly scale anything based on arch like there are a lot of distributions that are kind of like arch based and they try to make it more beginner friendly but there’s no way to actually make it fully beginner friendly unless you do an immutable ish style approach and most of them don’t do that so i’d say that it would increase the user friendliness a little bit So like something like CacheOS or EndeavorOS or something else that’s similar might be like a 3.5 or a 4, but it won’t make it super beginner friendly because there are still downsides of being an arch base. And I might go into more details. If somebody wants more information about that, let me know in the comments. I might make it like a series of explaining these kinds of things or whatever. But let’s move on to Gen2 Linux.

Michael:
[1:24:34] Gen2, and we might as well just put NixOS in the same because they’re similar. They both get a one out of ten each because they’re not beginner friendly at all nor do they want to be you know and then also then there’s the infamous linux from scratch if you never heard of it it’s okay you should not try it it is not meant for almost anyone it gets an emphatic zero out of ten for being the worst experience for beginners imaginable and not being that great of an experience for for like you know enthusiast even like you have to be like the whole arch is a competent linux user you’d be more than competent to do linux from scratch you actually have to want to suffer because it takes a long time it is the most manual thing you can do in linux everything is manual you have to type out every little tiny piece and yeah i don’t recommend it.

Michael:
[1:25:32] If you did want to do it do it in a virtual machine not on a computer because it would take forever and it’d be just you could take do it in steps on a virtual machine like save your state and come back later and that sort of stuff so if you want to do it i guess you could do it that way but i don’t recommend it at all anyway i hope you enjoyed this video i hope this reaction video was uh giving you some extra information about the linux experience and that sort of stuff If you have any questions, feel free to leave some comments. And yeah, hope you see in the next video.