Being free and open source is literally the entire premise and the most important “feature” of the Linux ecosystem: it will almost always be free (as in beer), and there will always be a lot of good choices. You’re probably never going to convince me that computers would be better off if we had to spend more money with fewer options.
People keep making this point, but to be perfectly honest it’s a dumb one because it’s the nature of the beast. OK, let’s say for the sake of argument that there’s too many distros out there, so now what?
None of this changes the fact that going to ChatGPT for advice (on pretty much any topic) is a bad idea. It doesn’t have thoughts or opinions, it doesn’t know that (for better or worse) Cosmic just shipped 1.0 a few months ago. It recommended him PopOS because it does nothing other than regurgitate old information scraped from the internet.
Its’ like… If I use an LLM for investment advice and I lose all of your money, who’s the idiot? I am.
Mate, you don’t need to convince me that choice is good. I’ve used as daily drivers, among others, Debian and several of its’ derivatives, Arch, Gentoo and openSUSE (I’m not going to bother checking the capitalization on that despite the fact that I’m literally using it to write this comment).
Linus went through the type of journey a normie would. Look at articles aimed at uninformed people, or ask an LLM. Because normies are uninformed. Hell, most normies don’t WANT to be informed. You know what everyone in my social circles that knows what a package manager or desktop environment even is, has in common? They’re all tech enthusiasts or professionals working in tech, usually both.
The goal of the video, IMO, is to find out if a completely-new-to-Linux user has a good journey in 2026 or not. Part of it IS choosing your first distro, and that is at this point the absolute hardest thing for a newcomer. And it is in fact still quite common for beginners to pick Pop!_OS because it’s been so heavily recommended in recent years (I’m talking last 5, not last year or 2) so there are still a ton of reddit threads and lists around.
Its’ like… If I use an LLM for investment advice and I lose all of your money, who’s the idiot? I am.
Most people also consider investments to be a lot higher risk than picking an OS/distro, so a normal person wouldn’t blindly trust ChatGPT like that for something so important, I’d hope. But there’s definitely idiots that will do that too.
Sorry but, what you you on about?
Being free and open source is literally the entire premise and the most important “feature” of the Linux ecosystem: it will almost always be free (as in beer), and there will always be a lot of good choices. You’re probably never going to convince me that computers would be better off if we had to spend more money with fewer options.
People keep making this point, but to be perfectly honest it’s a dumb one because it’s the nature of the beast. OK, let’s say for the sake of argument that there’s too many distros out there, so now what?
None of this changes the fact that going to ChatGPT for advice (on pretty much any topic) is a bad idea. It doesn’t have thoughts or opinions, it doesn’t know that (for better or worse) Cosmic just shipped 1.0 a few months ago. It recommended him PopOS because it does nothing other than regurgitate old information scraped from the internet.
Its’ like… If I use an LLM for investment advice and I lose all of your money, who’s the idiot? I am.
Mate, you don’t need to convince me that choice is good. I’ve used as daily drivers, among others, Debian and several of its’ derivatives, Arch, Gentoo and openSUSE (I’m not going to bother checking the capitalization on that despite the fact that I’m literally using it to write this comment).
Linus went through the type of journey a normie would. Look at articles aimed at uninformed people, or ask an LLM. Because normies are uninformed. Hell, most normies don’t WANT to be informed. You know what everyone in my social circles that knows what a package manager or desktop environment even is, has in common? They’re all tech enthusiasts or professionals working in tech, usually both.
The goal of the video, IMO, is to find out if a completely-new-to-Linux user has a good journey in 2026 or not. Part of it IS choosing your first distro, and that is at this point the absolute hardest thing for a newcomer. And it is in fact still quite common for beginners to pick Pop!_OS because it’s been so heavily recommended in recent years (I’m talking last 5, not last year or 2) so there are still a ton of reddit threads and lists around.
Most people also consider investments to be a lot higher risk than picking an OS/distro, so a normal person wouldn’t blindly trust ChatGPT like that for something so important, I’d hope. But there’s definitely idiots that will do that too.