The Problem with Linus Tech Tips: Accuracy, Ethics, & Responsibility

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I've had beef with LTT since his series of videos where he tried to use Linux as a daily driver while making absolutely zero effort to understand any of the differences between it and Windows, then proceeded to whine about how it's not Windows. The part where he broke his system after it explicitly warned him he was about to break it and asked for rather thorough confirmation that he wanted to do so was where I stopped watching him for good.
There's being ignorant and then there's being stupid. I fault nobody for being ignorant of how something works when they first encounter it. I do, however, fault them when they demand changes be made without actually understanding the implications of those changes.
- The Linux thing I don't find egregious. Replace Linus with a sizeable majority of the population and they would have done the same thing. I probably would have as well.
  If you want to move people from Windows to Linux, Discord to Matrix, Whatsapp to Signal or even Reddit to Lemmy, it needs to be as painless as possible.
  Everything that GN points out though is pretty damning.
  
  Billet labs incident is very very troubling. I can't see other youtubers not getting roasted over doing something like that, and could easily see a LTT video drawing attention to another channel doing something like that. So to find out LTT pulled such a move is a hit to their integrity.
  
  Thats the thing that irks me.
  Linus is so free with the criticism when he's calling out other companies (At least ones that aint paying him off coughASUScough), but legitimate criticism against him is treated like the most awful thing anyones ever done.
  
  It would be better if he wasn't trying to frame the Labs as being some kind of weapon or insurance to keep sponsors in line. Cool it Deputy Linus. There's already too many Sheriffs this week with awful takes on journalistic integrity.
- Yes! The Linux coverage from LTT is positive and encourageing UNLESS Linus is in the video then he looks for any excuse to raise his voice and yell "this is stupid" or "its going to break on me in 5 minutes". Emily's very good coverage of PopOS back in 2019 ish got me into Linux and I have not looked back. Its disappointing to see how with many things (not just Linux) how Linus will change the direction of a video to be more entertainmenting/clickbaity at the cost of good information and quality.
  
  I think what becomes clear when watching a lot of videos is that Linus is more of a tech fanboy that is good at all the high level stuff and can sell it in an entertaining way. He is not however someone who is super into the weeds of a specific technology, tool or system beyond applying his „I’ve worked with technology before“ knowledge.
  They have other folks on the show for that.
  It that being said. I wouldn’t fault him for his experience with PopOS!. That was totally on the OS and not his fault.
  
  Totally agree on the first part though, he is a total tech fan boy.
  He is constantly taking his surface level knowledge of item X and extrapolateing it out to create new assumptions but he saying it with enough confidence that it sounds like a fact.
  
  PopOs fucked up a bit leaving that iso live for so long with the steam cache issue, but Linus has to take responsibility here to. It was not "totally on the OS" there where many off ramps that where missed.
  For example:
  On the pop shop GUI if he first installed the system updates that would have run a background apt update avoiding the issue. There was a red bubble indicator you can see in the video that should have drawn his attention if he was not in a rush.
  On the pop shop steam page there was a list box that would have allowed him to install the flatpak version of steam, its not like it was hidden or anything it was right next to the install button and its was in fact bigger than the install button.
  Most people googling the terminal way of installing apps in linux would have also run apt update but he either skipped this bit or just ran the first thing he saw on google.... He probably would have also typed in "rm -rf /*" if google told him to without a second thought.
  He could have also just read what the OS was trying to tell him, pause, have a think and maybe ask some one like emily? But no he was in a rush so no time for that.
  He got into this issue mainly because he was rushing, it was more entertaining and created drama.
- That bit was important to include in the video in my opinion because of the circumstances.
  He didn't break his computer while messing around with the kernel, changing system settings by recklessly copy&pasting random commands he found on the internet. It happened while trying to install a very popular software from the distro's official package manager, following what's otherwise standard installation procedure. A lot of people broke their systems the exact same way until that bug was fixed.
  We all like to pretend Linux is "there", but it was a clear and important example of how it's not really. Because the user is dumb and the user has no idea what they're doing. At least that's the core assumption an OS should operate under if it is to be used by anyone and everyone. You can't claim even your grandma can run Arch when trying to install Steam can bork your system. And no, warnings are not a valid defense in this case. You will never teach the average user to not ignore those. Unfortunately it's the OS's job to protect the user from their own recklessness, and again, warnings are not always enough. Especially when you're getting warnings while doing something so mundane.
  
  I think he was using Manjaro for those videos. It's a bad distro and I would know because I used it for years. It's more the fault of Manjaro than linux itself.
- But that's how the typical user behaves. I love Linux and what you can do with it, but it's so tone deaf to think oridanry people are going to behave any diffeent than Linus did. People just don't have the time to take that effort you expect of yourself, only enthusiast have this kind of time. Other people are enthusiastic about other things. We need to all respect this.
  Ugh, it's so frustrating. Linux will continue to be irrelevant to consumers as long as this attitude of "just put in the effort to understand" persists.
- His series on linux got me interested in linux and a few weeks before the first ep came out I made the switch. I had been using linux as a brand new user for 4 weeks when watching his "review" of linux and I thought it was unfair. But linux made a good first impression on me and I am still daily driving it and now all my machines run linux.
- Yeah, this irked me too. I get trying to be the average person (and Pop! was also bugged at the time), but I find it really hard to believe that the average person would approach linux and completely ignore serious warning messages.
  
  I work in IT. Average people tend to fall into one of two categories when presented with big scary warning messages.
  Category 1: They freak out and immediately ask for help, and tend to be very skeptical of anything you tell them to do until the message goes away.
  Category 2: They ignore the message and YOLO it like Linus did, then call for help hours or days later when something inevitably breaks.
  It's rare for either group of people to read an comprehend the message in it's entirety.
  
  expired
  
  I some cases sure, but a lot of the time it's simple stuff like "Save changes before quitting?" or "You need to restart to apply updates. Restart now?" and they still can't figure it out.
  
  I find it really hard to believe that the average person would approach linux and completely ignore serious warning messages.
  Have you met people? They do this with Windows.
  
  In that case, there's no reason to pretend to be the "average person" at all, and Linus may as well have just learned how to use a system before reviewing it.
- Good God that was infuriating. Watching the prompt pop up when he was installing Steam or whatever asking him to confirm if he really wanted to remove the GUI was awful. He just said yes and felt like Linux was the issue. Nope.
  In the years I have spent IT adjacent, the primary difference I have noticed between Windows and Linux has nothing to do with drivers, OS, UI, or anything like that. It's that Windows has long conditioned users to hit OK on anything that pops up. Linux expects you to read it and make a choice, and it's usually not that difficult of a choice. Linus pulled up a web page, blindly followed instructions without reading, and borked his install. Predictable. It's the same behavior that gives grandma a computer virus.

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