linus tech tip
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"Stole a prototype" is unfair language, they made a huge mistake and auctioned off the prototype. Linus admitted the mistake to Billet Labs and paid them for the prototype.
They also installed the product incorrectly in a test and shat all over it and the initial response on the controversy from Linus on the forum was pretty terrible.
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His crew has claimed many abuses (supposedly he has been absolved, I don't have knowledge of or an opinion on whether that's justified).
He stole a prototype of a product then sold it for profit ("What Happened Between Linus Tech Tips And Billet Labs?" on this page).
Also on that page are other allegations of which I was unaware, most of which (at a glance) seem to be about improperly testing and/or representing products. I particularly like the one about claiming a mouse was poor quality after he failed to remove a cover from the sensor.
edit: I've been informed that my understanding of the situation with the prototype may have been incorrect. Reading the thread below may clarify matters.
Most of these criticisms are from a time which they have at least claimed they're out of. They made a huge deal about apologizing, slowing down, and doing things properly. Have they done so? Hard to know without a look behind the scenes, but so far I haven't heard any new complaints.
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Most of these criticisms are from a time which they have at least claimed they're out of. They made a huge deal about apologizing, slowing down, and doing things properly. Have they done so? Hard to know without a look behind the scenes, but so far I haven't heard any new complaints.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I kind of feel for Linus. He is clearly NOT the guy to be in charge of a media company that recieved a 100 million dollar buyout offer and in charge of 50+ people. I genuinely believe he has good intentions and isnt trying to do anything evil or anti consumer.
Doesnt mean his fuckups dont have real world impacts for others though. Hiring a CEO to run the "business" for him was absolutely the smartest thing he has done in a long time.
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They also installed the product incorrectly in a test and shat all over it and the initial response on the controversy from Linus on the forum was pretty terrible.
True, they fucked up a lot.
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I'm also not a fan of this guy, but as far as I know LTT is aggressively anti Linux and doesn't claim to be representative of or even part of the Linux community. I think one of his team members is pro Linux, but I don't know anything about that person.
I will admit that the first time I watched LTT I did think it was going to be about Linux.
Maybe I'm wrong?
I'm a linux user and I regularly watch him. I would not describe LTT as "aggressively anti Linux". They talk about linux and its flaws and sometimes their info is a bit outdated. But they dont hate linux and might be doing another linux 30day video soon.
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I don’t follow this guy. Did he fuck up or something?
You dont get to where Linus has gotten without fucking up a few times. Most of his big controversies are due to bad practice of an employee and hes owned it and corrected it. The rest are due to his Spicy takes on the WAN show where he gives the 'ceo perspective' on consumer issues.
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Hate this guy.
There is only one Linus in Linux. Torvalds.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Same. I remember him like becoming a thing and then I saw a video where there was all this panic about losing a bunch of data since it was all stored on a striped array with no backup, and I’m thinking “this guy is giving tech tips?” I wasn’t sure if it was satire, but I thought it was dumb and found him / his staff just annoying.
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I'd almost like to see the raw tape rather than the edited version of the episode where he nukes Xorg. I want to do an NTSB air crash investigation on it.
Linus installed Pop!_OS, got a working desktop, tried to install Steam via the Pop!_Shop, got an error message that says "Failed to install steam." He immediately goes on a rant about how Linux never works, you have to use the terminal.
Why did the Pop!_Shop fail to install Steam? It's just a front end for APT. Well, it turns out there was a bugged version of steam.deb, and not so much the software itself, but the metadata in the package was written in such a way that it thought it was incompatible with the Cosmic desktop, which was a rather new development at the time. So APT saw the package wanted to remove the entire GUI, and said "No we're not doing that" and failed with an error.
This was a known bug. And a fixed bug. At the time of recording, a newer version of the package with that bug fixed was available...but the apt cache that the image of Pop!_OS happened to have in the ISO pointed to the bugged version. And the Pop!_Shop doesn't do an apt-get update when launched, and it's very Apple-style not obvious in Pop!_OS as to how you do that. In the same episode, Luke installed Linux Mint which guided him through doing a software update. Pop!_OS doesn't.
Linus didn't google "popos failed to install steam" and learn to do an apt update and try again. Instead he goes on a rant about how nothing in Linux works and you have to use the terminal. Which he had to look up how to do. Most instructions I've seen will tell you to do an apt update before an apt install, but he either skimmed past that or found a source that didn't say to do that.
He then blitzed right past an allcaps warning that "THIS IS GOING TO BREAK THINGS. TO CONTINUE, TYPE YES DO AS I SAY." Windows constantly tells you that installing software might break the computer. Linux doesn't.
He gleefully told it to uninstall the entire GUI to include X11 and it dutifully dumped him to a terminal.
A OS for everyone must just work. Such a bug is not acceptable. And just installingsteam is a basic use case that should work on any distro used for home PCs.
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They also installed the product incorrectly in a test and shat all over it and the initial response on the controversy from Linus on the forum was pretty terrible.
They highlighted it's inflexibility. Showed me that custom cooking sucks from a longevity perspective.
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It's complicated, Linus at home wants the baby easy setup that just works, and in his mind Linux will only meet that need for him once steamos is out. He accidentally nuked his pop_os! installation setup if that tells you how software illiterate he can be sometimes.
There team is very different in opinions and it's not uncommon for them to be making an amazing server build that's clearly on linux. They use MacOS for their video editors. It's just more complicated than any one sentence can boil it down to.
I'd argue with calling him software illiterate, I think as a first time linux user, using pop_os! which was kind of obscure back then (even is now if you ask me), he should have been some computer mage not to run into some similar problem eventually. I mean steam uninstalling the desktop? Sure if you know linux you will have several clues that this is about to happen, but someone coming from windows who doesn't even know yet what a desktop environment on linux is or how it operates can't be expected to understand instantly. When I came over to linux I certainly didn't.
I think Linus is like average windows poweruser level. If he never touched the software before, he won't magically understand it, but if he manages to fuck up bad, that means most other people would have too. I guess it's all just a question of where you draw the line for software illiteracy. For me it's having to explain someone how to take a screenshot or log into Facebook (I love my Grandpa by the way).
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I used to watch them, for me the content has gotten a bit boring, but they still occasionally upload some interesting stuff. Also I used to listen to their podcast every week and it's still one of my favorites, I just don't get to listen to podcasts as much.
As for their controversies I think they've handled them well, but we don't have to agree on that.
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Thing is, this kind of content is already out there. Shoutout to the professional and amateur psychologists of youtube that dispense "Psych tips" all day, every day.
https://www.youtube.com/@HealthyGamerGG
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A OS for everyone must just work. Such a bug is not acceptable. And just installingsteam is a basic use case that should work on any distro used for home PCs.
On the one hand, I'm going to call bullshit. As if Windows has never thrown an error in its 40 year history.
On the other, the whole point of doing an analysis like this is to identify the links in the accident chain. Which are:
- A weird bug related to APT's dependency metadata happeend in the steam .deb package. This bug specifically effected Pop!_OS because their Cosmic desktop, still pretty much a fork of Gnome, was so new that dependency info got written wrong. Most of the Linux ecosystem was not effected, only Pop!_OS users using the Cosmic desktop.
- This bug was discovered, and fixed via issuing an updated package with the dependency data corrected. BUT, the version of the apt cache that was included in the ISO that Linus downloaded just happened to still point to the bugged version.
- At no point during the install or user onboarding process does Pop!_OS walk the user through the process of a software update. It also does not seem to perform an apt update on launching or searching the Pop!_Shop. I believe it is/was configured to do that on a timed basis, and was trusting that...perhaps a little too much.
- Linus tries to install Steam while on his period and he doesn't handle an error message particularly well. He turns to using the terminal without really knowing what he was doing and ignores all warnings. On camera.
The design of the Pop!_Shop and over-trusting scheduled updates allowed the bugged package to slip through the cracks. Note this happened minutes after the install of the OS before any scheduled update had happened. Because no one installs software immediately after first boot, right? To their credit, the automated system saw the incompatibility and just errored out. So here comes Linus with the steel chair.
This is why I'm kind of cold on recommending trendy new distros to new users. Let's very very slightly fork a DE for very petty reasons just enough to cause dependency problems, or let's re-implement a package manager front end because we want a grid not columns so we'll redo the whole thing and it'll be fine.
At the time, Pop!_OS was the big "it solves this one little problem, so point all newbies at it" distro because they shipped a separate ISO for Nvidia equipped platforms. Problem is, other than that it's just janked up Ubuntu Gnome.
No no! Use Bazzite. No no use Peppermint. No no, use Elementary. No no, use Endeavour. No no, use Nobara. This quarter the one all the newbies are bing told to use CachyOS. Get ready to never hear about CachyOS after 15 months from now.
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I used to watch them, for me the content has gotten a bit boring, but they still occasionally upload some interesting stuff. Also I used to listen to their podcast every week and it's still one of my favorites, I just don't get to listen to podcasts as much.
As for their controversies I think they've handled them well, but we don't have to agree on that.
I miss the beard. I feel like I watch less since he shaved, but that just might be a coincidence as my ADHD makes me binge different content in spurts.
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Delivering wholesome content, yet still somehow managing to fuck it up in some greedy way.
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His crew has claimed many abuses (supposedly he has been absolved, I don't have knowledge of or an opinion on whether that's justified).
He stole a prototype of a product then sold it for profit ("What Happened Between Linus Tech Tips And Billet Labs?" on this page).
Also on that page are other allegations of which I was unaware, most of which (at a glance) seem to be about improperly testing and/or representing products. I particularly like the one about claiming a mouse was poor quality after he failed to remove a cover from the sensor.
edit: I've been informed that my understanding of the situation with the prototype may have been incorrect. Reading the thread below may clarify matters.
He was “absolved” by a company that he hired to investigate.
The situations mostly come down to he said/she said, so nothing for the company to find…
The result of the investigation was that there wasn’t any evidence, not disproving or proving the allegations
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I miss the beard. I feel like I watch less since he shaved, but that just might be a coincidence as my ADHD makes me binge different content in spurts.
He just finished growing it back lol
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He just finished growing it back lol
Guess my break is over then, how convenient!
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Nah, I'm at issue with that because me.
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Why do you hate him?
wrote last edited by [email protected]He chose his channel's name to be deliberately confusing.
edit: reading the other comments in this thread, he sucks.
