TL;DR: A step-by-step installation of Linux Mint on real hardware and setting it up for typical gaming tasks.
I don’t really care much for SOG’s other content but his forays into Linux over Windows were incredible for demystifying the operating system to a mainstream audience (i.e. people who watch his content).
Some nitpicks:
- Muta should have used the flatpak version of Steam instead of the system package, the Steam client updates itself (with its own runtime and all) so using a system package over just sharing with flathub is a bit wasteful (it does complicate external storage devices a bit since you have to manually set permissions via flatseal but that’s it). (Edit: this is just a small nitpick, the native system package is fine as well).
- There should also have been mention of Bottles over installing Wine as a system package as well as things like the Heroic Games Launcher for GOG and Epic Games titles, Lutris is fine though.
- On long term stable release systems like Linux Mint or Debian, Flathub (or foreign package managers like Nix/Guix) should be your go to for installing software, let the distribution itself manage its core system components which I wish he clarified when he saw Flathub taking multiple GBs on first download.
Other than that, Linux stays winning. 
I always ended up having really annoying problems with the flatpak version of steam. Maybe fixed these days but I generally go with the native build since it seems to work more consistently. Other than that flathub is great for everything else but sometimes the stores can be really crappy at updating flatpaks and will lock up so i found its better to update it via the command line which doesn’t tend to break. I don’t know why the stores on so many distros shit the bed so hard but its a real blocker for getting non techy people to use when they’re this broken
I see where this is coming from, Valve only supports Ubuntu LTS officially so it would make sense that a native package on those operating systems would work ootb. I’ve just been using Fedora for so long that me installing flatpak Steam is second nature (instead of jumping through the hoops of installing RPMFusion Nonfree).
Software Manager on Linux Mint is really robust since I’ve last used it a couple of months ago. I think the impression people have of bad software store guis comes from GNOME software because of how slow Packagekit (the backend) is.
For a while now, Steam on Linux has shipped with the “Steam Runtime,” which is a collection of all the dependencies which would be present on Ubuntu. Games targeting Linux for distribution on Steam are compiled against this specific slate of libraries, and this is intended to make them work “everywhere” regardless of which versions are packaged by the distribution. On other distributions (in my experience, ArchLinux and Gentoo) this has worked pretty well. No segmentation faults, ABI problems, or dynamic link errors to report. It can, however, cause weird incompatibilities where something shipped by your distribution works, but doesn’t on Steam, or vice versa due to different library versions. The versions shipped by Steam tend to lag behind, but they are also configured specifically for the purpose of gaming.
As far as PackageKit goes, I’d say they hold a very un-enviable position. There are dozens of package managers out there, each with their own APIs, quirks, and functional differences. Trying to apply a one-size-fits-all layer on top of those is a never-ending struggle. Support for Apt and RPM is probably good, but as you start branching out into other systems it going to get rough.
yeah I don’t use the snap or flatpak of anything ever i s2g it always breaks shit
snaps are annoying and semi-proprietary bs. Flatpaks are neat and useful, but the permissions model really needs work. Little shit often breaks with it it seems and flatpaks rarely receive the sort of attention a distro package maintainer would provide, even though it should require less work than maintaining a traditional package. I run so many apps that are predominantly distributed as flatpak, and yet the devs don’t take flatpak packaging issues and little quality of life annoyances seriously (presumably because they run the software built from source in their dev environment and so never experience the flatpak)
Yeah. Snaps and Flatpaks are on different levels of annoying. Snap must die, there is no possible path to making it good. Flatpak is so close to good, the main problem is basically just that there are those little issues that I can’t get over.
the fact that I can’t drag and drop files into signal to send them? awful. I have to use a file picker, like a neanderthal
I do use the clipboard a lot for images though, at least that works
Exhausting to just have random core features never work and the only solution is to import a PPA or build from source by yourself
I like the AUR for that sort of thing but I guess that’s not that much better than a PPA. Plus Arch are being massive dickbags and saying “we’re x86 only” and deleting arm packages from the AUR so that kinda ruined it for me.
yeah pop shop is pretty trash at it, the ubuntu one was workable but not great last I checked (and ewww snaps), the options on arch are mostly pretty rough too…
I love the CLI but having a basic, reliable gui app for one of the most fundamental functions of the OS is worthwhile thing
Personally, things like Synaptic Package Manager hits a nice middle ground for me. I dislike stores (it always feels like I’m better off just going to the website) and I don’t want to sort and filter rows of entries in the terminal.
wow, I haven’t thought about synaptic in years! throwback! I did always find it a nice, functional option. If I hadn’t made this shit a career and spent probably years of my life at a terminal, I might still be using it. It’s literally better in almost every way than its successors, and its lightweight to boot… I guess that’s what you get if you try to build an apt GUI, rather than try to make a flashy clone of the app store and just happen to use apt as the backend lol.
The problem I guess is that people need to learn how to use it. What even is a package? a repository? why does it say Amateur Radio? etc… But I don’t think that’s really a huge problem. Better to have functional stuff with a learning curve than intuitive stuff that’s always broken and not very powerful.
Fun fact, the pop shop was forked from Elementary OS’s “app center” because GNOME software was incredibly slow and unintuitive. Now they’re replacing it with COSMIC store.
YaST and dnfdragora are reliable, though I don’t envy anyone trying to teach it to a non-savvy induvidual.
I’ve never even delved into suse or fedora on a desktop lol. only on servers, and only a little bit (do not get me started on dnf in EL9. Impossible to use on a resource constrained system with any large repos like EPEL installed). They seem cool but I just don’t have the time and energy to learn new distros very often anymore lol