He also looked at several sites before asking chatGPT to see what other options it would recommend, and he specifically says he asks it because that’s what a lay person would do, in those eyes I would say that a journalist that doesn’t ask chatGPT for this would be a bad one. Also, these are the first 3 links from my search:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/comments/1lpmmwj/what_is_the_best_linux_distro_for_mostly_gaming/

Top comment says Pop.

https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/top-linux-gaming-distributions-2026-play-better-open-source

First item is SteamOS, the one after that is Pop.

https://www.interserver.net/tips/kb/6-best-linux-distros-for-gaming-and-playing-windows-games/

N°1 on the List is Pop

Even being generic about best distro for beginners without mentioning gaming at all

https://linuxblog.io/best-linux-distro/

https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-best-linux-distros-for-beginners-in-2025-make-switching-from-macos-or-windows-easy/

https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/top-linux-distributions-beginners-friendly-stable-and-easy-learn

All 3 of them list Pop, so it’s not surprising that someone looks at 6 different sites, sees multiple recommendations, one of which appears in all 6 of them and at the top for gaming specific ones and decides to use it.

You might not like it, you might have issues with it, but to say it’s not widely recommended is disingenuous.

Hey, first of all welcome. Now, I’ve never used Fedora, but I wanted to give you some answers to your points:

• Computer feels slightly slower. I’m surprised by this.

I’m also surprised by this, KDE is very snappy so it shouldn’t feel like that. I have a gut feeling from this and some other things that you might have an Nvidia card, if so which driver are you using? I know the community shits on the proprietary drivers (with reason) but they provide the best experience (except when they don’t).

• Fedora or Mint…“it just works” isn’t exactly true based on my experience. “Most stuff mostly works okay” is more like it.

That’s true, but that’s also true for Windows. One thing we forget is the amount of knowledge we have acquired from years of just using the system. To me, every time I have to use Windows it’s a chore, nothing works out of the box, everything needs some tweaks, I can’t do anything, everything is complicated obtuse and weird. But to you it’s not, because you’re used to it, and since most stuff works and the ones that don’t you are familiar with troubleshooting it feels as if everything works. I feel the same thing happens to us on the Linux side, we say everything works because to us it does (but also you’ve had some issues I have never experienced before).

• I had a service keep crashing upon boot: xwaylandvideobridge.

That is apparently needed to share your screen on certain apps like Discord. From what I read there are reports of people saying this crashes for them and it has to do with them running out of VRAM (which would also account for your computer feeling slower). And apparently there’s a bug in newer Nvidia drivers where there’s a memory leak that could cause this. If you’re using Nvidia proprietary drivers check the version z maybe trying to update to the latest or downgrade to 550 or before it fixes this.

• Boot time is definitely slower compared to Win11.

This is because Windows hasn’t powered off in a while, it hibernates. Even when you ask it to power off it doesn’t, this is a known pain point for Linux because Windows doesn’t close NTFS drives properly unless it powers off completely, so you are locked out of your shared drives.

I never tried to use systemd-analyze, but my guess would be that they’re counting the time from when the service starts until it’s done, and most of that time is waiting for hardware or other services, so if you have one service that takes 11 second and 5 services that take 0.1 seconds but depends on your first service they would all say 11 seconds. If you send me the output I can try to read the docs and see what I can come up with, a quick look told me that you can also run systemd-analyze critical-chain <unit> to get a dependency list which might give you more insight on all those that took 11 seconds.

• Weird stuff with youtube / video codecs.

Never had that issue, never heard of Cisco codecs either. You’re correct that this is not newbie friendly, it’s related to why GPU drivers are an issue in some distros. Apparently from the link that you send that is a description on how to switch from an open source implementation to one that depends on the proprietary Nvidia drivers. This is the sort of thing your distro should do automatically when you switch to a proprietary drivers for the GPU, and why I like to recommend certain distros that (at least back when I started) took care to do these things when you selected the proprietary driver.

HP printer

Yeah, all of my printers have been HP, the most I had to do was install a package for HP (hplip I think it was called) and they have all worked flawlessly.

Not really, but this is a reply to most comments here about the video so without seeing the video and reading some of the other comments you are missing a lot of context. In the video Linus shows several different sites that recommend Pop, he even looks for recent sites written by people specifically because he got some bad comments about using listacle articles before. He also asks chatGPT, and while that’s not exactly reliable it is based on average messages online so it’s not fully random. Also, like I pointed out, the community we’re using to discuss this also lists is as recommended, which goes to show it’s not a fluke of the sites he used but that it is generally recommend broadly.

Tell me you didn’t even saw the video without telling me you didn’t even saw the video. But you want an extra one? This one, here’s the link to the pinned thread on this same community where the top 3 recommendations for beginner distros are Fedora, Mint and Pop: https://lemm.ee/post/37682729

Honestly, I think lots of people are hating on him just because. Pop is still highly recommended on a random Google search, and his reasons to pick it are legit. Plus he acknowledged that last time the issue was user error + unimaginable level of bad luck, and removing that there would be no reason for him not to use it. Also if you saw the WAN show he also installed Bazzite and Kubuntu on two other systems and got two other issues.

As much as I want to say he did something bad like last time, this time I don’t see it, his issues are legit and to dismiss them because he’s using an “unstable” (that is the default and recommended) DE or because he chose a distro that is in the top recommendations on every site out there is disingenuous.

I know it’s not what you’re looking for because it might be overly complicated for someone getting started, but if you ever have the extra hardware (or can run a VM to play around) to give it a go I recommend you look into NixOS.

Nix is very different from other OSs you might have used because you declare your system and it gets built, if you want to install a package you add it to your configuration rebuild the system and now the package is available in the new generation of your system, but the old one is still available and you can select it via boot menu. This sounds overly convoluted, but for someone with a PC that MUST ALWAYS work it’s unbeatable.

You update the system and the new drivers broke the game you’re playing? Select previous generation of the system and carry on until you have time to figure it out. You installed a program and that broke something? Go to the previous generation keep on working and figure it out later.

I’ve never been afraid of updating my system, but since switching to Nix knowing rolling back is not an easy option is nagging at the back of my head constantly.

With all that being said, Nix is hard to get into, and this tip is unlikely to help someone getting started (I really think it’s better to get your toes wet on something more close to what you’re used to to avoid frustration). Nix requires learning a new language (which is very weird and not really that intuitive in certain things) and configuring your entire system with it. But the plus side is that once you’ve done it it’s done, and your entire system uses the same configuration format, and any hack quirks or random fixes you had to apply are there in code so you can’t forget about them when you reinstall the system or migrate to a new machine. This might not be helpful to you, but maybe it is to someone else.

Honestly, I think he’s right on that one. No tinkering means no tinkering, selecting a proton version to force to use the windows version of the game and passing command arguments is tinkering. That is the difference between gold and platinum in protondb, gold means it works with tinkering while platinum means works oob. L4D2 is marked as Gold, so protondb agrees that some tinkering is required, his complaint that a Valve game in a platform Valve is pushing should work without tinkering is perfectly valid.

Yup, it’s very clear there wasn’t a single person who understands about OSs in any of the proceedings for this law.

I’m not sure if that law will pass/has passed, but I wonder how it affects embed systems, vending machines, etc, since all of them have OS in them. For Linux this can already be implemented by using groups for age so they can claim the OS already offers this and be done, then it’s up to the apps to query it and most apps wouldn’t need to so that’s that.

Last year I would have said Arch. I have been running it for over 15 years with some small breaks to try stuff, or with some machines that have company issued OS. But I have been toying with NixOS, and honestly I’m loving it. If I had to choose only one and couldn’t change it it would have to be Arch, I know I can get 5 years with it easily, but if I was setting a new system today it would almost assuredly be NixOS, I might regret that 3 years down the line when there’s something I can’t get to work, but the more I play around, the less likely I think that would be, and the more comfortable I feel that I will eventually migrate to NixOS fulltime

For this to work you need a display to send through the network, but that display needs not be a physical one. So depending on your definition it can be run headless. If you meant without it being plugged to a display then yes, if you meant without having graphical stack installed then no (there would be no point to streaming display without a display).

It works brilliantly on my Linux host with a 7800 XT, I think you might have an unrelated issue.

If you’re going to use Arch you should use Arch. One of the biggest advantages for Arch is the AUR which can cause many issues on Arch based distros that are not Arch.

That being said, for a media center, if you’re not used to, I wouldn’t go with Arch, Debian is a much better choice since you’re already used to it and should be good for that use case.

That would make Mint unstable. That is exactly what unstable means in Linux context. There are debian based rolling-release distros, including Debian Sid. This is one of the reasons people choose Arch, because it’s a rolling release you never have to worry about version.

There’s a good chance you might break stuff by upgrading major version like you fear, and that’s why it doesn’t happen automatically. That being said it should be safe, but good on you to prepare backups.

Please research the meaning of stability when applied to Linux before parroting stuff. Also, who mentioned Arch?

If you know that that’s the right driver to install, what is your question?

I usually give detailed responses, but honestly the correct response here is RTFM. The short answer is to install nvidia-580xx-dkms.

Arch wiki is such a great place that has the answer to most technical questions you might want to ask. I strongly dislike the idea that Arch is for advanced users, but it does expect you to read the documentation (which is why I dislike stuff like Manjaro that try to make Arch “accessible”, but end up leaving people in similar situations without even knowing where to look for the solution to their issues).

My main computer at work is Linux, I do have a Windows build box where I compile code for Windows, and to make my life easier I usually develop it there as well. But outside of platform specific code, or code related to a product that’s Windows only, I don’t have any issues.

As for other software Teams, slack, zoom, Google meeting and docs work well enough that I can use them daily without issues.

At a previous job for some reason they wanted me to use Windows, which was absurd since I worked on the backend of a site which would only be deployed to Linux, didn’t last long in that job after that was made official.

In short, as long as my main machine is Linux, I don’t mind having to have a Windows machine to do Windows stuff. But I get annoyed out of my mind if I’m either forced to use Windows as my main OS (it’s just not ergonomic for me), especially if there’s no reason for it.

Back in 2004 a friend was using Linux, I asked that friend to teach me programming, and he said he would only do so on Linux because he didn’t even knew how to compile stuff on windows. So I started dual booting and originally I only used the Linux partition for programming, organically I started to spend more time on Linux than on windows until eventually I only used Windows for gaming.

Over time I had some degree of success with Wine, so some games I would play on Linux, and only use Windows for the ones that didn’t worked. Then around 2011 I discovered Humble Bundle and started to get native games for Linux, and by 2013 when Steam came to Linux I realized I hadn’t rebooted to use Windows in years, so I wiped that partition.

Probably it’s not, probably what happens is that the GPU is throttling and not reaching the same performance, and with less performance comes less heat. Try running a benchmark to see if there’s any significant difference in performance.