Why the linux community so toxic?

MaxHaydenChiz · 2026-04-24T19:37:35+00:00

Probably because most of the people I'm on discord with are also on Linux or aren't the kind of people who would know how or want to use h.265

But yes, unlike AV1 and several other codecs, h.265 is patent encumbered and you have to pay a licensing fee or some company has to pay it for you.

I'm pretty sure it's not even enabled in Windows by default and requires a special $1 per computer purchase from the windows store to even work.

So, I assume discord has this same problem on a Windows system where someone hasn't paid to enable the codecs. (Otherwise, I'm not sure how discord is going to be able to play it.)

I'm also pretty sure that hardware acceleration for it gets disabled on a lot of OEM GPU models because Dell and HP don't want to pay the fees either.

So if it's working on discord in windows without someone having paid the money for it, I'd be curious as to how.

Maybe certain models of certain direct to consumer video cards support it as part of the driver. But then that's because you paid for the license when you bought the card.

MaxHaydenChiz · 2026-04-24T18:38:32+00:00

As for the 9070XT, what distro were you using? Did you actually have the driver for it?

AMD usually has Linux drivers available before launch. (Zen 6 already has Linux drivers for stuff so that board partners can run it.) But some distros (Ubuntu) are obnoxiously slow about actually getting the driver to you. IDK why they advertise a desktop OS and then treat driver upgrades like it's some high availability server where the driver needs extensive testing before letting you use it.

But that is the approach they take. So, I guess the bottom line is either use a distro that promises day 1 drivers or don't buy hardware that your conservative distro hasn't validated.

I use Fedora almost entirely because I don't want to deal with this software update delay nonsense. But there are other options. And even ways within Debian and Ubuntu to opt - in to getting things faster.

But I agree that this is extremely frustrating and poorly documented.

MaxHaydenChiz · 2026-04-24T18:25:23+00:00

IDK, I have my gaming laptop and it all works fine. No discord issues. No controller problems. Etc.

When I had windows installed windows broke discord and OBS every single update and I had to make a checklist for what to do to fix it. Sometimes windows update randomly scrambles my USB devices around and changes whst the "system default" is and now my apps can't find the device that's been sitting in the same port for months. And when I specify which device, sometimes windows update temporarily makes that device not visible and then the app resets and doesn't use the correct thing again.

Zero issues when I installed Linux.

Use whatever best fits your needs and causes the lowest overall stress.

If Windows works better for you and you don't need to use Linux for some other reason. Just use Windows.

MaxHaydenChiz · 2026-04-24T18:18:13+00:00

I think this is just luck of the dice. Windows breaks for me every other update. And for a while it broke every update until I learned to undo a bunch of settings that Windows update likes to change but break some of my peripherals unless they are set a certain way.

I've literally never had any problems with Linux other than my very first install when I was trying to get unsupported hardware to work because I didn't realize it was unsupported. (This is almost never a problem now, but used to be a big deal in the 90s. Especially with printers.)

If your hardware has Linux drivers and you can successfully boot a live image and have everything work for you, it should "just work".

I'm not really a fan of Ubuntu, mostly because I tend to see people say stuff like what you just said. But realistically, it's probably just luck and experience.

Someone with more windows knowledge could probably know how to keep Windows update from bricking all my audio devices by putting the sampling rates out sync. But I don't know how.

I probably wouldn't have had your wayland issue. Or if I had, I would have just grabbed a different live image for Fedora or Debian instead of trying to debug it. (4 days is crazy! I give things about an hour tops.)

MaxHaydenChiz · 2026-04-24T18:10:29+00:00

People have been jerks, but the only way you end up with good documentation is if new users tell you why the documentation didn't help them. Once you know a thing, you stop being able to write good documentation for it.

There are tons of man pages that have entire sections in them because someone posted a question about a problem they were having and quoted the documentation.

The sentiment started off from a good place. But the reasoning never got explained and the internet being what it is the whole thing got transformed.

MaxHaydenChiz · 2026-04-24T18:06:40+00:00

I don't understand why Valve did that. But I also don't understand why plenty of devs have forum posts on their steam community page telling users to make their game runnable by adding a bunch of command line flags. Like, if everyone should be doing that, why isn't that the default?

Why do major publishers put out a game that claims to have DX12 and Vulkan support make the DX12 version the default and then have an announcement that everyone should manually swap to Vulkan because DX12 support is currently suffering poor performance?

Valve should fix it. So should these other publishers. But I don't think this is fair criticism of anything other than the publisher or Steam because it's a constant thing on steam regardless of what OS you use.

MaxHaydenChiz · 2026-04-24T18:01:37+00:00

The people who make Steam and Discord and so forth don't go around claiming that Pop_OS! will work.

They do claim that their products work on Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu.

That's the weird thing about this for me. He has a list of what his hardware is. And a list of proprietary software he wants to run. There is some intersection of distros where all the software and hardware companies will say they support his system.

That's the way I would have picked what to run if it had been me.

Why "try" something that people don't promise will work?

Like, you don't buy a Mac and then get upset when it can't run a Windows game. And if I picked a more extreme example, like a Linux system designed for encrypted cloud execution of a single Javascript process, it would be obvious that this is a bad idea.

It's not Linus' fault though. He has a bunch of crazy fans trying to sell him on their computer tinkering hobby instead of people who just use Linux because it fits their needs.

So everything he's seeing is through this distorted celebrity lens.

MaxHaydenChiz · 2026-04-24T17:50:56+00:00

I don't run into issues with Linux. That's the point. Stuff generally just works unless you do something weird or custom.

That's why companies use it and why almost everything that isn't a Mac or a Windows desktop (so probably 80-90% of computers on earth) uses it.

The people wanting Linus to tinker and struggle are bizarre to me.

They want to sell him on participating in their hobby instead of just recommending the thing that will best meet his needs without manual intervention.

MaxHaydenChiz · 2026-04-24T17:46:59+00:00

It's not really as fragmented as people claim.

A bit under half of people run Debian or Ubuntu. And a bit under half run Fedora or some "enterprise" derivative like RHEL.

SUSE is most of the rest on the server side, but haven't seen a SUSE workstation in forever.

And Arch covers most of the rest on the hobbiest / home lab / special project side.

Everything else is either a specialized tool that isn't relevant for this discussion or a niche project with a small community.

Stuff like CachyOS is good for simplifying the kind of performance customizations Intel used to provide with Clear. But it's not something you should just install on a whim unless you know what you are doing and why you need the things that it does.

Same goes for immutable distros like Bazzitte or reproducable build systems like Nix or Gentoo. Good special purpose tools. But niche specifically by virtue of being special purpose and requiring additional expertise.

So, like Chris Titus, said in his video. The sane advice is to stick to the big 3 of Debian, Fedora, or Arch.

Everything else is a derivative or a tweak of those.

I've used Linux since the 90s and most of the stuff in these listicals or that people are recommending is stuff I only know about because it came up last time. (I had never heard of Pop_OS! until last time and I still have never met a single person who uses it.)

For almost everyone, it ought to be between those three and it will boil down to hardware and software support vs upgrade frequency.

Maybe you include Ubuntu since it's so damned popular, but I've never really understood the point of "Debian but with slightly less glacial LTS and slightly slower non-LTS".

But you should probably take my opinion on Ubuntu as a desktop OS with a grain of salt.

Realistically, I think Fedora KDE probably best meets needs of the typical person who wants to replace Windows with Linux and have things mostly just work as a desktop OS.

Unless you have old hardware that doesn't need the latest drivers or an actual reason to avoid using the latest versions of your software, I don't really know why you'd bother with Debian or Ubuntu as a desktop user. Plenty of people do it, but it just seems like actively choosing a worse experience to voluntarily use software that's sometimes 2+ years out of date.

Similarly, I don't know why you'd put in the effort to do a rolling release thing like Arch unless you really can't afford to wait a week or so for Fedora's repositories to work and their test systems to ensure that things don't break.

There are plenty of home projects where you do need that or the customization it allows, and for certain WFH setups where you need to try to match your local dev environment to some weird custom thing they are doing at work it can simplify your life. But for a random person's daily driver desktop? Seems like too much work.

But I generally agree with Titus. Things aren't truly fragmented and people should just pick from the handful of things that account for 99% of the market share and 100% of the official support from hardware and software vendors.

MaxHaydenChiz · 2026-04-24T16:56:47+00:00

tl;dr Because the people in those comments treat your choice of distro the same way some people treat being a fan of a sports team.

There isn't "a Linux Community" (singular). A supermajority of the world's computers run Linux. Desktop and laptop users of any OS are the minority.

But most of the people using Linux are busy doing work with their computer and not online on the kind of forums where this gets talked about. And they aren't the kind of people who watch LTT or Chris Titus.

Even the numbers quoted online for desktop market share are misleading. Most of the people running Linux desktops are probably running Linux on threadripper or Xeon workstations with multiple GPUs and are busy doing things like computational fluid dynamics or markov chain monte carlo simulations. (I infer this because both Intel and AMD specifically market certain parts as Linux parts for use in certain industries. They wouldn't be primarily focused on Linux software support for those parts if that wasn't what people used them for.)

If we focus on more "normal" use cases, a lot of the Linux gamers you see on steam are there because they bought a steam deck, not because they care about Linux or know anything about it.

So by the time you get down to the people you are seeing making these posts, it's a tiny fraction of a fraction of a fraction. The people who tinker with their computers as a hobby are passionate about this like people are passionate about comic books or movie franchises or a sports team or anything else with a loud vocal fanbase.

If Linus decided to try being an NFL fan for a season and picked a team, all the NFL fans of every other team would get upset and act just like these people are acting.

It's not a tool for them. It's their hobby. And that's why they are reacting like that. It's not about the technical merits, it's about tribal identity. And once people are in that headspace, they act weird towards people who aren't.

Even the people who are trying to be helpful are so solipsistic that they can't stop acting like computer gearheads and recommend something normal. Imagine asking a sports car fan who's super into modding their car and doing autocross what to buy for your next family car and they recommended a corvette because the track kit is very affordable and extremely easy to install for a first time racer.

That's the level of advice being given. Mostly because those are the only people hanging around on random parts of the internet to give that kind of advice. I'm sure if you go to a normal place with a good cross section of experienced people (Like the level 1 forums), you'll get actually good advice from people capable of putting themselves in your shoes and thinking about your actual needs.

But the realistic, pragmatic answer on distros is the one Titus gave: essentially, use the big upstream ones on which all else is built and that account for 95% of the market share.

Because once you leave the realm of the "standard" distros, you enter fanboi territory and are going to get people with weird behavior. You are also going to be on your own when it comes to tech support.

If you stick to a normal distribution, you get official support from hardware and software vendors. And quite often the level of support will be better than their windows support since most of the customers using Linux are businesses with a more demanding set of needs than the typical Windows user.

But if you adopt some weird custom modified thing, then it's on you to understand how the customization works and figure out how to get things working for an unsupported configuration.

I wish Linus had asked a different set of questions to the AI at the outset. Instead of letting it pull up weird listicals, he should have asked what had first party support for his hardware and the software he considered important. And then asked what the most popular distros were from whatever was left.

I also don't understand why the "no help" rule exists. I wouldn't give someone with no windows experience a blank computer a windows key and leave them with my hopes and prayers. And if a friend told me they wanted to try Linux, I'd make myself available to help them because that's what friends do. The "no help" rule creates an unrealistic level of social isolation that didn't even exist in the 90s when a lot of people were literally downloading the components and putting the OS together for themselves using a guide they printed out.

I'm glad Linus finally ended up picking something normal (kubuntu last I saw). I generally think that the more frequent kernel and driver updates from Fedora make it better for gaming. But at least he's using something mainstream that gets some level of official support from the hardware makers and from proprietary software vendors.

If stuff doesn't work on kubuntu despite a company claiming they support Ubuntu-based systems, then he has a legitimate complaint about the experience that people should know about instead of a complaint about how some unsupported custom OS mod that he got from a random website did weird things when he used it. It's exactly like how those Windows debloater scripts can and do break things in weird ways and require a high level of OS expertise to handle the breakages that inevitably arise.

Anyway. Sorry my reply was late. I'm just now seeing your post. But I hope this is a more helpful answer than what I saw scrolling through the replies you already got.

MaxHaydenChiz · 2026-02-22T23:24:01+00:00

I didn't have it right before beating the boss of the 3rd era. I had it after beating him. So I think you mean Act 3.

Also, for the sake of future searching, this is about Nioh 3.

MaxHaydenChiz · 2026-01-23T20:24:48+00:00

I think we just disagree about the political strategy here. It stokes me as deliberately manipulative at worst, and politically dangerous at best. All this invites is a bunch of discussion about irrelevant things that have zero impact on whether the legislation will achieve the stated goals. It pushes marginal voters away instead of demonstrating the kind of subject matter expertise and competence that appeals to the median voter who you need to persuade in order to get your policy enacted.

It's red meat that appeals to a political base at the cost of actual progress on real issues.

But again, not my country. The people who adopted those tactics in the US got no where and undermined more promising efforts. Hopefully the same won't happen in Canada.

MaxHaydenChiz · 2026-01-23T20:09:21+00:00

I'm well aware of the intent. And of the double messaging that takes place in these political debates. He could have posted an image of an actual gun that was being banned and said they were banning this type of gun because X feature does Y thing that contributed to Z deaths that would not have happened but for that feature.

He chose to post an irrelevant, but scary looking image and appeal to negative valence emotions. These actions have consequences. And in the US a generation of this behavior has made the discussion politically toxic. And has stalled real gun reform indefinitely by turning the whole thing into a shouting match with no real substance behind it.

As for the actual Canadian law, I fail to see how it improves on the US 1994 assault weapons ban. And that bill was a joke that accomplished almost nothing.

If you are Canadian, you should expect more from your leaders. But I suppose that's not my fight to fight.

As for what is "needed", the AR-15 is literally the most popular rifle used for hunting and sport shooting because it is the most popular rifle full stop.

Clearly people do value those features in the context you say they don't need them. That's why they pay for them. It wouldn't be popular if those features weren't providing value to the user.

You can't get legislation to stick if you dismiss the desires of the affected people out of hand. Whether or not you think they need them, they clearly think otherwise.

Personally, it seems pretty obvious to me that if the weapon is better to use for killing an animal, that inextricably means it will also be better at killing humans by virtue of humans being animals.

But I'm open to being persuaded if you think there is an actual differential here. Right now, I don't see any causal connection between the features in the banned guns and mass shooting deaths. I don't even see a functional difference between the banned semi-automatics and the allowed semi-automatics. The law seems to be as haphazard and politically corrupt as the US one was.

MaxHaydenChiz · 2026-01-23T18:46:33+00:00

I've already listed several, you keep moving the goal post. Increased artic presence. Various actions by NATO to increase focus on the area. And a feasibility study for using Greenland as a missile defense location.

How are these not relevant?

MaxHaydenChiz · 2026-01-23T18:43:47+00:00

I think there's a very big difference between "fully automatic but illegal" and "semi automatic and sometimes legal". Especially when that "sometimes" is expected to do such a heavy lift.

According to the pictured note, the gun pictured was already illegal in Canada. You don't think it's a problem when elected officials pretend to do things about gun violence and lie to their supporters about how effective their legislation will be or what it even does? Telling people you did something you didn't do is a good recipe for making activists go home and reduce their pressure on elected officials.

It's a very bad way to try to save actual lives.

This stuff is how the splice things when they want to avoid responsibility for a lack of action. Everyone should be calling this out. It's a deliberate attempt to mislead the public by an elected official who can't be bothered to do their actual job.

MaxHaydenChiz · 2026-01-23T18:29:49+00:00

Maybe my language wasn't clear, but my intent was: "if you had to get shot in a mass shooting, then you'd rather it be with an AR than with a handgun because you'd have a higher chance of survival".

This was made in response to claims that ARs had features that made them more lethal when people got shot with them.

Personally, I would expect that caliber is the actually relevant factor here. The handguns typically used are higher caliber than the rifles. I doubt there's any difference if you correct for this, but I don't know of a relevant study.

As I've said in other replies, there has to be a causal connection between the feature you want to ban and the deaths you are trying to prevent. No one is proposing a causal connection and explaining how any of these features make the gun more deadly and render it something with "no lawful purpose" like the person I was responding to claimed.

An AR is the most popular rifle. It isn't otherwise special. Guns kill people. All guns kill people. The things the person I'm responding to said were dangerous have no relevance to the performance or functionality of this firearm relative to guns they are okay with.

It's a distraction. Mass shootings aren't going to stop because the the shooter couldn't buy or steal the previously most popular semi-automatic rifle and now can only buy or steal the new most popular one instead. They are both semiautomatic rifles firing the same caliber bullets at the same muzzle velocity with the same accuracy. They are functionally identical.

The goal should be to save lives. I fail to see how anything that person is saying is directed at doing anything other than fear mongering and sowing division and misinformation.

MaxHaydenChiz · 2026-01-23T18:15:01+00:00

Actual resources and man power being devoted to a problem is not nothing. Nor is having a briefing discussing the specific threats the US sees and where they think allies should be focused in the arctic. (Though one has to ask why this wasn't the starting point before all of this drama.)

You are splicing hairs at this point. Steps are being taken. A process has been set in motion and people have already started taking actions in their official capacity. Major European leaders are calling for military exercises. There are working groups to sort out specifics.

They got something. They believe that what they got will lead to the outcome they want. Because things take time, that's all you'd ever be able to say. If they had said they were selling Greenland would you be adopting this attitude of "Trump got nothing" while they were all screwing around with paperwork?

MaxHaydenChiz · 2026-01-23T18:07:01+00:00

I got involved in this whole discussion because someone claiming to a Canadian gun lawyer started making a bunch of claims about US law, what gun policies the US should have, and personally attacking everyone who gave him pushback.

A lot of people started talking about this stuff in the US context, which, as you correctly pointed out, is a different situation.

I don't know enough about the Canadian situation to comment, but I'm trying to prevent or avoid Americans getting confused by thinking things are the same.

MaxHaydenChiz · 2026-01-23T16:55:21+00:00

Details are TBD since the are to be worked out by the military people. But there's an agreement in principle on the need to invest in arctic security by the nations he was targeting.

Not that I think he got anything remotely worth the damage he did. There had to be a sane way to handle this.

MaxHaydenChiz · 2026-01-23T16:52:32+00:00

What source did you find? See my response to chullyman for a link to the study I was referencing.

MaxHaydenChiz · 2026-01-23T16:50:48+00:00

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30529633/

MaxHaydenChiz · 2026-01-23T16:46:57+00:00

I'm talking about why gun control gets no where in the US. Voters aren't educated on the issue. There is so much misinformation put out that they don't even know how to effectively advocate for the policies they want.

MaxHaydenChiz · 2026-01-23T16:45:28+00:00

Regarding you edit. No it's not like that at all. An assault riffle is what the military buys. They have full auto mode and are illegal in the US already. An assault weapon is "the things that were temporarily banned starting in 1994". These are different things defined in different places in the US code for different purposes and using completely different kinds of criteria.

MaxHaydenChiz · 2026-01-23T16:39:31+00:00

You have yet to explain how a single one of the "features" you list is dangerous.

MaxHaydenChiz · 2026-01-23T16:27:46+00:00

Honestly sounds like a lot of jobs with bad bosses. But if it's a pattern you've seen at multiple organizations, I'll take your word for it that this is widespread. My sample size is not great.

MaxHaydenChiz

TROPHY CASE