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you are operating under a big misconception, the original Arch is not plug and play, but derivatives, like EndeavourOS is as plug and play as any debian or ubuntu flavours. Endeavour is also very conducive to gaming especially and works well for general work. i am sure this is a major factor into things.
Yup! One small example from my own experience: I'm still using X11, but never have I felt bothered by Nick's enthusiasm and support for Wayland. Where we diverge I mostly either don't care or am actually quite happy to hear another perspective and keep other options in mind.
i think the low amount of steam decks is actually the opposite of being sold to avid linux users with a linux desktop, i think deck owners are mostly windows gamers who don't watch this channel
Yeah I was about to comment that. Using the Deck as a desktop sounds pretty weird to me because odds are, people who buy it just want to play games and the fact that it runs linux is irrelevant.
I will note, Brodie poked a bunch of us to go fill out your survey, and Brodie's community is a bit more Arch-and-rice-y. I'm watch both of you, but as a person who is pretty technical and can't use a plug-and-play system effectively, I still really value your opinions on things as someone who wants things to be plug and play, because I do think the smoothness of the user experience matters, and it's easy to forget as a very technically focused developer.
fair point. I'm a sysadmin and use ubuntu largely out-of-the-box because it's really polished when you get to it and does exactly what I want without messing around.
I also found out via Brodie, but I'm also a huge fan of this channel -- been here longer than with Brodie even. RUclips just doesn't think that I need to see Nick's posts for some reason :(
I think because of the kind of community you built, it still attracts a lot of non-elitist "pro" users who run complex setups themselves but appreciate linux getting simpler to get into for noobies and like staying informed on anything foss related, I'm basically in that category
I feel this. Even tho I use Ubuntu and Fedora, I'm also running a Btrfs LUK2 Bcache raid 10 on a server. I want tech to become easier and more user friendly while still powerful and customizable because I know how hard it had been to do a lot of things. Helvum for example was an application I wanted 5 years ago, but virtual patch panels weren't really possible until pipewire made it easy. I remember reading guides for jackd and alsa that were driving me nuts when all I wanted was to route my microphone and desktop audio to the same application.
Hey, I was the same for several YEARS, before I finally switched to Linux 5 months or so ago. Getting to be informed before you do the switch helps in it being more smooth. And in general it's good to be informed.
The Hyprland responces come from the Hyprland developer pinging everyone in the Hyprland Discord with your survey on the first of April. So there are some skewed results.
I mean, elementary also pinned the survey in their Mastodon, but still got hilariously small amount of votes, not even 1% XDDDD Compared to 3-5% they were steadily getting few years ago, this is just pathetic
I'd assume every hyprland user is running arch or nixOS, so that might explain the prevalence of those as well. Not that I'm that surprised tbh, I always assumed that people who are watch a channel dedicated entirely to linux news and content are probably intermediate to advanced users.
I'm one of the NixOS people. I follow your channel because you're one of the best channels out there for general Linux information and news, and have a forward-thinking reasonable perspective! I am still a little surprised by the NixOS numbers though, since it feels very specifically suited to people "like me" (software developers who like spending their free time messing around with config files). Also I'm only on X11 because i'm on a NVIDIA GPU and try as I might I have not been able to get it to work with XWayland on my machine, I'm almost certain because of NVIDIA's insistence on not supporting implicit sync. If I could get XWayland with NVIDIA's drivers to work on my machine, I'd immediately switch because Wayland solves so many problems for me. Ideally I'll either be able to get an AMD or Intel GPU (I'll be honest I want an A770 because it would be *really* funny to me to have an AMD CPU and an Intel GPU) to replace my 3060 or the next Mesa release with NVK as the default will hopefully solve those issues for me without a really bad performance hit.
I'm totally in the same boat with you there. I've had to switch to an old AMD GPU because of all of the Nvidia instability issues on Wayland as well. I can't play any of my proton games through XWayland on my green gpu atm. 💀 Linux gaming on Nvidia through Wayland on 500+ drivers for now...
The Steam OS having such a low percentage is funny to me. I never consciously used Linux until I bought a Steam Deck and then had to figure things out to get some really old games working. And as the tinkering continued on, I eventually tried Linux on the desktop as well. So even though Steam OS is not my primary OS, if it hadn't been for the Steam Deck then I would probably still be using Windows today
That's me. The Deck was my first exposure to Linux, and playing around with it coincided with my getting frustrated with M$, so I decided that maybe it wasn't the worst idea to try that Linux thing on my main computer. The Deck has never been my main computer, but it got me introduced
But it was mentioned in the discord of the Arch-heavy Hyprland community. Don't wanna imply that the poll wasn't representative due to biased promotion. /s
This was really interesting. It would be really cool if you could do it next year and have other linux channels involved so you could get a larger sample of users.
I would personally count myself as a part of the “advanced” camp, however I still enjoy your more beginner friendly content, since it really helped me set up and make the right choices for family members that are not as technologically involved.
Same here .. though I do run what is one of the more beginner friendly options (Pop). I spend enough time configuring complex software, containers and development. I like my desktop as straight forward and clean as possibly.
Appimages would have a higher % if there was a package manager for them, but they're basically like Windows exes. They just run. You have to download them yourself. I like this when I'm on systems where I don't have root access, but other than that, they kinda just exist.
App images are very useful at times, especially when your operating system has an older version of a program that is dependent upon repositories for updates. I'm not exactly sure if you would call the latest updated version of browsers apps, yet they are similar since they run as a standalone program option. These browsers are especially good for older operating systems whether it be Linux or Windows, you may not have security update support yet the latest browser will at least let you get onto the internet and offer some security updates for that latest version.
I think that's the advantage of them. Why use flatpack or (god forbid) snap, if you could use the distro's package manager. The main advantage of appimage is that its not tied to anything. Anyone can just make the executable and provide it as a side package (eg. on their own website) without asking anyones permissions, requiring accounts or risking the app disappearing if some admin/moderator decides he does not like it any more. The last one is especially important in modern world full of consorship and cancel culture.
Absolutely. I've recently put some on a couple of my students' school laptops, and I've sometimes used them as a last-ditch fallback for the few packages I can't get in either Manjaro's repos, nor in Flatpak, nor even in the AUR, just before actually installing snapd or using Wine. For that situation, though, they're awesome.
13:10 personally I wouldn't "prefer" but regional availability of those brands are mostly bubbled around EU or US 😅 Also, as the hardware support is better than ever, no-OS big-brand hardware works really well with the added price advantage.
They are still new and I run a 10 year old PC for example but will strongly consider them, when I replace this one. So I guess, there are others like me and this will change in the next couple of years.
These brands are just too expensive, as I can get the same performance for less than half the price. Even if I want to support them, that's just too much of a difference and my Lenovo Legion works just perfectly - if we ignore that you can't update the BIOS.
The problem with dedicated Linux laptops is that they don't usually ship to locations where there's a high number of Linux users, or are too expensive for people there to afford. Remember that survey last month about how users went up to 4%? Most of the countries with high number of Linux users are third-world countries who either don't get the hardware or can't afford the price.
I'm from Brazil and I had to change my notebook recently, I wanted to buy it from a dedicated manufacturer, but it was either possible or it was too expensive. about compatibility I still have problems, for example, on my new notebook I can't make bluetooth to work.
This survey was really interesting and I think all Linux RUclipsrs should do this annually to see how their communities like Linux. If it's true that Brodie sent over his viewers, then I think the results would've been different without them. If every creator runs this survey annually, then I think it'll provide helpful data to the devs.
There aren't that many Linux focused channels and this one is one of the better ones for news. I think there's a lot of cross-pollination going on. I follow several of them and don't really care if my preferences don't line up with Nick's preferences. I love Arch, Nix and tiling and I don't like Gnome, but I also don't require other people's validation as a requirement for me to hear them out. 😉
4:30 for the steam deck I think the reality is that it's more being used by previous windows users rather than people who already use linux as a daily driver. It's likely the case that a lot of people using the steam deck just think of it as a console (as that's the intended purpose anyway) and aren't really a part of the linux community. I think if a gaming or pc hardware youtuber ran the same poll their numbers for steam deck would make up a larger proportion but that's just a guess. Also IMO a misconception about arch is that it's not user friendly because it doesn't have things like flatpack setup by default but I think realistically it just means that everyone on arch is using the same format so it makes things more easy and consistent. if it's not on the official repos it's on the AUR. if it's not on the AUR you build it from github or an equivalent and it just feels like package management is never an issue, it's just the same command every time.
I mean, I'm part of the linux community and still use my Steam Deck mostly as a console, I don't see the reason to daily driving it when I already have many devices I can use for everyday tasks.
@@telldo8016 i got a steam deck because it's the only way i was able to upgrade my pc, and I daily drive it now, though I'm probably the only one doing that lol
yeah I'm guessing that's one of if not the main one missing. something like xmonad and ratpoison are probably more rarely used. outside of this particular survey maybe i3 is the most widely used for now, followed by sway?
Besides the entire Arch meme (yes I use Arch btw), for me personally the reason why I just haven't been able to get into other distros besides Arch is they don't have a wiki like Arch. The Arch Wiki is the bible of Linux Honourable mention: The Gentoo Wiki
I use arch as my daily driver since about two years or so, but recently when getting into haskell programming I've started using a nixOS machine for that as it has much better support for the haskell ecosystem out-of-the-box. I don't like my nixOS setup as much though yet.
For me I started with Endeavour OS and made a huge list of programs which I install in clean boot and now I am totally dependent on it. If I have to switch to non arch based distro it would be a huge pain in the ass to install everything. I use Arch btw if you couldn't tell
Well, the informations in Arch wiki are widely applicable on others distros, I'm not using Arch but I agree that Arch wiki is the best one, and using it often.
Snaps have all their sandboxing only with Apparmor. In the past this was not upstreamed so only Ubuntu, today MAYBE also OpenSuse, Arch etc. But OpenSuse and Fedora both prefer Flatpak, just as many smaller Distros do. GNOME has nearly all their apps verified on Flathub, with KDE being second place. Flatpak is the future for GUI apps.
Oh and Snaps will not be Sandboxed at all on Fedora, using SELinux. And btw if you use Waydroid this will only be sandboxed if you use SELinux (i.e. only on Fedora and similars)
Apart from the Brodie's recommendations influencing your result, I think some of the tiling WM users (like me) do watch your videos to just see the state of GNOME/KDE, to follow Linux in general and your opinions on Linux topics.
I used other distros before I first touched arch... but it wasn't until after I started using arch day to day that I got to really understanding more about what makes Linux different "under the hood" so to speak. Still remember the first time I was able to get my system running pipewire properly (before it became a standard on the distro) I was so excited. Or the time I switched to using a tilling window manager for a couple of months. I might not always stick with the more hacky solutions in the long run, but they teach me a lot, and they can be fun to play with.
16:55 You forgot to add an option of Linux + something else or just "something else", since I feel like BSD systems are also popular among a specific part of the community.
7 месяцев назад+24
On the subject of “buying from Linux-first hardware vendors”, I would love to but, where I am (Brazil) they’re either not available for delivery here or are shipped from far which means big shipping and import tax costs. So people end up buying from big brands (Dell, Lenovo, etc). And there aren’t even many configurations, I bought a Windows laptop to install Linux because there isn’t a laptop here with the configuration that I need and Linux out of the box. :/
Totally agree ! I personnaly switched to Linux around 2 years ago (used to run Windows), but sticked to the same PC as everything was working fine so I didn't want and didn't see any reason to buy a new one with no OS or Linux preinstalled. And I believe a lot of newcomers follow the same path, ditching Windows on the way without changing their PC.
I hope this becomes an annual tradition, sort of like how vlogbrothers do their regular Nerd Figheria censuses. You've already identified some areas for improvement which would be interesting to see a followup on. Also would be good to see cross tabs of some audience verifiers (eg. "are you a subscriber") to tease apart some of the skews you mentioned.
Another option should be "I have some hardware that doesn't work, but I really don't care about it", such as fingerprint readers and such junk - I have a fingerprint reader that doesn't work at all, and I don't care about it enough to even look in its direction, but the rest of the hardware works exceptionally well. Given the options, I would have voted as "works perfectly well", and only now I would be reminded of this FP reader's existence. Come to think of it, there are also a built in mmc card reader and a smart card reader of some sort that I've never bothered testing. Bloat(hard)ware?
Yeah, the only thing that didn't work ootb on my Asus laptop was the "numperpad". There is a reverse-engineered driver but I didn't bother with it since the feature is pretty useless.
Yeah I'm also having some issues with printing, but I don't care I can just use a windows laptop for it. There's like 5 times a year when I have to use a printer.
@@H4GRlD If your printer has network connectivity try to install it using IPP and a generic printer driver. You wont be able to use all the features, but basic stuff (printing and checking ink levels) should work, since those are part of the IPP format.
In my experience, using Arch gives me a more pleasant experience using my desktop OS. When I was daily driving Mint, I would remove pre-installed things to install what I wanted, and later when I tried updating to a new version of Mint it broke everything (probably my fault), and I didn't want to go through all of that again. While with Arch, I set up up to be how I want it from the beginning, and I only get what I want to have since of the clean slate you start with. Additionally it has been easier to maintain since I just update my packages every now and then, and I don't have to worry about a new point release forcing me to reinstall, or potentially it breaking my current install. Also, the AUR/pacman stuff has more of the packages I want/need, and it has up to date versions, so I don't have to install the binary manually to get the latest version.
There’s a big drawback to pacman though: rollback. It’s not a smooth process at all, which means if a major bug gets introduced (*cough* Bluetooth in kernel 6.8.2 *cough*) and you don’t have any snapshot to roll back to, that’s a tedious process.
The problem with your hardware question is that I do not consider my gaming rig to be my “main” machine. So I answered integrated Intel when I do have a machine with an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D and a Radeon RX 6600XT - which is where any of my hardware Steam Survey statistics derive.
Agreed! It's still not perfect and has some small issues, but for the most part, it works great if you're using a DE or WM that has good Wayland support. On my laptop, which has a high DPI built-in display and I need good trackpad gestures, Wayland is a must, especially since I usually have it connected to a secondary 1080p regular DPI monitor, and X11 doesn't support having different scaling factors on each display.
@@theodoros_1234 My thoughts exactly. GNOME on X11 is pain, since that DE is *nothing* without its touchpad gestures. I don't think X11 should be deprecated at this point for any reason other than "we need more hands on Wayland so they can report bugs" since there are cases where Wayland isn't equal or better than X, but that doesn't mean occasional critic towards Wayland, an unfinished project, mean that it's awful. People just take criticism too personally.
As a GNU/Linux user since 2003, NixOs makes a lot of sense. No more updates breaking the system, no more ansible or custom scripts to restore a fresh system. No more distro hop (fingers crossed). Easy to add programs that are not packaged (insanely simple for most use cases). This is so refreshing to have stability by design while also having the option to go explore whatever program you want using nix-shell. These features are making this os way simpler than any other linux distro in the long run.
I'd like to think I use a GNOME+ type of environment: it's visually and functionally vanilla, but with the addition of several QoL extensions / features already planned by GNOME for the future.
Hi Nick. I'm a professor in the business intelligence program at Marymount University and I do a lot of work with statistical analysis. It'd be a lot of fun to do some exploratory analysis on your survey results. Looking at things like correlations between some answers and factor analysis might give some deeper insights to share with your fans. It could also be a cool dataset to look at with my students. If you'd be open to sharing your data, please hit me up :)
The raw data is available as a link in the video’s description! I’d love to get some more in depth analysis, don’t hesitate to send me your results in a file in an email :)
The fact that there are so many "advanced" users (who can run Arch or Nixos) watching your channel speaks a lot about the quality of your work! Congrats! Even though I am not one of those knowledgeable I enjoy watching your videos a lot.
Once again, thank you for the work you put in this channel. It was really fun to see the results of the survey. It sounds like tha arch community was activated by other means, so that definitely seems like a reason that arch had that many entries. Another thing might be your news videos? I have used a lot of different setups over the years, but the news videos have always been an accessible way to get news about privacy, security and desktop agnostic news in general. Even though i can see from your views, that the most popular videos are the ones abiut kde and gnome, it seems that the news videos hokds a VERY consistent viewer base 🙂 Also, next time you do a survey, let us enter for mutiple systems if nextcloud can handle it 👍
With people buying from big name manufacturers rather than Linux-first manufacturers, many of them might have bought the laptop intending to keep Windows on it, but switched to Linux later down the line. It would be interesting to see how many people ran Linux from day 1 on their current PC or if they have switched from another OS.
@@osoiii Definitely, but very few people have Linux as their first OS, and I think most people replace Windows on an existing machine rather than buying a brand new computer just to get started with Linux. There could be a lot of people filling out the form who used Windows on their computer for years before they even learn about the Linux desktop, and then installed Linux on the same computer afterwards.
xbox 360 emulator. literally those are the only 2 programs holding me back to windows currently (I DID use arch before though but got into vtuubing so lol)@@zeta_eclipse
As others have said - given that at the time of writing you have nearly 30,000 views, I suggest you invite people to do another poll now we've been informed there IS a poll ! First I heard of it was this video!
Arch has the best wiki and for some time it was the top suggested distro for advanced users. At least that's why I decided to bite the bullet a few years back
I use the Arch wiki all the time even when driving Fedora or Ubuntu. It's just one of the best information resources and often the only one on a niche topic.
I didn't vote on this, but Debian stable was my OS of choice. Wanted something with good documentation, relatively easy to work with, but not hand holdy to the point where I don't learn anything. I'm a dual booter with windows but more of my workflow has been put onto Linux.
Remember that there might be a lot of people (like me) who use Arch _derived_ distros, like Endeavour, but aren't "i use arch btw" arch superusers. Those people would probably, lacking a clearer option, check a box saying Arch is their main distro.
As someone running both arch (laptop) and endeavour (desktop), they are exactly the same in day to day usage, it is just arch install in better. Don't tell the arch people tho So I found it fitting to put it just into the using arch category
@@marsimplodation If you're familiar enough with the base Arch install process, then I suppose there's nothing wrong with using Endeavour to as the installer to save time. It's like with nmcli and nmtui . Don't argue. Just use whatever is best for you lol.
I agree, Garuda and Manjaro are both in this category AND come with the 'flashy' installer! But yeah, in the terminal we all use pacman (or pamac) - so technically we are running Arch... Technically.
I Use Arch Linux with the Arch Linux Endeavour installer by the way! >If you're familiar enough with the base Arch install process Yea, i am. The arch install iso sucks. Only a "DOS Terminal from 1980". No copy paste, no firefox, tiny default font. Makes a nice rescue system for troubleshooting if system doesn't boot, right? Around 800MB iso for "Dos terminal".
>Manjaro @@Vilvaran No Manjaro isn't Arch because they don't use the original arch linux package mirrors in pacman. And some say Garuda has more custom things like custom kernel that is more far from Arch than Endeavour but may be better for gaming.
As an Arch user and Manjaro for work system, I appreciate your channel for its uniqueness and professional approach. The quality of your content and the attention to detail in your videos set you apart from many other RUclipsrs in the Linux community. Keep up the excellent work, and I look forward to more insightful and engaging videos! 👍💻🔧📺
I also run Arch with Hyprland on my primary system. But I get the appeal of distributions like Fedora, Pop OS!, Debian, etc. with more traditional desktop environments and I play with them time from to time. Your channel is a great place for me to keep track of a good lot of the things happening in the Linux community. I appreciate the "no snobbery" approach in your content which is why I prefer your channel to a lot of the hardcore Arch/Gentoo + Xmonad kind of channels.
One thing your video didn't mention was a Raspberry Pi. While you can install various OSes on a Pi, the official Pi OSes (available for download from the Pi web sight) are all customized versions of Linux. I personally own two Pi 5s (the current "fastest" Pis on the market), that I run the biggest (64 bit full Linux and some common apps) official Pi OS on. I originally got my Pis to run "Pi-Hole" (a local ad-blocking DNS cache) for my home LAN. Pi-Hole resulted in slightly faster internet access for my LAN (due in part to the faster DNS responses from the local cache), as well as some ads being blocked LAN wide (most noticeable on my internet connected TVs, which now show a fraction as many ads as they did before Pi-Hole). However after getting the Pis (which I still run Pi-Hole on btw), I discovered they also make good everyday "desktops" as well (and by bringing up the included chromium browser, I can even use them as a nice "streaming device" for a connected TV). And while I can only run Linux apps on the Pis (due to the OS I chose to install on the Pis), the Pis do let me install every Linux app I've tried to add. And about the only problem I've discovered, is that while the CUPS setup on my Pi recognizes my printer (including its two sided "duplex" printing option), I've not actually gotten duplex printing to work on my Pi (instead, picking that option in the driver still prints on only one side of the page). Still I consider this to be a minor annoyance, that doesn't prevent me from using the Linux based Pi OS as my primary desktop these days.
Shout out to the other 3 Linux From Scratch users out there that took the survery! 4 (including me) people who use it is more than what I was expecting, only 2 at most, but we got 4. That's pretty good!
Oh, hey there! Question, besides the learning and "I built it myself" satisfaction, are there any other reason to go LFS ? I'm on Gentoo and I'm slightly curious, but I feel it's just something to try at one point for the experience, then I'd rather continue staying on Gentoo.
@Winnetou17 I covered that in a vid I did called "Why I like LFS", and I hate promoting my own crap but it explains it in a better way than what I can comment. Basically it boils down to me having issues with minimal distros so I realize the only way to truly be happy with a distro is to make it myself from the ground up, where Arch and Gentoo are more automatic, less customizable, less flexible, and do things in their own way.
@@zeckma Curious how Gentoo is less flexible than LFS with their USE flags? I mean, I've never used Gentoo but how I understand it is that you can use these flags to set things up however you want. Maybe that's wrong. LFS was a cool experience, both to learn how Linux works and how to use it. It's how I got started in Linux, but I can't say I'd be likely to go back.
IMO, a bunch of linux channels should run the same poll. Not a YT poll, but a poll where you guys share the same link, so there won't be duplicate votes.
Arch having such a strong presence might be related to how arch users behave, after all, a survey on the internet where they can indirectly say "I use Arch btw" was too tempting not to answer.
Just because I use a distribution that provides me a lot of ability to modify things at the cost of being plug-and-play, doesn't mean that I have any illusions about plug-and-play being what would bring more people over to Linux. Moreover, for most use cases, plug-and-play is what would be most effective and useful.
Just to be clear, I did not buy my Linux machine from a major manufacturer because I *prefer* them, but because my knowledge of other options is limited to just Tuxedo and System76, neither of which were making devices that appealed to me at the time. I ended up getting an HP Dev One, only to see support for it dropped on hardly two years. And then I ended up reusing my desktop PC instead.
The one thing that I love this channel for, is the up-to-date news about Linux and FOSS. Its the perfect amount of detail in a convenient location. Other topics you cover is simply a bonus :) So from that stance, if there are others like me here, I think the survey says less about how we use linux and more about what we love about your channel.
I was one of the responders to your survey. In my case, many of the choices are constrained by technical factors or work requirements. For example, I have to use X11 because I have to interact with servers through X11 forwarding. I have to use Google Chrome because of its progressive web app capabilities. I would love to use Firefox exclusively, but I need to run Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Teams as PWAs, which Firefox does not natively support. These are minor gripes, though, as 90% of all my dev work runs on Linux servers. When it has to be a Windows native app, I have the company issued Windows laptop to work on.
i3 or sway may be good places to start in that case. i3 is not my favourite, and I haven't tried sway for that long, but I think they probably give the best experiences out of the box, while many others require more tinkering to get started. Or maybe Pop OS or it's WM, if you want to try out a middle ground between tiling and floating.
I noticed Brodie posted your survey on his community, so I guess it got some attention there aswell. Although I must say I'm still not surprised by a large amount of people using arch and tiling wms, because even if this channel is very much focused on beginner friendly content, I'm sure more experienced users (me included) do enjoy that type of content sometimes as well, and your news are definitely worth watching for anyone.
I use Mate and frankly it fits in the Gnome camp as it is basically Gnome-2 ported to GTK-3 and GTK-4, I went to Mate because I didn't like the changes that came with Gnome-3 and Gnome-3 and later did not work well with remote desktop software whereas Mate does. It strikes me as funny that Gnome-46 has changed less radically from Gnome-3 than Gnome-3 did from Gnome-2.
Now we just need everyone - Nick, Chris Titus, DT, Brodie, Primeagen, TechHut, LinuxCast, Mental Outlaw, BugsWriter, LearnLinuxTV, WolfGang to do a survey and promote it together!! That would say a lot about the community.
Of course nix and arch are gonna be so popular. I imagine a fair amount of people chose arch even though they ran an arch-based distro, but my actual theory for why they're so popular among your viewers is that this is simply one of the best linux related channels, thus many people, regardless of their skills, are gonna follow you. It just so happens that arch is popular among the mid to high range skill level.
@@gregholloway2656 Hi! Wow! I guess back in the day it was a challenge! I started my Linux journey in February 2023 and did a lot of distro hopping. But Slackware caught my heart!
I don't particularly hate Wayland. If I used a full desktop environments instead of tiling WMs and didn't have an NVIDIA card, I'd probably already moved on to it. As of right now though I have Wayland disabled on my system (Gentoo).
There's no surprise in the success of the Arch base. It's the only place where you can install everything you want without the need to add PPAs or build from source. Typically, Arch-based distros perform very well too. The Debian/Ubuntu approach is actually terrible for general use (compared to Arch). People with decent machines benefit a lot from newer kernels, drivers (and packages in general). And that's just for the 'average' user. For power users, you have complete control over your system.
It was interesting to see the survey results, thanks. I think a survey focused on Desktop Environments and Window Managers would be very interesting also.
It is no surprise that AMD is higher on the usage list for CPU. AMD was early on the support for Linux. Since i have always built my own systems, AMD was the only choice as were non-Nvidia video cards. In the past ( 10 years ) Suse was the best for laptops but now personal preference. However, for best performance with AMD Ryzen CPUs and especially Threadripper, AMD recommends "Clear Linux" which is an Intel development. My TR is paired with an AMD based video card and just sings along. Your assessment of users who build their own systems is on target for selecting components known to have Linux support. great job. thanks.
On the WM- & Desktop category i wanted to answer differently. I took KDE-Plasma, but on top use the Krohnkite tiling-script and am transitioning to Bismuth. I need KDEs polished customizability and stability, while having the option to use a tiling-manager.
This video is amazing. 9500 answers is not a small number by any stretch of imagination. As a point of potential improvement, I think it would be enough to mention the selection bias at the beginning and at the end, not every time you make an interesting observation. I hope you can do this yearly or so.
Hey Nick...great vid! I believe this is the best video I've seen on your channel. The two biggest surprises...definately that NixOS is so popular for daily use, and the migration to Wayland is more than I would have thought. Keep up the great work :)
Great video. I didn't participate in your survey but I would agree with most of your findings. I personally switch from Win10/Win11 to an Arch based distro /Plasma 6 /wayland (with dual Win boot if needed) for my desktop and a Proxmox for my server needs. I think the results match the spirit of this community that is usually pragmatic and open new paradigms and FREE ways to do things. Distro hopping is fun if we are trying to learn new things but not practical for daily work/gaming/productivity. If I distrohop now I would do it to another Arch or Debian based distro as it is close to what I have experienced.
I build my PC specifically for Linux around a 5900X where multi-threading is disabled with a RX 6750 RX for GPU and 64 GB RAM. 12 cores full throttle this puppy behaves like a beast when creating 3D assets.
It seems that in the WM environments we have 2 major ones too since Sway is basically i3 but using wayland instead of x11. So hyprland and i3/sway dominate everything else. Also good to see that there are a lot of wayland on the tiling WM world.
I am about to look into NixOS. Care to explain why you think it is overrated? From what I understand it is very stable and the config approach seems to be very straight forward. The downsides are that it takes up more space and well you have to get into it.
I don’t know what you mean by this, but NixOS’s benefit is exceptional reliability and replicability, which, to be fair are a domain-specific advantages, but these are pretty unique. If you need something really stable and run fresh software, NixOS might be your only choice.
@@WhatTheScoots it only takes up as much space as you tell it to. You can clean older versions via command. But the problem getting into it is mostly dogshit documentation. Once you learn it, you discover it is not actually difficult, but it is explained poorly.
Finally someone said it. Like it's cool but people don't need those crazy features they think they need. They could do all their work on Arch, Debian, Mint, or Fedora.
Try Kasm Workspaces to stream any desktop, app or OS to your web browser:
github.com/kasmtech/KasmVNC/releases/tag/v1.3.1
kasmweb.com/community-edition
have been using Kasm for over a year now on my Oracle VM. Works on great ARM. Love for the team
you are operating under a big misconception, the original Arch is not plug and play, but derivatives, like EndeavourOS is as plug and play as any debian or ubuntu flavours. Endeavour is also very conducive to gaming especially and works well for general work. i am sure this is a major factor into things.
Note that IBM and NCR cash registers, point of sales (POS) use SUSE Linux booted over the network. Involuntary usage but exceeding voluntary users.
Arch users were just really excited to tell a survey that they use arch lol
Hey, I am running Arch too, btw 🤣
Me too btw
@@andreapadovan5845 me too btw 😅
we use arch btw
i use endeavour btw
I follow you because your “Use whatever works for YOU” mentality. You have your own biases, but you never use them to bash opposing views.
Yup! One small example from my own experience: I'm still using X11, but never have I felt bothered by Nick's enthusiasm and support for Wayland. Where we diverge I mostly either don't care or am actually quite happy to hear another perspective and keep other options in mind.
Can we use them to zsh opposing views?
It should always be use what works for you.
haha bash
i think the low amount of steam decks is actually the opposite of being sold to avid linux users with a linux desktop, i think deck owners are mostly windows gamers who don't watch this channel
also steam os is arch based so i imagine many will have clicked arch derivative and moved on
this definitely seems like the reason why
steam OS is an arch derivative anyway XD
I got one but it's definitely not my main driver - that title goes currently to the sister model of the zotac steam machine ;)
it's likely under reported because the form was only for one computer and people (like me) were too lazy to do it again
Yeah I was about to comment that. Using the Deck as a desktop sounds pretty weird to me because odds are, people who buy it just want to play games and the fact that it runs linux is irrelevant.
For the next survey please announce it at the start of a regular video
so I won't miss it again. Thanks!
Same here, I feel guilty watching almost every video on this channel then missing a survey.
I think announcing it at least a month ahead on several videos with an email sign up would do a lot for getting a larger involvement.
I will note, Brodie poked a bunch of us to go fill out your survey, and Brodie's community is a bit more Arch-and-rice-y.
I'm watch both of you, but as a person who is pretty technical and can't use a plug-and-play system effectively, I still really value your opinions on things as someone who wants things to be plug and play, because I do think the smoothness of the user experience matters, and it's easy to forget as a very technically focused developer.
That's a community!
fair point. I'm a sysadmin and use ubuntu largely out-of-the-box because it's really polished when you get to it and does exactly what I want without messing around.
Im on the exact same page as you
Makes sense. I was surprised how many people were using not only Arch but vanilla Arch.
I also found out via Brodie, but I'm also a huge fan of this channel -- been here longer than with Brodie even. RUclips just doesn't think that I need to see Nick's posts for some reason :(
I think because of the kind of community you built, it still attracts a lot of non-elitist "pro" users who run complex setups themselves but appreciate linux getting simpler to get into for noobies and like staying informed on anything foss related, I'm basically in that category
I feel this. Even tho I use Ubuntu and Fedora, I'm also running a Btrfs LUK2 Bcache raid 10 on a server. I want tech to become easier and more user friendly while still powerful and customizable because I know how hard it had been to do a lot of things.
Helvum for example was an application I wanted 5 years ago, but virtual patch panels weren't really possible until pipewire made it easy. I remember reading guides for jackd and alsa that were driving me nuts when all I wanted was to route my microphone and desktop audio to the same application.
Maybe, but Arch doesn't necessarily mean complex.
Just look at Manjaro.
Same
Linux needs more users like that IMO
@@Luredreiermanjaro is complex because you have to be a pro for it not to break after a handful of months and to fix it again and again
8:40 i'm 99.9999% sure the one you forgot is dwm
That's the one I thought about as well, although I don't think that many people are actually using it (I, for one, no longer do)
I was thinking exactly that. So, I went with the wm I used before I switched to dwm, which was Qtile.
I use dwl .
@@qwfp i think it is currently used and pushed by ChrisTitusTech, another huge linux content creator. so it only makes sense :)
was about to comment that
i'm probably in a 0.1% who don't use linux at all in this community, but still enjoy watching the vids.
Hey, I was the same for several YEARS, before I finally switched to Linux 5 months or so ago. Getting to be informed before you do the switch helps in it being more smooth. And in general it's good to be informed.
😮
switch
Out of interest, why do you not use Linux, and why do you enjoy the vids regardless?
ya the command line is intimidating. but it is also ultimate control - you can do basically anything with it
The Hyprland responces come from the Hyprland developer pinging everyone in the Hyprland Discord with your survey on the first of April. So there are some skewed results.
I noticed this too 😂😂😂 it's definitely skewed.
thats why i'm here
I mean, elementary also pinned the survey in their Mastodon, but still got hilariously small amount of votes, not even 1% XDDDD
Compared to 3-5% they were steadily getting few years ago, this is just pathetic
This would explain why Arch is so popular in this poll because they made probably the biggest part of Hyprland users
I'd assume every hyprland user is running arch or nixOS, so that might explain the prevalence of those as well. Not that I'm that surprised tbh, I always assumed that people who are watch a channel dedicated entirely to linux news and content are probably intermediate to advanced users.
I'm one of the NixOS people. I follow your channel because you're one of the best channels out there for general Linux information and news, and have a forward-thinking reasonable perspective! I am still a little surprised by the NixOS numbers though, since it feels very specifically suited to people "like me" (software developers who like spending their free time messing around with config files).
Also I'm only on X11 because i'm on a NVIDIA GPU and try as I might I have not been able to get it to work with XWayland on my machine, I'm almost certain because of NVIDIA's insistence on not supporting implicit sync. If I could get XWayland with NVIDIA's drivers to work on my machine, I'd immediately switch because Wayland solves so many problems for me. Ideally I'll either be able to get an AMD or Intel GPU (I'll be honest I want an A770 because it would be *really* funny to me to have an AMD CPU and an Intel GPU) to replace my 3060 or the next Mesa release with NVK as the default will hopefully solve those issues for me without a really bad performance hit.
I'm totally in the same boat with you there. I've had to switch to an old AMD GPU because of all of the Nvidia instability issues on Wayland as well. I can't play any of my proton games through XWayland on my green gpu atm. 💀 Linux gaming on Nvidia through Wayland on 500+ drivers for now...
Shout out to the 101 other ARM users!
I love my M1 Mac Mini
Termux here, although I don't know if could be considered Linux per se
@ArcRCG finally, someone as crazy as I am! Termux is awesome
I have way too many raspberry pis
termux is so damn fun and cool lol @@ArcRCG
The Steam OS having such a low percentage is funny to me. I never consciously used Linux until I bought a Steam Deck and then had to figure things out to get some really old games working. And as the tinkering continued on, I eventually tried Linux on the desktop as well. So even though Steam OS is not my primary OS, if it hadn't been for the Steam Deck then I would probably still be using Windows today
That's me. The Deck was my first exposure to Linux, and playing around with it coincided with my getting frustrated with M$, so I decided that maybe it wasn't the worst idea to try that Linux thing on my main computer. The Deck has never been my main computer, but it got me introduced
I wished you mentioned the survey in a video before, I've never used the yt community tab. I'll wait for the next survey
Same
But it was mentioned in the discord of the Arch-heavy Hyprland community.
Don't wanna imply that the poll wasn't representative due to biased promotion. /s
@@alicethegrinsecatz6011 Of course it was lol
Same
youtube shows community posts on main page as suggestions. that's how I learned about it. do you have community posts on your youtube main page?
This was really interesting. It would be really cool if you could do it next year and have other linux channels involved so you could get a larger sample of users.
I would personally count myself as a part of the “advanced” camp, however I still enjoy your more beginner friendly content, since it really helped me set up and make the right choices for family members that are not as technologically involved.
Same here .. though I do run what is one of the more beginner friendly options (Pop). I spend enough time configuring complex software, containers and development. I like my desktop as straight forward and clean as possibly.
Appimages would have a higher % if there was a package manager for them, but they're basically like Windows exes. They just run. You have to download them yourself. I like this when I'm on systems where I don't have root access, but other than that, they kinda just exist.
They are certainly niche too but when you do want or need them they can be nice to have.
App images are very useful at times, especially when your operating system has an older version of a program that is dependent upon repositories for updates. I'm not exactly sure if you would call the latest updated version of browsers apps, yet they are similar since they run as a standalone program option. These browsers are especially good for older operating systems whether it be Linux or Windows, you may not have security update support yet the latest browser will at least let you get onto the internet and offer some security updates for that latest version.
I think that's the advantage of them.
Why use flatpack or (god forbid) snap, if you could use the distro's package manager.
The main advantage of appimage is that its not tied to anything. Anyone can just make the executable and provide it as a side package (eg. on their own website) without asking anyones permissions, requiring accounts or risking the app disappearing if some admin/moderator decides he does not like it any more.
The last one is especially important in modern world full of consorship and cancel culture.
Absolutely. I've recently put some on a couple of my students' school laptops, and I've sometimes used them as a last-ditch fallback for the few packages I can't get in either Manjaro's repos, nor in Flatpak, nor even in the AUR, just before actually installing snapd or using Wine.
For that situation, though, they're awesome.
13:10 personally I wouldn't "prefer" but regional availability of those brands are mostly bubbled around EU or US 😅
Also, as the hardware support is better than ever, no-OS big-brand hardware works really well with the added price advantage.
They are still new and I run a 10 year old PC for example but will strongly consider them, when I replace this one. So I guess, there are others like me and this will change in the next couple of years.
These brands are just too expensive, as I can get the same performance for less than half the price.
Even if I want to support them, that's just too much of a difference and my Lenovo Legion works just perfectly - if we ignore that you can't update the BIOS.
The problem with dedicated Linux laptops is that they don't usually ship to locations where there's a high number of Linux users, or are too expensive for people there to afford. Remember that survey last month about how users went up to 4%? Most of the countries with high number of Linux users are third-world countries who either don't get the hardware or can't afford the price.
I'm from Brazil and I had to change my notebook recently, I wanted to buy it from a dedicated manufacturer, but it was either possible or it was too expensive. about compatibility I still have problems, for example, on my new notebook I can't make bluetooth to work.
Only Windows PCs go on Sale. The few Linux ones always stay full price
I really did NOT expect Arch to be on top considering how much you talk about Fedora and Ubuntu. Great video!
Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if most Arch users only really use it so they can be "the cool kids" and say "i use arch btw" all the time
I wonder how much of those Arch+Tiling WM folks are from Brodie's audience instead of yours 😂
Can confirm I found out about the survey through his community post, but I already watched this channel to begin with.
Personally as an Arch+Gnome user, I watch both Brodie and TLE, sad that I missed the post about the survey.
This survey was really interesting and I think all Linux RUclipsrs should do this annually to see how their communities like Linux. If it's true that Brodie sent over his viewers, then I think the results would've been different without them. If every creator runs this survey annually, then I think it'll provide helpful data to the devs.
There aren't that many Linux focused channels and this one is one of the better ones for news. I think there's a lot of cross-pollination going on. I follow several of them and don't really care if my preferences don't line up with Nick's preferences. I love Arch, Nix and tiling and I don't like Gnome, but I also don't require other people's validation as a requirement for me to hear them out. 😉
last sentence hit lol@@Xaito
We use Arch btw
agreed 😂
4:30
for the steam deck I think the reality is that it's more being used by previous windows users rather than people who already use linux as a daily driver. It's likely the case that a lot of people using the steam deck just think of it as a console (as that's the intended purpose anyway) and aren't really a part of the linux community.
I think if a gaming or pc hardware youtuber ran the same poll their numbers for steam deck would make up a larger proportion but that's just a guess.
Also IMO a misconception about arch is that it's not user friendly because it doesn't have things like flatpack setup by default but I think realistically it just means that everyone on arch is using the same format so it makes things more easy and consistent. if it's not on the official repos it's on the AUR. if it's not on the AUR you build it from github or an equivalent and it just feels like package management is never an issue, it's just the same command every time.
I mean, I'm part of the linux community and still use my Steam Deck mostly as a console, I don't see the reason to daily driving it when I already have many devices I can use for everyday tasks.
@@telldo8016 i got a steam deck because it's the only way i was able to upgrade my pc, and I daily drive it now, though I'm probably the only one doing that lol
At this point, all I need is someone talking about Linux in background while I work. So keep these videos coming.
Did you forget DWM in the Tiling WM section?
yeah I'm guessing that's one of if not the main one missing. something like xmonad and ratpoison are probably more rarely used.
outside of this particular survey maybe i3 is the most widely used for now, followed by sway?
Besides the entire Arch meme (yes I use Arch btw), for me personally the reason why I just haven't been able to get into other distros besides Arch is they don't have a wiki like Arch.
The Arch Wiki is the bible of Linux
Honourable mention: The Gentoo Wiki
I agree! Arch wiki is the best btw
I use arch as my daily driver since about two years or so, but recently when getting into haskell programming I've started using a nixOS machine for that as it has much better support for the haskell ecosystem out-of-the-box. I don't like my nixOS setup as much though yet.
For me I started with Endeavour OS and made a huge list of programs which I install in clean boot and now I am totally dependent on it. If I have to switch to non arch based distro it would be a huge pain in the ass to install everything.
I use Arch btw if you couldn't tell
Well, the informations in Arch wiki are widely applicable on others distros, I'm not using Arch but I agree that Arch wiki is the best one, and using it often.
Agreed. I moved from Kubuntu to vanilla Arch and the wiki is such a godsend
I don't use immutable distros yet, but it's definitely something I'd be interested in once the Flatpak / Snap ecosystem matures more.
You dont need to. You can use Distrobox and install any application inside it with no performance impact, while being containerized.
@@critzlez8593 I know, I just can't be bothered to manage that stuff. I'd rather casually install something through Flatpak or Snap.
Snaps have all their sandboxing only with Apparmor. In the past this was not upstreamed so only Ubuntu, today MAYBE also OpenSuse, Arch etc.
But OpenSuse and Fedora both prefer Flatpak, just as many smaller Distros do. GNOME has nearly all their apps verified on Flathub, with KDE being second place.
Flatpak is the future for GUI apps.
Oh and Snaps will not be Sandboxed at all on Fedora, using SELinux.
And btw if you use Waydroid this will only be sandboxed if you use SELinux (i.e. only on Fedora and similars)
Plus, the Fedora Atomic ones have rpm-ostree, which allows you to install native packages when needed.
Apart from the Brodie's recommendations influencing your result, I think some of the tiling WM users (like me) do watch your videos to just see the state of GNOME/KDE, to follow Linux in general and your opinions on Linux topics.
I use LxQT and XFCE on my potato laptops, but I too like to keep up with other DE's.
I used other distros before I first touched arch... but it wasn't until after I started using arch day to day that I got to really understanding more about what makes Linux different "under the hood" so to speak. Still remember the first time I was able to get my system running pipewire properly (before it became a standard on the distro) I was so excited. Or the time I switched to using a tilling window manager for a couple of months. I might not always stick with the more hacky solutions in the long run, but they teach me a lot, and they can be fun to play with.
16:55 You forgot to add an option of Linux + something else or just "something else", since I feel like BSD systems are also popular among a specific part of the community.
On the subject of “buying from Linux-first hardware vendors”, I would love to but, where I am (Brazil) they’re either not available for delivery here or are shipped from far which means big shipping and import tax costs.
So people end up buying from big brands (Dell, Lenovo, etc). And there aren’t even many configurations, I bought a Windows laptop to install Linux because there isn’t a laptop here with the configuration that I need and Linux out of the box. :/
Totally agree !
I personnaly switched to Linux around 2 years ago (used to run Windows), but sticked to the same PC as everything was working fine so I didn't want and didn't see any reason to buy a new one with no OS or Linux preinstalled. And I believe a lot of newcomers follow the same path, ditching Windows on the way without changing their PC.
If love if I could get a Framework laptop from System 76... I'd buy that. And it will be my next hardware with Pop either way.
I hope this becomes an annual tradition, sort of like how vlogbrothers do their regular Nerd Figheria censuses.
You've already identified some areas for improvement which would be interesting to see a followup on. Also would be good to see cross tabs of some audience verifiers (eg. "are you a subscriber") to tease apart some of the skews you mentioned.
Another option should be "I have some hardware that doesn't work, but I really don't care about it", such as fingerprint readers and such junk - I have a fingerprint reader that doesn't work at all, and I don't care about it enough to even look in its direction, but the rest of the hardware works exceptionally well. Given the options, I would have voted as "works perfectly well", and only now I would be reminded of this FP reader's existence. Come to think of it, there are also a built in mmc card reader and a smart card reader of some sort that I've never bothered testing.
Bloat(hard)ware?
The card readers usually work out of the box. At least I've never had any issues.
Edit: typo
Yeah, the only thing that didn't work ootb on my Asus laptop was the "numperpad". There is a reverse-engineered driver but I didn't bother with it since the feature is pretty useless.
Yeah I'm also having some issues with printing, but I don't care I can just use a windows laptop for it. There's like 5 times a year when I have to use a printer.
@@H4GRlD If your printer has network connectivity try to install it using IPP and a generic printer driver.
You wont be able to use all the features, but basic stuff (printing and checking ink levels) should work, since those are part of the IPP format.
@@hubertnnn Hey, thanks for this!
In my experience, using Arch gives me a more pleasant experience using my desktop OS. When I was daily driving Mint, I would remove pre-installed things to install what I wanted, and later when I tried updating to a new version of Mint it broke everything (probably my fault), and I didn't want to go through all of that again. While with Arch, I set up up to be how I want it from the beginning, and I only get what I want to have since of the clean slate you start with. Additionally it has been easier to maintain since I just update my packages every now and then, and I don't have to worry about a new point release forcing me to reinstall, or potentially it breaking my current install.
Also, the AUR/pacman stuff has more of the packages I want/need, and it has up to date versions, so I don't have to install the binary manually to get the latest version.
There’s a big drawback to pacman though: rollback. It’s not a smooth process at all, which means if a major bug gets introduced (*cough* Bluetooth in kernel 6.8.2 *cough*) and you don’t have any snapshot to roll back to, that’s a tedious process.
The problem with your hardware question is that I do not consider my gaming rig to be my “main” machine. So I answered integrated Intel when I do have a machine with an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D and a Radeon RX 6600XT - which is where any of my hardware Steam Survey statistics derive.
I just love the flexibility of Plasma.
Hats off to the 28 Gnome Web users
It improved a lot. It's usable. With the vim extension it would be great
17:30 I used to distro hop everytime I messed up my system but then I found out NixOS and using it for more than a year.
Happy to hear these results! I use arch btw
Why was there no option for nix as external package manager?
Not a lot of reasons to say Wayland is great because it is implied.
But yeah, Wayland is great in my opinion
I agree. For me it works even better than X11
Agreed! It's still not perfect and has some small issues, but for the most part, it works great if you're using a DE or WM that has good Wayland support. On my laptop, which has a high DPI built-in display and I need good trackpad gestures, Wayland is a must, especially since I usually have it connected to a secondary 1080p regular DPI monitor, and X11 doesn't support having different scaling factors on each display.
@@theodoros_1234 My thoughts exactly. GNOME on X11 is pain, since that DE is *nothing* without its touchpad gestures.
I don't think X11 should be deprecated at this point for any reason other than "we need more hands on Wayland so they can report bugs" since there are cases where Wayland isn't equal or better than X, but that doesn't mean occasional critic towards Wayland, an unfinished project, mean that it's awful. People just take criticism too personally.
how do i use x11vnc on this oh so cool wayland. sometimes i need a desktop remote connection and not just ssh
It's great to see NixOS is getting more popular. It seems that (in your fanbase) we occupy 2 thirds of the immutable distro market.
no you must not stop poking fun at Arch
they deserve it
As a GNU/Linux user since 2003, NixOs makes a lot of sense.
No more updates breaking the system, no more ansible or custom scripts to restore a fresh system. No more distro hop (fingers crossed). Easy to add programs that are not packaged (insanely simple for most use cases).
This is so refreshing to have stability by design while also having the option to go explore whatever program you want using nix-shell.
These features are making this os way simpler than any other linux distro in the long run.
I'd like to think I use a GNOME+ type of environment: it's visually and functionally vanilla, but with the addition of several QoL extensions / features already planned by GNOME for the future.
Honestly, all I really need is dash to panel and caffine and it's pretty much my ideal desktop.
Hi Nick. I'm a professor in the business intelligence program at Marymount University and I do a lot of work with statistical analysis. It'd be a lot of fun to do some exploratory analysis on your survey results. Looking at things like correlations between some answers and factor analysis might give some deeper insights to share with your fans. It could also be a cool dataset to look at with my students. If you'd be open to sharing your data, please hit me up :)
The raw data is available as a link in the video’s description! I’d love to get some more in depth analysis, don’t hesitate to send me your results in a file in an email :)
Endeavor os is my go to
The fact that there are so many "advanced" users (who can run Arch or Nixos) watching your channel speaks a lot about the quality of your work! Congrats! Even though I am not one of those knowledgeable I enjoy watching your videos a lot.
Gives people the chance to tell that they use Arch.
Is surprised that people told him they use Arch.
I too, use Arch btw.
I proudly use Arch btw.
Once again, thank you for the work you put in this channel.
It was really fun to see the results of the survey.
It sounds like tha arch community was activated by other means, so that definitely seems like a reason that arch had that many entries.
Another thing might be your news videos? I have used a lot of different setups over the years, but the news videos have always been an accessible way to get news about privacy, security and desktop agnostic news in general.
Even though i can see from your views, that the most popular videos are the ones abiut kde and gnome, it seems that the news videos hokds a VERY consistent viewer base 🙂
Also, next time you do a survey, let us enter for mutiple systems if nextcloud can handle it 👍
In the future for browser selection, could it be multiple select for those of us that silo different aspects of our life into different browsers
With people buying from big name manufacturers rather than Linux-first manufacturers, many of them might have bought the laptop intending to keep Windows on it, but switched to Linux later down the line. It would be interesting to see how many people ran Linux from day 1 on their current PC or if they have switched from another OS.
@@osoiii Definitely, but very few people have Linux as their first OS, and I think most people replace Windows on an existing machine rather than buying a brand new computer just to get started with Linux. There could be a lot of people filling out the form who used Windows on their computer for years before they even learn about the Linux desktop, and then installed Linux on the same computer afterwards.
ah yes. I use arch btw prevails
Yep!
I will say, once my vtuber software and xenia emulator work on linux, I'm swapping back to arch so i will use arch btw
@@stanzacosmi xenia emulator?
xbox 360 emulator. literally those are the only 2 programs holding me back to windows currently (I DID use arch before though but got into vtuubing so lol)@@zeta_eclipse
@@zeta_eclipse I presume it's the Xbox 360 emulator
As others have said - given that at the time of writing you have nearly 30,000 views, I suggest you invite people to do another poll now we've been informed there IS a poll ! First I heard of it was this video!
Arch has the best wiki and for some time it was the top suggested distro for advanced users. At least that's why I decided to bite the bullet a few years back
I use the Arch wiki all the time even when driving Fedora or Ubuntu. It's just one of the best information resources and often the only one on a niche topic.
I didn't vote on this, but Debian stable was my OS of choice. Wanted something with good documentation, relatively easy to work with, but not hand holdy to the point where I don't learn anything. I'm a dual booter with windows but more of my workflow has been put onto Linux.
Remember that there might be a lot of people (like me) who use Arch _derived_ distros, like Endeavour, but aren't "i use arch btw" arch superusers. Those people would probably, lacking a clearer option, check a box saying Arch is their main distro.
As someone running both arch (laptop) and endeavour (desktop), they are exactly the same in day to day usage, it is just arch install in better. Don't tell the arch people tho
So I found it fitting to put it just into the using arch category
@@marsimplodation If you're familiar enough with the base Arch install process, then I suppose there's nothing wrong with using Endeavour to as the installer to save time. It's like with nmcli and nmtui . Don't argue. Just use whatever is best for you lol.
I agree, Garuda and Manjaro are both in this category AND come with the 'flashy' installer!
But yeah, in the terminal we all use pacman (or pamac) - so technically we are running Arch... Technically.
I Use Arch Linux with the Arch Linux Endeavour installer by the way!
>If you're familiar enough with the base Arch install process
Yea, i am. The arch install iso sucks. Only a "DOS Terminal from 1980". No copy paste, no firefox, tiny default font. Makes a nice rescue system for troubleshooting if system doesn't boot, right?
Around 800MB iso for "Dos terminal".
>Manjaro
@@Vilvaran
No Manjaro isn't Arch because they don't use the original arch linux package mirrors in pacman. And some say Garuda has more custom things like custom kernel that is more far from Arch than Endeavour but may be better for gaming.
As an Arch user and Manjaro for work system, I appreciate your channel for its uniqueness and professional approach. The quality of your content and the attention to detail in your videos set you apart from many other RUclipsrs in the Linux community. Keep up the excellent work, and I look forward to more insightful and engaging videos! 👍💻🔧📺
10:15, I have some issues with wayland, but wayland is great!
I also run Arch with Hyprland on my primary system. But I get the appeal of distributions like Fedora, Pop OS!, Debian, etc. with more traditional desktop environments and I play with them time from to time. Your channel is a great place for me to keep track of a good lot of the things happening in the Linux community. I appreciate the "no snobbery" approach in your content which is why I prefer your channel to a lot of the hardcore Arch/Gentoo + Xmonad kind of channels.
i use arch btw
One thing your video didn't mention was a Raspberry Pi. While you can install various OSes on a Pi, the official Pi OSes (available for download from the Pi web sight) are all customized versions of Linux. I personally own two Pi 5s (the current "fastest" Pis on the market), that I run the biggest (64 bit full Linux and some common apps) official Pi OS on.
I originally got my Pis to run "Pi-Hole" (a local ad-blocking DNS cache) for my home LAN. Pi-Hole resulted in slightly faster internet access for my LAN (due in part to the faster DNS responses from the local cache), as well as some ads being blocked LAN wide (most noticeable on my internet connected TVs, which now show a fraction as many ads as they did before Pi-Hole).
However after getting the Pis (which I still run Pi-Hole on btw), I discovered they also make good everyday "desktops" as well (and by bringing up the included chromium browser, I can even use them as a nice "streaming device" for a connected TV). And while I can only run Linux apps on the Pis (due to the OS I chose to install on the Pis), the Pis do let me install every Linux app I've tried to add. And about the only problem I've discovered, is that while the CUPS setup on my Pi recognizes my printer (including its two sided "duplex" printing option), I've not actually gotten duplex printing to work on my Pi (instead, picking that option in the driver still prints on only one side of the page). Still I consider this to be a minor annoyance, that doesn't prevent me from using the Linux based Pi OS as my primary desktop these days.
Shout out to the other 3 Linux From Scratch users out there that took the survery! 4 (including me) people who use it is more than what I was expecting, only 2 at most, but we got 4. That's pretty good!
Oh, hey there! Question, besides the learning and "I built it myself" satisfaction, are there any other reason to go LFS ? I'm on Gentoo and I'm slightly curious, but I feel it's just something to try at one point for the experience, then I'd rather continue staying on Gentoo.
@Winnetou17 I covered that in a vid I did called "Why I like LFS", and I hate promoting my own crap but it explains it in a better way than what I can comment. Basically it boils down to me having issues with minimal distros so I realize the only way to truly be happy with a distro is to make it myself from the ground up, where Arch and Gentoo are more automatic, less customizable, less flexible, and do things in their own way.
@@zeckma Neat, I'll check it out, thanks!
@@Winnetou17 No problem!
@@zeckma Curious how Gentoo is less flexible than LFS with their USE flags?
I mean, I've never used Gentoo but how I understand it is that you can use these flags to set things up however you want. Maybe that's wrong.
LFS was a cool experience, both to learn how Linux works and how to use it. It's how I got started in Linux, but I can't say I'd be likely to go back.
IMO, a bunch of linux channels should run the same poll. Not a YT poll, but a poll where you guys share the same link, so there won't be duplicate votes.
Arch having such a strong presence might be related to how arch users behave, after all, a survey on the internet where they can indirectly say "I use Arch btw" was too tempting not to answer.
Arch user: Witness me!
😂😂😂 true
Just because I use a distribution that provides me a lot of ability to modify things at the cost of being plug-and-play, doesn't mean that I have any illusions about plug-and-play being what would bring more people over to Linux. Moreover, for most use cases, plug-and-play is what would be most effective and useful.
Just to be clear, I did not buy my Linux machine from a major manufacturer because I *prefer* them, but because my knowledge of other options is limited to just Tuxedo and System76, neither of which were making devices that appealed to me at the time. I ended up getting an HP Dev One, only to see support for it dropped on hardly two years. And then I ended up reusing my desktop PC instead.
The one thing that I love this channel for, is the up-to-date news about Linux and FOSS. Its the perfect amount of detail in a convenient location. Other topics you cover is simply a bonus :)
So from that stance, if there are others like me here, I think the survey says less about how we use linux and more about what we love about your channel.
No please keep making fun of Arch it keeps us humble god knows we need that
I was one of the responders to your survey. In my case, many of the choices are constrained by technical factors or work requirements. For example, I have to use X11 because I have to interact with servers through X11 forwarding. I have to use Google Chrome because of its progressive web app capabilities. I would love to use Firefox exclusively, but I need to run Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Teams as PWAs, which Firefox does not natively support. These are minor gripes, though, as 90% of all my dev work runs on Linux servers. When it has to be a Windows native app, I have the company issued Windows laptop to work on.
This makes me more curious about tiling window managers
i3 or sway may be good places to start in that case. i3 is not my favourite, and I haven't tried sway for that long, but I think they probably give the best experiences out of the box, while many others require more tinkering to get started.
Or maybe Pop OS or it's WM, if you want to try out a middle ground between tiling and floating.
I noticed Brodie posted your survey on his community, so I guess it got some attention there aswell. Although I must say I'm still not surprised by a large amount of people using arch and tiling wms, because even if this channel is very much focused on beginner friendly content, I'm sure more experienced users (me included) do enjoy that type of content sometimes as well, and your news are definitely worth watching for anyone.
I use daily and gaming with PopOS. It works fine for me
I use Mate and frankly it fits in the Gnome camp as it is basically Gnome-2 ported to GTK-3 and GTK-4, I went to Mate because I didn't like the changes that came with Gnome-3 and Gnome-3 and later did not work well with remote desktop software whereas Mate does. It strikes me as funny that Gnome-46 has changed less radically from Gnome-3 than Gnome-3 did from Gnome-2.
To be fair, the entire huprland discord was pinged to vote.
Now we just need everyone - Nick, Chris Titus, DT, Brodie, Primeagen, TechHut, LinuxCast, Mental Outlaw, BugsWriter, LearnLinuxTV, WolfGang to do a survey and promote it together!!
That would say a lot about the community.
Of course nix and arch are gonna be so popular. I imagine a fair amount of people chose arch even though they ran an arch-based distro, but my actual theory for why they're so popular among your viewers is that this is simply one of the best linux related channels, thus many people, regardless of their skills, are gonna follow you. It just so happens that arch is popular among the mid to high range skill level.
Shoutout to the other 14 Slackware users 🎉❤
Howdy! Slackware user since the beginning. Boot and root floppies baby!
@@gregholloway2656 Hi! Wow! I guess back in the day it was a challenge! I started my Linux journey in February 2023 and did a lot of distro hopping. But Slackware caught my heart!
Finally found the comment I was looking for :) Moved to Slackware on my Mac since 2021, never looked back
I don't particularly hate Wayland. If I used a full desktop environments instead of tiling WMs and didn't have an NVIDIA card, I'd probably already moved on to it.
As of right now though I have Wayland disabled on my system (Gentoo).
Where did you get the screen recording of the Hyprland session from? Could you please share the dotfiles if possible! :)
There's no surprise in the success of the Arch base. It's the only place where you can install everything you want without the need to add PPAs or build from source. Typically, Arch-based distros perform very well too. The Debian/Ubuntu approach is actually terrible for general use (compared to Arch). People with decent machines benefit a lot from newer kernels, drivers (and packages in general). And that's just for the 'average' user. For power users, you have complete control over your system.
Absolutely awesome there were so many responses to the survey, I enjoyed doing it and the video response 🙂
Debian with Openbox is all I need.
It was interesting to see the survey results, thanks. I think a survey focused on Desktop Environments and Window Managers would be very interesting also.
It's a breakdown of your Discord users, not the popularity of Linux options... a bummer but there it is.
It is no surprise that AMD is higher on the usage list for CPU. AMD was early on the support for Linux. Since i have always built my own systems, AMD was the only choice as were non-Nvidia video cards. In the past ( 10 years ) Suse was the best for laptops but now personal preference. However, for best performance with AMD Ryzen CPUs and especially Threadripper, AMD recommends "Clear Linux" which is an Intel development. My TR is paired with an AMD based video card and just sings along. Your assessment of users who build their own systems is on target for selecting components known to have Linux support. great job. thanks.
What, no Lynx in your browser list? Hahahaha.
On the WM- & Desktop category i wanted to answer differently. I took KDE-Plasma, but on top use the Krohnkite tiling-script and am transitioning to Bismuth. I need KDEs polished customizability and stability, while having the option to use a tiling-manager.
There definitely wasn't an announcement on the Hyprland Discord about this pole. 😅
This video is amazing. 9500 answers is not a small number by any stretch of imagination.
As a point of potential improvement, I think it would be enough to mention the selection bias at the beginning and at the end, not every time you make an interesting observation.
I hope you can do this yearly or so.
i use nixos btw
dwm and alpine btw
@@StephenHall-zz2ymalpine is so underrated. Package manager is fast as hell. Desktop iddles with practically no ram usage. True and pure Linux
@@StephenHall-zz2ym i use sway
Hey Nick...great vid! I believe this is the best video I've seen on your channel. The two biggest surprises...definately that NixOS is so popular for daily use, and the migration to Wayland is more than I would have thought. Keep up the great work :)
Cries in Stacking WM.(openbox, labwc, standalone xfwm)
Would have liked a Nix option for the snaps/flatpak/appimage section.
I hate gnome, I don't particularly like cinnamon either, I would rather use KDE instead. It'a shame Linux Mint discontinue KDE distro.
Great video. I didn't participate in your survey but I would agree with most of your findings. I personally switch from Win10/Win11 to an Arch based distro /Plasma 6 /wayland (with dual Win boot if needed) for my desktop and a Proxmox for my server needs. I think the results match the spirit of this community that is usually pragmatic and open new paradigms and FREE ways to do things. Distro hopping is fun if we are trying to learn new things but not practical for daily work/gaming/productivity. If I distrohop now I would do it to another Arch or Debian based distro as it is close to what I have experienced.
As an arch user, please never stop making fun of arch😊
We love y'all like younger siblings
I build my PC specifically for Linux around a 5900X where multi-threading is disabled with a RX 6750 RX for GPU and 64 GB RAM. 12 cores full throttle this puppy behaves like a beast when creating 3D assets.
Where are my fellow Arch Users at??😊✋
Here btw
It seems that in the WM environments we have 2 major ones too since Sway is basically i3 but using wayland instead of x11. So hyprland and i3/sway dominate everything else. Also good to see that there are a lot of wayland on the tiling WM world.
nix is one of the most overrated distros in existence.
I am about to look into NixOS. Care to explain why you think it is overrated?
From what I understand it is very stable and the config approach seems to be very straight forward. The downsides are that it takes up more space and well you have to get into it.
I don’t know what you mean by this, but NixOS’s benefit is exceptional reliability and replicability, which, to be fair are a domain-specific advantages, but these are pretty unique. If you need something really stable and run fresh software, NixOS might be your only choice.
@@WhatTheScoots it only takes up as much space as you tell it to. You can clean older versions via command. But the problem getting into it is mostly dogshit documentation. Once you learn it, you discover it is not actually difficult, but it is explained poorly.
Finally someone said it.
Like it's cool but people don't need those crazy features they think they need. They could do all their work on Arch, Debian, Mint, or Fedora.