 Anything is easy if you know exactly what you're doing, but by the same token, anything can be difficult or even impossible if you lack the requisite skills, resources, or knowledge. That's the basic premise of this video, where Linus and I, now three weeks into daily driving some form of Linux on our personal gaming machines, will change the gears and attempt to complete 12 simple tasks. Simple as long as we've actually been doing our homework to familiarize ourselves with our Linux desktop environments. Here we go. Thanks to NZXT for sponsoring today's video. NZXT wants to make building a custom PC easier. With NZXT Build, just set a budget, see how the computer performs with your favorite games, and Build takes care of the rest. Use the link down below to get your own custom PC today. INTRO While the main idea behind the Linux Daily Driver Challenge is to evaluate the Linux experience from a gamer's perspective, even the most ardent gamer will occasionally want to do other things on their PC, like print out a document or watch a video. And those things need to not only be possible, but also fast and painless enough that they aren't immediately prompted to run back to Windows. So with that in mind, we've set a time limit for each of our tasks of 15 minutes. Compared to gaming, basic office work is much more mature on Linux. And for anything that's not straightforward, there's a good chance that you can find a web app to fill the gap. These days, everything from word processing to basic video editing or even creating 3D mockups can all be done in a browser and often for free. In preparation for this part of the challenge, I practiced using PlayOnLinux by installing Notepad++, and I hope that if I really need some other Windows application, that's going to come in handy for me. If it doesn't, I also have a working Windows 10 virtual machine that I set up using KVM. But Luke and I agreed ahead of time that using a VM that's running paid non-open source software kind of violates the spirit of the challenge here, even if it is technically within bounds. So there's going to be a half point deduction for using that workaround. I didn't install a VM or do any other form of special prep, but because I'm work from home most days, I've been doing a lot of everyday stuff on my machine already, and I'm expecting this to be pretty straightforward. Here are the challenges you must surmount in whatever order you please. Cut and paste a file from OneDrive. Oh, man, I was expecting them to come up with some stuff that's really challenging. So just like in Windows, Ctrl X, and I will paste it to my Kingston thumb drive. It is done. 3.9 gigs, playing it back. Yes, I do appreciate the irony of trying to play success.mkv and having it just be a black screen. I'm going to cut this and I'm going to paste this. Done. Okay. Step one, complete. I mean, I really didn't consider that this might take me longer than like a couple of seconds. Just like it doesn't take longer than a couple of seconds to go to lttstore.com, check out our great merch. That is really annoying. Mac OS does this too. There's no refresh button in Dolphin. So you can't force it to refresh. And I know what the philosophy is. The philosophy is you're not supposed to need to refresh. Well, sometimes I do. So you need to have the button. Sorry, I'm still angry about this from like seven or eight years ago, or whenever I did this, I was like, I'm going to have to refresh this. From like seven or eight years ago, or whenever I did my Mac OS daily driver challenge. VLC is not even opening anymore. Now I'm kind of afraid to touch anything. Nautilus reports a completely different stuff. Okay. The file is here. And for some reason, VLC launches now. Did it just take that long to cancel the move operation? It did. I am grabbing a smaller file, trying to install team viewer dot txt. I'm cutting and I'm pasting it. Success. Challenge two, digitally sign this PDF. I have not specifically installed any kind of PDF reader. So this is the default digitally sign. Oh, oh, this is looking promising. Oh, draw a rectangle to indicate the signature field. Okay. Do the signature size is too small to read. No, I'm just going to sign it. There are no available signing certificates. Okay, man, I thought I was going to be done this in like one minute. How to sign. I'm assuming I'm not going to be able to sign it because I'm assuming this is just a, a reader. It's just a reader. Uh, is there something on here? Document viewer. I know what I use on windows for this is sedge. Okay. Sedge. I'm going to, I'm going to download sedge to just in case this PDF mod thing doesn't work. Okay. This is what I use on windows. So let's, let's give this a shot. Sign new signature save. Um, let me just verify that that worked. Let's get out of here. I don't need PDF mod PDF to sign. Signed done. And Jaro add PKCS signing certificate. Oh, you can get free trusted certificates from the let's encrypt. Oh, or we can use the MK cert tool. Come on. Yes. I know Andy. Oh, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What commands? All right. It's clear that this is a thing that you can do. And it's something that I could figure out if I had another half an hour, an hour, but unfortunately it's not something that is quick or easy. I guess I get zero points. I should have bailed a couple of minutes ago and switched over to my VM. I failed challenge. Number two, export a chart from the Excel, right? Click save as picture and Excel file. This has gotta be the chart. We're trying to right click export as image. Did that work? I've never done this before. I wasn't even fully aware that was a thing. Looks like it worked. It has a transparent background, but it doesn't matter. I don't think so. This black background is not the color of the cells. The black background is just an image. Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Okay. You just have to find exactly the right spot. Export as image. Hey, why is the name system volume information? Okay. Why did it default to system volume information? Okay. Yes. Okay. I needed a W here and I got it. It's not quite right. You can see it's actually missing the borders on the right and bottom, but everything else here looks fine. Call them that a W. Add a new font. I'm assuming this is just dragging it into the fonts folder. I'll just do this. Nope. I thought it was going to be as easy as just dragging it into this folder, to be honest. Or user share fonts, true type. There we go. I'm gonna put a font in here. Mission denied. Okay. So open as root. Done. Now if I load this again, I don't see it. I'm just going to copy it to my downloads folder. What just happened? Did that just copy to the full? Why would it do that? I dragged this onto a folder, but because Arc is some completely separate application that doesn't integrate properly with Dolphin, it just goes, it just dumps it into the folder instead of specifically on the folder I'm dragging it to. So I have to open this folder, then copy it. I can open night zone with, sorry, what is this? K font view. Oh, install. Do you want to install the fonts for personal use? System wide. System wide. Yes. I'm going to change my user interface to it. Ha. All right. I did not think this one was going to be difficult. I don't know how much time I have, actually. I wasn't even paying attention because I thought I was just going to blow through it. So it can just go directly into fonts. So it could go directly into there. I don't know. I'm just going to put things everywhere. Is it actually called a font? Is it called night zone? Have I been done this whole time? Okay. I got it right. I just didn't realize it was called night zone. Thanks, James. Oh my God. Okay. Sweet. Sick. Print the word doc. Okay. Here's my word document. File. Print. Yeah. Theoretically, I haven't done any setup for a printer, but this looks like a printer. So let's do it. Okay. Our document is printing. I'll be back. That's in my girlfriend's office. We'll see what's going to happen. That was probably the easiest and best printing experience I've pretty much ever had. I didn't detect that printer. I didn't install that printer. I didn't do anything. I know from previously using Mint, I've seen the pop-up in the top right-hand corner come up being like, this printer has connected, but I never did anything for it. And yeah. Printers. Okay. Hold on. Hold on. What was that? Printer HPD? What is this? Do I even have an HP printer? It's a Samsung. That's going to be, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Are you kidding me? There it is. Samsung CLP 310 series. Okay. I was late. It found a driver. This printer is actually a pain in the ass to get working on windows because I think the last time it got a driver was either the Vista or windows 7. I actually have it saved to a folder on my server because there's no other place that I can find it or I can, but it's a real chore. You have to extract it from some other thing. It's a very giant pain in the butt. This just worked as far as I can tell, but until I actually see the page, I'm not ready to believe it. Connecting printer, waiting for printer. Let's go Andy. Let's go Andy. The light's flashing. It's flashing. Come on CLP. Yeah. I was going to say, I've never been so happy to see a page printed out of a printer, but actually getting something to print is one of those things that pretty much every time you need to do it, it's like kind of urgent and kind of a pain in the ass. So no, no, I've been through this a lot. Challenge number six, compress and send all the files on this drive. Okay. Um, compress here as dot zip. Why is it dot zip dot UQJQFU? Well, that brings us to the next challenge. It's a why is it dot zip dot UQJQFU. Well, that brings up nothing. Why would it put that there? Goodbye. Failed to open archive, not a zip archive. It's a UQJQFU. Nope. It just is broken. Perfect. We're going to compress to a zip right here. Create. Let's, let's check top. Going to make sure things are happening. Seven zip is attempting to use 100% of my CPU. So things are happening. Holy crap, Andy, you know what? I think I just fell for the same thing that I said I wouldn't fall for again. Press here as dot zip. It was doing it down here and I didn't notice. So I guess the, the six characters or whatever here is just random gibberish while it's a temporary file. I should change this font back. I like it. Let's do it. Oh, TSCU comic. There we go. Are these files going to compress at some point? Dolphin, you're embarrassing yourself. Okay. Let's try and do it in. I forget what this one is called. It doesn't matter. Archive name. At least it prompts me for what I want to call it. I don't see any kind of progress indicator. Are you kidding me? Am I going to fail to zip a file? This is not uploading. I was kind of hoping that I was going to be able to do every single task in under 15 minutes. The fonts task really slowed me down because I didn't realize the font wasn't called a font. And then this one is slowing me down because it just took a long time to compress. And now it's taking a long time to upload. But other than that, these have all been very easy so far. And this one is clearly stalled. Hold on. Maybe PZip's got me still. Hold on. So this is, this is all the stuff. Okay. Copy. Then I can go into downloads. Zip folder. Yes. This is the work around. Oh my God. 10 minutes remaining to copy these files. This is another thing that I definitely can do. It just had some issues. Wait, wait. No, I'm good. I'm good. The first one I did in dolphin. It's done. I think. Wait, no, I didn't get the point. I'm supposed to send them. Maybe I can weasel my way out of this a little. What do you mean by compress and send? Well, I mean, there's a three gigabyte file in it. So emailing, it's not really practical. Oh, well, I mean, I already zipped the whole thing, including the video. Cause like, okay, I'm giving myself the points. I could have, I could have emailed this to someone. I think that's fine. All right. Okay. Well, I can, I can do other tasks while I'm waiting. Yeah. Let's do that. Okay. So take a screenshot, screenshot. I can do a whole screen. I can do current window. I can do area to grab. I'm going to do area to grab and I'm going to screenshot this. Bang. It just shows up right here. I'm going to throw it in the Linux challenge folder and there it is. There's a screenshot. I'm going to wait for make a shortcut. I didn't read this line before I started this. I don't have a network share. Setup discord app to open on startup. There's probably a startup applications. Add one, choose application. Discord, add application. Done. Discord is on startup now. Watch 4k content. I'm assuming that's this, the a video. Google unveiled the pixel six and six pro today, but we already knew everything about it. Did we? Every day. Well, I guess I did that. This is done. That just got finished. Insert files using drive Linux challenge. Okay. One person view. Got it. This is really cool. If I search for a snipping tool, it actually is like, ha ha, we don't have that, but we do have spectacle, which is a pretty cool little screenshotting tool. So you just click, take a new screenshot and then you can do, do, do, do, do, do do. Drag a little thing. Press enter. Cool. I did it. Now I have to make a shortcut. Oh man, I got this too. No, you can't right click it to where you want it and make a shortcut. So no, I will find another way to do that. Link to file or directory. Yes, this is a much better way of doing this. Ha ha. Name for new link. Okay. Can I copy the location? Yes, I can. Ha ha. Oh, done. I've, I've like never made shortcuts. I don't make shortcuts in windows either. I can hold the shift and control keys, highlight and dragging a file or folder. Okay. Seems a little weird, but let's make a shortcut of a video. That looks like it's a shortcut. Yeah, it's a, it's a link. It's a shortcut. Nice. Connect to a network share. This is actually crazy easy because while I am using Samba on my Linux, uh, NAS, it's a Linux NAS. So yeah. So network shared folders, SMB, ladder server. Oh, does it want me to like map a network share? I mean, that's not really necessary. I can just add a shortcut to this right here. See, I'm going to call that good enough. So now every time I open up dolphin, I just click Linus and it will go to my share just like that. I have received confirmation from James. I don't have any network attached storage devices at my home right now. So he said it is okay if I set up a folder for sharing. I'm going to go into property sharing options. Let's try that. Samba needs to be installed appropriate firewalls. Let's do this. This is the first one where I haven't done anything with this at all yet. I've used Samba, but it was 10 years ago. Share this folder is on others to create and delete files in this folder. And let's do guest access as well. Add the permissions automatically. Cool. It is now a network share. You can see little thing image there. I think that's it. So in the end, that took me less than 40 minutes in total. The majority of that time was waiting for a file to compress, waiting for a file to upload, waiting for a response from the taskmaster himself, et cetera, not doing the actual tasks. I think that would have taken me a very similar amount of time in windows. Actually, the print a file portion probably went better than it would have on windows to be completely honest. So yeah, overall, no problem. Really easy. Compressing and files failed, copying failed yet. Thanks a lot dolphin. You suck. Set up a discord app to open on startup. I think it might just do that by default. The first thing I'm going to do then is just test that. I'm feeling good, Andy. I got this. Hey, okay. Apparently I had already configured this. So another point for Linus, watch 4k content, a video dot MP4. Where'd it go? Hello? Wait, it goes black and full screen. That's a nice feature. Why? I grabbed MPV media player, the official repository community version, because that seemed like the most credible one. And then I was able to immediately open the video in MPV player and boom, full screen solved. Look at that gorgeous guy. Challenge number 12, watch HDR content. As far as I can tell, this is basically just James rubbing in that I have not been able to consume any HDR content this month. Here's an article from a month ago. Redhead has announced it wants to hire an engineer. Well, that's a fail, but everyone's going to fail. So I feel pretty good. Other than digitally signing my PDF, I managed to complete all of my possible challenges, but that doesn't mean that the road to get here was as painless as what you just saw. I've had a very frustrating issue where any amount of windows movement, especially if I dare to have an even low performance game like FTL running will be very laggy. I've had a few fixes suggested to me that maybe helped a little bit. I can't really tell. None of them have fully solved the problem. I could distro op and try something else, but I'm hesitant to do that even if it would solve the problem, as that means a lot of additional work just to get caught up to where I am now. And it's possible other things will break anyways. Meanwhile, on Mandarok DE, I've had a relatively smooth experience. I do have little complaints like that the show desktop button doesn't actually minimize anything. And as soon as you grab a focus application, everything comes ripping back onto the screen or that the application labels are underneath the window previews. When you cycle through with alt tap making them harder to read. But overall, if all I needed to do was run a web browser, do some basic word processing, I wouldn't have anything to complain about. Installing and managing applications on the other hand, has made me wish that my Pop OS experience hadn't been so discouraging. Manjaro has a graphical package manager called PAMAC that allows applications to be installed in a couple of clicks. But by default, it contains only some of the things I need. It can be unlocked to search for flat pack, snap and AUR packages, which dramatically increases its usefulness. But if this Manjaro developer is to be believed, these non-official sources can result in downtime. And if they do, everything is working as intended. Fortunately, I haven't really encountered that yet, though I had only been at it for a few weeks. But it's this kind of hit or miss functionality that has turned using my computer from something that I do for fun into something that feels more like work. Okay, here's one. Miraculously, the browser source plugin that I needed for OBS was available in PAMAC through the Arch user repository. But the thing is, I ended up only stumbling upon that by finding a post referring to it as I was fighting my way through attempting to manually copy the plugin files into the appropriate system folders, which in fairness to me was based on a guide I found and actually got me really close. I was able to launch OBS, but as soon as I tried to actually use that source, it would crash. Now I understand that this is totally a power user thing to do, but it's also absolutely something that a gamer, particularly a game streamer, might need. I wasn't able to install the browser source plugin as easily as Linus was. I did figure out how to get it to work eventually, but in the hardest way possible because using my Windows brain, I installed OBS by following the commands on their website rather than using my distro's package manager. If I had actually started with that, the main OBS install would have just included the browser source plugin to begin with. In my opinion, it's an unintuitive user experience to not include the browser source plugin by default for all the main ways of acquiring OBS. People have been using this thing for years. It's in there by default on Windows. It is buried under the build instructions tab, but come on. Honestly, some of my dumbest problems have been caused by my default file manager, Dolphin. Among other things, it does not allow the user to copy anything into a folder that requires administrative privileges with no obvious way to override it in the GUI. And I've run into this twice so far, adding insult to injury, the community responses to this user who shared my concern that not everyone wants to copy files using the terminal and that Linux should allow the user to do what they want to do with their computer were some of the most painfully condescending and stubborn things that I've had the displeasure of reading throughout this challenge. Now, I lost my link to the tweet, unfortunately, but I saw an interesting criticism of this series that basically accused me and Luke of intentionally smearing Linux and its developers because we were going to come into this with a basic Windows gamer perspective and try to do things the way that they do things. Well, newsflash guys, that's most people. And if you legitimately, like in your heart of hearts, want Linux desktop to grow, you need to accommodate those people. So you can sit there and go, am I out of touch? No, it's the users who are wrong. But you are, you're literally a meme at that point. The only question is whether you're self-aware or not. Well, that depends. I strongly believe that enthusiast distros for advanced users should stay advanced. There is immense raw potential and an unfettered experience. It is important for new users wishing to eventually achieve mastery of a system and for current masters of that system to be afforded full control and responsibility in order to maximize their ability to learn, grow and realize potential. That being said, not everything fits under that umbrella. There are distros out there more for gamers or inexperienced users. So for those systems, we really hope that there's a lot of good that can come from us doing this. We also don't want to paint everyone in the Linux community with the same brush because it's a diverse bunch of people with a wide range of experience with Linux. People like Wendell from Level One Techs, Jason Evangelo from Linux for Everyone and Gardner Brian from Gardner Brian have been inviting and supportive not just to us, but to fans of the channel following in our footsteps, which is super cool. But something that the good eggs in the Linux community need to understand though, is that you guys are great and there's lots of you. It's just that it only takes a couple of toxic gatekeepers to turn people off. Like you gotta remember, it's not always easy for people to reach out and ask for help. And if a literal developer of their distro goes out of their way to type extra unnecessary words to be condescending when they could have just pointed the user to the resources that they needed, it is extremely damaging to the good work that the majority is trying to do. And there has been so much of that good work on display throughout this project. I mean, getting my Windows VM, which I've only ended up needing to ingest some audio using Rhodes weird unnecessary utility and to configure my audio interface was kind of a nightmare between incomplete guides, meaningless error messages, accidentally installing a version of VirtualBox that was made for the wrong version of the Linux kernel and needing to enable an additional BIOS option that didn't tell me I needed. It took me it took me literally hours, but I got there. And it's worth noting that it can be a real hassle to set up a VM on Windows too, especially for an inexperienced user. And hey, at least on Linux, it's incredibly powerful and it's free. Now there's a lot more that I could say right now, but I feel like most of it is better suited for the upcoming parts where we focus on game compatibility and performance and our overall conclusions. So I will see you there. Thanks to NZXT for sponsoring today's video. With NZXT Build, getting a custom build PC is easier than ever. Just set your budget, see how your PC will perform in your favorite games and Build takes care of the rest. Their recommendation engine provides benchmark data for the expected performance of your build at 1080p and 1440p and their FPS estimates are guaranteed to be within 10% accurate. You can customize and upgrade your build from various NZXT case options with RGB lighting and all that good stuff. They feature transparent pricing with a flat $99 assembly fee in your local currency and it will be built and shipped within 48 business hours. With all your PC's components covered under one warranty plan, NZXT will manage any problems you have and you can contact their live chat for real time help and troubleshooting. So go check them out. They've got 13 years of experience developing PC components and we're going to have them linked in the video description. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe go check out one of the previous parts. It is, it is a heck of a ride this whole series. It's been a lot of work but it's also been a lot of fun.