I have had literally dozens of comments at this point telling me I need to try Linux telling me how much more amazing it is for low end systems battery draw and just overall system stability and honestly I have tried it before back in 2014 I tried to daily drive Ubuntu and found just about no reason to actually continue using it it was basically impossible to use without constantly popping into the terminal which I don't know about you but for me that's pretty inconvenient generally but after reading through all of these comments I wanted to see if anything has changed in the past eight years and if Linux is worth all the hassle or even if there is any hassle anymore and if maybe just maybe I'll consider switching over to it I'm gonna try out Linux on my laptop which I use almost exclusively for emails word docs photo editing light gaming and watching videos with my Galaxy buds that last part is more important than you might think now back to when I use Linux as soon as I got to the light gaming part of my Linux usage I was basically screwed emulators had decent support but still required terminal use for installation and anything further than that you needed a Linux wizard of some sort to come and help you or just dual building windows then forgetting Ubuntu was installed and only using Windows for the next eight years I was looking at Pop OS since I've heard it's pretty decent for gaming meant because I heard it's decent for Windows users and Ubuntu because it's what I've just always used whenever I needed to pop into Linux after being informed by the internet that Ubuntu is horrible and should be burned in a fire for reasons I do not understand at all I tried pop OS now the fun part installing pop OS I did all the normal things you're supposed to do like getting a flash drive and putting the OS in the flash drive and I was able to get into demo mode for pop OS but every single time I tried actually installing it to dual boot Windows it would just give me a ton of errors and refuse to install this happened across two USB drives I tried and one compact flash I tried actually as a last resort and I have not been able to replicate this issue since after about an hour of frustration I decided I'd try mint which did let me go through the install process and installed with zero issues after about half a second with mint I decided I hated it because it wasn't my first choice and I do not compromise on my Linux distros so I wipe the flash drive redownloaded pop OS for good measure and retried it and it just worked great so now I have pop OS installed with only moderate frustration I've honestly never heard of anyone actually having these issues installing Linux before so I'm just gonna go ahead and call myself lucky also dual booting just won't work properly at all I have to manually select pop Os or Windows when I start my laptop and it automatically goes to pop OS so that actually kept me using it when I didn't want to thanks Linux so with it installed it's time to only use pop OS on my laptop for the next month or three weeks my schedule is a disaster okay it's whatever it ends up being I typically use both Firefox and Chrome for web browsing which Firefox actually came pre-installed and I was able to just log right in and see hey I'm close to 5 000 subscribers so you should subscribe because I like when pointless numbers go up yeah Chrome was equally as easy just hop into the pop shop hit install and log in which can you believe it's called Pop Shop whatever since I've switched back to Google Docs writing scripts I was able to jump right into writing this one without any issues at all but pop os does come with a document editor which is fantastic either way if you are an office Fanboy you can't really get office on here but you can use Office 365 in browser so something I guess pop OS is actually pretty responsive and lightweight too with about 15 to 20 Chrome tabs open I'm only using four gigabytes of RAM which is basically just how much RAM uses by just existing plus I was able to put this on my 512 gigabyte SSD with Windows 10. and it still had plenty of space to not only install Linux but also be usable and have space for other things I really just forgot how bloated Windows is and the insane amount of space it takes up with just the OS itself so honestly this was a pretty nice change of pace after installing it didn't need any help finding all the drivers that needed this goes for my Graphics drivers touchpad display even Wi-Fi and ethernet all of it was immediately sorted out with no problems at all I also had no issues with the battery I heard some people have issues with Linux and ThinkPad batteries I'm assuming that's the Dual battery I think pets though not a single battery like my T14 plus all my touch gestures work fine yay even though they're slightly different from Windows gestures they still work and uh scrolling works most of the time I can also keep my precious multiple desktops I love so much but switching doesn't actually feel as smooth as Windows nor does window snapping itself and I don't know if I can do this please let me know but I would love to be able to remap window snapping to use the windows and arrow keys since that's just my preference and it's what I've been doing for years but I can I mean I can live without it scrolling on the touchpad does feel less smooth though for some reason and sometimes it just doesn't want to scroll at all for whatever reason or it's just really jittery also Bluetooth War worked better than on Windows on Windows every time I put in my earbuds I have to disconnect and reconnect them to my laptop which is pretty annoying since I'll take them in and out multiple times while using them in a day with pop OS I didn't have that issue at all I could open my laptop pop my earbuds in and it connected every single time besides times where it didn't connect then it would just sit there saying connected while not being connected and then wouldn't disconnect next I installed Minecraft with amdu's lackluster opengl support on Windows it actually seemed to run a little bit better on Linux which is pretty interesting I was able to get a really smooth playable experience even on battery power after that I installed pcsx2 and dolphin through the pop shop love calling it that both of which ran beautifully with zero issues even when using my third-party controller I experienced no stuttering lag or issues with setting them up besides not being able to connect to my SMB server more on that later lastly I installed steam which was easy and I was I see almost my entire steam Library until I clicked the Linux games button and was less surprised to see almost my entire steam Library I mean I only really play polybridge factorio civ5 and BeamNG on my laptop all of which are actually supported by Linux besides beam whether or not Civ 5 works I don't know because I don't feel like playing it for this video but factorio and polybridge worked great so I didn't even actually have to switch over to Windows just for the one hour of gaming I do at night overall pop OS ran really well I had zero driver issues it started right up and it worked and it's extremely responsive and pretty good on battery too starting it up is also insanely fast it takes just a few seconds to go from completely powered off right to the desktop it also is ready to go as soon as you're on the desktop you don't have that annoying waiting period like on Windows where everything is still loading and all you can do is sit around for a few seconds plus when my laptop is shut it doesn't just drain the battery for no goddamn reason Windows anyways so when I close my laptop I'm pretty sure it won't have to to be charged in a few hours I also wrote almost all of the rough draft for the script in one go after I woke up this morning and my laptop is still at 92 percent which is pretty impressive it's also confusing because I wrote that like a week ago I can get pretty much everything I need to get done easily and don't have to worry about dragging my charger everywhere the main thing I'm missing productivity wise is Premiere Photoshop and Lightroom there is as a Photoshop alternative but I have used it before and I personally don't think it really holds a candle to photoshop also there is raw therapy which is a Lightroom alternative I messed around with it for a few minutes with some 5D raws and it wasn't quite as responsive as Lightroom or really as user friendly honestly but it could get the job done if you needed it to it was just pretty slow overall so on something that isn't an eight core ryzen it might not run very well also OBS worked flawlessly for screen recording not that you would ever need it since you can easily record your screen or take screen screenshots with Ctrl shift alt R but it's nice to know it worked for a regular desktop screen recording as any Linux user I had some weird Edge case issues like the Bluetooth earbud issue not crazy ones with bleeding edge Hardware mind you but I had a few for some reason some windows would just randomly freeze entirely for seemingly no reason usually it was Firefox though though switching to another desktop and back seemed to fix it and I haven't had the issue for at least a week now I also had an issue where YouTube would not play at all even after resetting Chrome it would just load forever for some reason even though I was having no internet issues then once it did play the audio stopped working then it started playing through the speakers but refused to actually connect to my earbuds while showing it was connected to them and then it all just started working again after I closed and opened my laptop so I guess that fixed itself also sometimes when I close my laptop it just shuts off entirely not sure why but Linux boots so fast I don't really care and getting SMB file share to work was too much for me and my windows brand to deal with I looked up multiple tutorials and even installed some weird app that's supposed to help with SMB file sharing and it refused to connect at all the furthest I got was it acknowledging the server existed and the D drive was there but saying access was denied even with all the proper information on this laptop with Windows my desktop all my desktops I use for filming and my phone I can connect no problem it's as easy as just putting in my username and password and I'm in but I could not get it to work with Papa OS for some reason and I'm about to rebuild both my main server and backup server so I really don't want to go messing around with my settings and make things more difficult when I rebuild both which if you're interested I am making a 200 12 terabyte server and yes that price does include the hard drive so subscribe if you want to see that still pretty annoying that it doesn't just work but either way I am almost 100 sure this is a configuration issue on my end so take that with a grain of salt my experience with pop OS is almost enough to make me want to switch but with the issues I'm having with SMB file sharing lack of Adobe suite and the fact that if I wanted to use Linux for everything I would have to dual boot on my desktop to actually play all my games on my gaming computer it's a tough build to swallow and swallow it I don't think I will I'm going to keep testing pop OS on my laptop and see how much I like it for regular productivity but I have a feeling I'm eventually going to need one small thing from Windows at some point and then I will pop into windows and never touch pop OS again as the prophecy foretold and if you're interested in the video that inspired this one that would be the 100 laptop video here since so many people told me to use Linux on that one and I figured I need to give it a try