I find these sort of videos frustrating to watch as I just want to step in and take over or explain things so I skimmed through to find some of his complaints.
- Choosing a distro is difficult
It should not be, but I can see his point. These "best distro" articles are complete nonsense. It is highly likely that the people who wrote the articles thought; I can't put out an article that only recommends distros people have heard of so I will recommend DraugerOS or something equally obscure because their target audience are people already using Linux... distro hoppers.
Reality is if you are new to Linux the only distros you should even think about in my opinion are: Debian, Ubuntu, Pop_OS, fedora, linuxmint and opensuse. I would not recommend Solus for Linus or Luke but I would in general.
You should approach it like most people approach buying a car. There are maybe 5-6 manufactures they will consider buying from, 10 vehicles that suit their style, intended use and price range. Ultimately they will choose a car based on recommendations from friends not entirely from some article online and I hope never from a salesman. The people who benefit from car reviews the most tend to already know roughly what it is that they are after and to not buy a car from "Great Wall Motors" or something equally trash.
I realise not everyone has a Linux friend but I assume not everyone has a car friend either. So I don't see how this is any different. Getting useful information that does not assume some knowledge is difficult and is the hardest part about teaching anything, it only gets more difficult when you start including things that are subjective.
- Linux top 10 distro articles / reviews are often out of touch
As I already said they are not out of touch with their target audience.
Linus complains about articles implying that choosing one distro seemingly means giving up features of another, as if it is worded incorrectly. Sometimes its just marketing nonsense and all distros do xyz but other times that is exactly how it works. If one distro is providing the zen kernel and the one you installed does not, you obviously do not get the benefits of running it.
Linus is confusing the fact that you CAN apply those tweaks / optimisations / customisation / applications / desktop environments to any distro with the reality that different distros have different goals and will not universally adopt the same thing; Which means it is then up to the user to support things their distro does not which is not always easy and most users will tap out at this point assuming it can not be installed via a appimage/flatpak/snap.
- Speaking as a normie, Linus does not want a dozen ways to do the same thing.
Yes he very much does, if it could not do the "thing" the way he wanted, he would cry. New users being confused about how to get it to behave the way you want it to is to be expected if you do not like the default. Choice is never a bad thing. But this is where distros should shine by having a clear target audience and having sane defaults so the "average" user / "normie" does not feel a need to change anything.
