Linus Tried Linux Again. This Time, He Might Actually Stick With It.

Installation: Cursed, As Per Tradition

Linus's Linux installation experiences are practically a genre at this point, and the 2026 version doesn't break from tradition. He shows up to install Bazzite and discovers his SSD is dead. Grabs a replacement drive from the office — turns out it has an old Fedora image on it. Boot errors, secure boot confusion, re-installation, wrong key enrollment sequence. He finally gets through it by doing a clean install with Secure Boot on, then enrolling the keys properly. The irony: the second attempt was completely smooth once he followed the sequence correctly [1]. Elijah had a hardware puzzle of his own — the "Bulbasaur PC" (built by Linus's kid, naturally) had M.2 slots buried behind a GPU that couldn't be removed without basically disassembling the machine. He solved it by luck: one of the visible slots was empty, so he installed there. Luke, on Pop!_OS, had audio working within minutes and called it painless — right up until he tried to play Half-Life 2 and the game froze his entire system. He went back to Windows. [1] This is Linux in miniature: one person has a smooth setup, one has moderate friction, one gives up inside two hours.

Gaming — What Actually Ran (And What Didn't)

Here's where the real story is. Bazzite's gaming performance was genuinely decent. Batro worked out of the box. Left 4 Dead 2 ran — but only after Linus found a forum post explaining that the game needed to be launched with a Vulkan flag. That flag isn't in any in-game setting. You have to know to look for it. The fix took him until the next day, and the bug has apparently existed since at least July 2025 [1]. Hell Divers 2 was more eventful. The game launched. The opening cinematic played. The mouse didn't work. Linus figured out controller input worked instead, got through a mission, and that was that. PUBG: borked, per ProtonDB. A month without PUBG. Fine, probably. Elijah on CachyOS fared better from the start — Discord audio eventually stabilized (he traced a weird low-volume issue back to a SPDIF output setting), and he got OBS running almost immediately. His SMB network share mounted in seconds, automatically discovered. "I didn't have to troubleshoot it," he said on a call to his wife after getting audio working. "That's a lot easier than I thought it was going to be." [1] The Teams situation was a universal struggle. No official Linux client. The open-source Teams-for-Linux wrapper exists, the community version works in the browser, but it's clunky and Microsoft has zero stake in fixing it.

The Things That Just Worked Are Actually the Story

The failures in this video are entertaining and got the community talking. But if you watch the full 53 minutes, the more interesting through-line is what Linus specifically called out as better than expected. No driver downloads. On Windows, a fresh gaming rig installation means visiting five manufacturer websites. On Bazzite, every device was detected and functional without Linus touching a single driver page [1]. OBS: installed, worked, done. Network shares: Bazzite found his SMB share automatically and let him pin it to the sidebar in under a minute. The Cosmic Store (Pop!_OS's app store) got called out as actually useful, unlike the Windows Store, which has been functionally useless since it launched. These are quality-of-life wins that don't make great YouTube moments but are exactly what flipped the calculus for daily use. Privacy-respecting setup, plug-and-play hardware detection, and a functional package manager are things that advanced Linux users have taken for granted for years — but are now the feature list that Windows refugees are comparing against.

Where Linux Actually Stands in 2026

Linus's video landed on the same week that Steam's December 2025 hardware survey data was still circulating: Linux crossed 3.2% market share on Steam, tripling from a decade ago and surpassing macOS for the first time [2]. Proton now supports 96% of the top 500 Steam titles. Global Linux desktop share is hovering around 4–5%, up 70% from 2022 [2]. Bazzite specifically — Linus's distro of choice — holds 6.54% of Linux users on Steam as of January 2026, behind only SteamOS, Arch, CachyOS, and Mint [2]. CachyOS (Elijah's pick) is at 8.89%, gaining nearly two full percentage points in a single month. These aren't fringe numbers anymore. This is a real platform with real adoption curves. The catalyst isn't idealism about open source. It's the Steam Deck. Valve spent three years normalizing Linux gaming on a consumer device that sold millions of units. They built Proton, maintained it, and made it work for the average person. The Steam Deck ecosystem created both the software maturity and the community knowledge base that makes Bazzite viable for someone like Linus in 2026 in a way it absolutely wasn't in 2021 or 2015 [1].

The second you throw Chrome on this thing, it's going to tank through that half-size battery.

— Linus Sebastian, referencing Windows-to-Linux friction in the context of software defaults

Is 2026 Finally the Year of the Linux Desktop?

The honest answer is: no, not universally. But the question itself is getting less stupid. For a gamer with a Bazzite-compatible rig, a willingness to read one ProtonDB page before playing a new title, and no hard dependency on Microsoft Teams or an anti-cheat-locked game? Linux is a legitimate daily driver in 2026. Linus got gaming working. Elijah got everything working. Luke went back to Windows. Two out of three is not a ringing endorsement, but it's better than the old joke. And the things that sent Luke back — game-level crashes on a first-party Valve title — are fixable. The broader point is that Linux has stopped being the option for people who love to tinker and started being a credible option for people who are sufficiently frustrated with Windows. That's a different and much larger audience. Linus is going a month on Bazzite. His gaming rig is running. His streaming rig stays on Windows for now — "I can't afford to have any issues with that." But he's honest about what comes next: "If this goes well, maybe I'll be considering swapping that one over." [1] Watch this space.