On 26 of April, 2025, famous gaming livestreamer and Youtuber, PewDiePie, published a video showing the world that he uses Linux. The video, which starts with him listing the reasons he left Windows for Linux, snowballs into critical levels of pure nerd glee rarely seen recorded in video.
Video
Thoughts Before Watching
To be brutally honest, I'm not really into Youtube or Twitch livestreaming, so to me PewDiePie was just some guy. I think I had heard he learned to draw on his own in a year, and recorded videos about it, which sounded interesting, but I never really watched any of his videos.
I thought his video would go like this:
- Windows sucks now.
- I installed Linux (and by Linux I mean some beginner-friendly distro like Linux Mint, Ubuntu or Pop_OS!).
- Games work now so should you.
My Surprise
While this was more or less how the video went, what pleasantly surprised me, actually, what completely blew me away, was how this guy was much better at using Linux than I was, and he wasn't even a programmer. He tinkered with a lot of his operating system and was having a lot of fun with it.
He was having fun... with Linux.
As a disgruntled programmer, I can't relate. That doesn't even sound physically plausible.
PewDiePie Linux Feats
Allow me to list some of the feats that he managed while tinkering with Linux, which I personally have never bothered to even think about.
Improving Linux Startup Speed
He troubleshooted why his operating system took so long to start up using systemd-analyze and fixed that so it starts up faster.
I'm not a tech guy.
PewDiePie.
I have never used that command on my PC. I'm sure that if I bothered to look up how to make Linux start up faster, I might find some information about this. I'm not sure if Google would help me here or I would need to use ChatGPT, but I'm sure I could find something if I put my mind on it.
The problem is I have never bothered. This might sound a bit negative, but I want to write this down because I think it's important and it fascinates me. I did switch to Linux, but I haven't put as much effort configuring it as PewDiePie has.
On Windows, if my computer is kind of slow, you just kind of deal with it.
PewDiePie.
I suppose I'm a Windows user at heart, then.
Grepping
When PewDiePie talked about learning to use the terminal, I thought he meant something simple like installing applications. To my surprise, he was using the grep terminal command to search the files in his computer that contained a piece of text.
To put that in perspective, when I decided to write some Linux terminal tutorials, I did write one for how to use applications with the terminal, but I haven't written one about grep. I don't even really know how to use grep that well. I only use grep when piping output from another command. I know it can search files, but I rarely do that.
I've been out-Linuxed. I'm not that good at Linux, so I usually don't really care if someone who uses Arch Linux 24 hours per day knows some random ls-something command to figure out system information, but it feels really humbling that someone who is just a user has mastered these commands better than me.
In the past, people who never programmed algorithms were using computers by typing terminal commands into teletypewriters. Nowadays, people rarely use terminal commands. I think that may have warped my perspective on how complicated it is. It certainly isn't as complicated as programming anything, nor is programming that complicated to be honest, but it is something that you normally expect people to shy away from being too complicated. It's fantastic to see that someone can REALLY just learn this stuff and make Linux work for them.
Using a Photoshop Alternative
PewDiePie switched from Photoshop on Windows to GIMP on Linux. That's unfortunate. I'd like to say the Krita is a better choice, but considering his main use case is creating thumbnails for Youtube, and that means using text, I can't actually recommend Krita for text because its text tool is just the worst text tool ever created. I've read that there's someone working on improving it currently, but until it has a proper text tool, it's simply not a replacement for Photoshop for this use case specifically. A functional text tool can`t come soon enough.
Installing Arch Linux
A bit of a bait and switch. PewDiePie starts by saying you can just "pick any distro" and start, which is terrible advice. He then says he picked Mint because he used Mint 15 years ago for a bit until he realized he couldn't play games on it at the time. At that moment, before showing his grep skills, I assumed this meant he had only ever used Mint, and was giving terrible advice as someone who didn't really know much about the whole Linux ecosystem. My presumptions were completely wrong about this guy.
He then reveals a laptop he had in which he had installed Arch Linux, and it doesn't even stop there.
Hyprland
PewDiePie installed a tiling window manager, Hyprland, instead of a traditional desktop environment. He uses keyboard shortcuts to switch between workspaces, and Rofi to launch applications.
Ricing
PewDiePie riced literally everything. This man has a nuclear reactor wallpaper so he can LARP as a nuclear power plant engineer from his laptop. He made everything look like an ASCII art-inspired nuclear reactor dashboard, including making the volume on taskbar turn red so it looks like it has gone "critical."
I'll be honest. I'm actually envious of how happy this man is with Linux. I wish I had this degree of enthusiasm and positive energy toward the operating system. It's rather inspiring and I'll try to do some ricing from now on, because he sounds like he's having so much fun.
I don't even set wallpapers, custom cursors, or even themes these days. I just leave it all on default. I know I can change it, but, like many, I just slowly stopped tinkering and customizing things. Perhaps I should do more of that. Perhaps you should do more of that as well.
Custom Widgets with Eww
PewDiePie created custom widgets for his desktop using Eww. When I read "rust" written on its description I knew things had been gone too far, but then I checked the documentation and it's worse than I thought.
An example of the language from the documentation [https://elkowar.github.io/eww/expression_language.html] (accessed 2025-05-17):
(box
"Some math: ${12 + foo * 10}"
(button :class {button_active ? "active" : "inactive"}
:onclick "toggle_thing"
{button_active ? "disable" : "enable"}))Oh no, it's a lisp! I'm having GIMP's scheme flashbacks here. Not sure if I want to rice anymore.
Creating a Daemon
PewDiePie wrote a custom daemon to automatically show the taskbar when a window is open, and hide it when the desktop is visible.
systemctl --user start waybar-watcher.serviceAre you kidding me? Wow. Just wow.
I mean I did write a background script for my desktop once, but I never bothered making systemd manage it. I need to step my Linux game up. I'm such a noob.
Improving Firefox Startup Speed
PewDiePie was unhappy with Firefox taking 2 whole seconds to open. Instead of an SSD upgrade, he decided to just fix it.
What?
I don't know how he did it. I honestly have no idea. He skipped explaining. Left us all wondering. Well, if he can do it, there is no way I can't do it. I won't do it, though, because I don't use Firefox, I use Vivaldi. But if I used Firefox, at least I know now that there is some way out there to make it start faster, I just have to figure out how.
Conclusions
I loved the video. Very inspiring and gives, to me, a fresh perspective on how people can make use of Linux and computers in general. I'm sure that there will be many influenced by PewDiePie who will try Linux, and I hope they enjoy similar success and get to have as much fun with it as he did.
Linux Youtubers Found to be Most Boring People on Planet Earth
After watching the video, like any normal person, I also watched videos of various youtubers reacting to the video, because Youtube recommended them to me, so I might as well watch 3 hours of videos of people watching a 20 minute video.
One thing I noticed is that PewDiePie is ironically the most enthusiast Linux evangelist on Youtube. It's a really ironic thing, specially considering the difference in audiences you would expect them to have.
PewDiePie hyped up the fact you CAN play games, while some Linux Youtubers' reacted to this by reminded their audience that not all games were really supported.
Where PewDiePie hyped up his riced setup, some Linux youtubers' claimed this was something any new user did, and he would eventually "grow out of it" when he needed to get work done.
Where PewDiePie said he replaced Photoshop with GIMP, Linux youtubers' noted that it wasn't a perfect replacement. This point was specially awkward, because PewDiePie is the youtuber. He is the user using the application, and he says he replaced Photoshop with GIMP. This isn't some guy who uses Linux for his dislike of Microsoft and peddles GIMP as a replacement for Photoshop despite never using Photoshop for anything in his life. This is someone who actually produces something with Photoshop claiming that GIMP was a sufficient replacement. A comment here is unnecessary.
Even when PewDiePie joked that "open source is always the best source" some reactive youtubers' had to interject to claim that isn't always really true.
I would have expected that users subscribed to Linux youtubers would have a solid grasp on how the whole Linux experience feels like, so they wouldn't need all these warnings and caveats. If someone needed this, that would have been PewDiePie's audience. And yet we see that the Linux youtubers' are putting the warning labels while PewDiePie felt they warnings were completely unnecessary.
Are they necessary or not?
Personally, I have no way of knowing. Personally, I'd give warnings as well, because I feel whoever heeds my advice might get disappointed, and I'm afraid of them having difficult with Linux and blaming me for not giving them a fair warning. However, maybe I shouldn't do that. Maybe I should just tell them that Linux is awesome because you can customize it. I can't see myself doing that, unfortunately. I'm glad that there is someone out there that can spread the word of Linux for me in a way that doesn't sound too gloomy.