Today marks the 10 year anniversary of my YouTube channel. It’s absolutely wild to think that I’ve been making about two videos a week for a decade.

I’ve Always Been A Gamer

I’ve always been a gamer. I grew up with an NES, a Super Nintendo, an N64, and a PlayStation. As I reached my teenage years, the Xbox was my go-to.

However, for as long as I can remember, the PC dwarfed the consoles. Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Command & Conquer, Unreal Tournament, Age of Empires, SimCity 3000, The Sims. That's where my heart truly was.

My family wasn’t well-off, though, so if I wanted a PC I had to work for it. I once spent an entire summer mowing lawns and trading/selling Pokemon cards so I could buy a PC. My aunt sold me her old Gateway 2000 for $100. It came with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse and I kept it in my bedroom. I then ran a phone line so I could dial up to the net! (In retrospect, it was probably a bad idea for an 11 year old to have an unsupervised Internet connection in his bedroom, but I digress. 🤣)

At the age of 14 I started to dabble in Linux. My first distro was Fedora Core, then I quickly switched over to Ubuntu. And Ubuntu was my home for over a decade.

I was going to vocational school studying to be an electrician. But I knew that wasn’t where my passion lay. I had wanted to be in the Computer Careers course, but it was full. However, I had to find something else to do with myself as a homeschooler. That's why I took electrical.

I had filled out the final semester by doing odd electrical jobs for the school and made a decent amount of money, so I bought an ATI Radeon card second-hand from my uncle. I wish I could remember the model number. It unlocked a whole new level of gaming for me: Call of Duty, Halo, Unreal Tournament 2004, Max Payne 2, Black & White 2, and so much more.

It was probably around 2008 when I became a full time Linux user. My daily driver distro was Ubuntu Jaunty and it literally changed my life. I remember upgrading from Jaunty to Karmic and being so impressed that my computer actually got faster after an upgrade.

So I immediately started to evangelize the incredible virtues of Linux. I installed it on my friends PCs and he l noticed one thing immediately: how much more responsive the mouse cursor felt. That was something I had noticed, too!

But there was one thing missing: games.

Gaming on Linux

When Ubuntu Lucid released in 2010, I was really starting to feel the lack of games in my PC-using habits. I was messing around with Minecraft and stuff at this point, but it wasn’t really the same. I was used to having a variety of PC games on my desktop.

Granted, I was dipping into my collection of boxed PC games and running them in WINE. Games like Modern Warfare and Halo CE. Or I was *ahem* downloading some of the old Linux ports of SimCity 3000 and the like... but the sad truth was—I was turning to my Xbox 360 for most of my gaming needs.

I was playing the XBLA release of Perfect Dark, Braid, Bastion, Rock Band 2, Splinter Cell: Conviction, and whatever Assassin's Creed was new and shiny at the time. Heck, I was even playing Left 4 Dead 2 on the 360. A sad state of affairs to be sure.

But I caught wind of something: Humble Bundle. Pay what you want and support charity… and every game had a Linux port? Yes, please. I bought every single Humble Bundle religiously. It was the best way to get fresh and interesting Linux games. And I was sold.

So, in 2013, when Valve announced that Steam was coming to Linux? Oh man. I was stoked. I hopped on the bandwagon and redeemed every Humble Bundle key that I’d received. Only maybe 20% of them had their Linux build available on Steam... but it didn’t matter. I quickly beat Braid, and Bastion as they were some of the best games available at the time. And I bought myself a DualShock 4 controller to play my favorite games again and again.

Steam Machines

I remember taking a break at work one day and checking my phone. The /r/linux_gaming subreddit was all abuzz with the news of Valve’s Steam Machine project.

Valve had announced SteamOS—then based on Debian—and their program for OEMs to pre-install their gaming-focused OS on prebuilt machines meant for your living room. A wild and exciting (if a bit half-baked) idea.

It was half-baked because Valve had yet to roll out Proton. That was still four years away! And that lack of compatibility with Windows titles? That was a major snag in the adoption of SteamOS and one of the primary reasons the Steam Machines never took off.

You’ve gotta remember this was Valve’s "crowd-source everything” era. They didn’t want to take risks or responsibility for anything back then. I mean, this was a time when Steam Greenlight was still a thing. Remember that disaster?

To the project’s credit, there were PC vendors who bought into the idea of Steam Machines. Falcon Northwest and Zotac come to mind. But the original one? The flagship? Alienware Steam Machine. I wish I still had one of those.

I followed the news and paid close attention. This was the future. I was certain of it. But delay after delay and the confusing, muddled catalog of hardware was truly disheartening.

The Channel

It was late 2014, I’d been gaming on Linux for years at this point and the landscape had changed dramatically in that time. And things were also changing in my life.

At the time I had just gotten a job at a furniture store in their warehouse. I had a lot of extra free time since my commute had gone from over an hour and a half a day to just under 10 minutes. So I wanted to put that time to good use.

Valve had just rolled out the Steam Curator program and thousands of people had followed the one I had spun up. It was called “The Linux Gamer” and I had drawn a purple pixel art penguin as the mascot…

I had always wanted a YouTube channel. I had tried and failed many times to start one, too. So driven by my desire to help people with gaming and to review video games, I created The Linux Gamer on YouTube on September 28th, 2014.

I created a review of a random PC port of a mobile game to get my feet wet. Beyond Gravity. Going back and watching it is kinda hard for me.

I’ve tried really hard to have a more natural performance. But I don’t know if I’ve improved that much.

Back then, I didn’t know much about capturing footage on Linux. So I was using Steam’s in-home streaming to stream gameplay from my Linux laptop to a Windows PC running FRAPS. Yes. That’s really how I started. That solution sucked, though. So I quickly found alternatives.

Like I said, I had tried to start multiple YouTube channels in the past but they all were terrible. This was different, though, and I could feel it. Thousands of views and subscribers in just a few short months.

So… I’ve been playing the YouTube game for ten years now. I’ve witnessed, first hand, the incredible growth and change of the Linux world.

Together, we’ve watched Linux gaming mature from a small corner of Steam, we've seen the birth of Proton, and we've seen the meteoric rise  and the massive, mainstream adoption of a Linux gaming handheld.

And this little hobby-project I started back in 2014—over ten years ago—has grown, too. It has opened so many doors for me. I’ve made so many friends and connections. I’ve grown as a person, a creative, and a Linux user. I wouldn’t have been able to start my company or publish my video game if it weren’t for this channel. I wouldn’t have been able to support myself through the pandemic, nor been able to afford my house.

Things have to change

So now, shortly after the 10 year anniversary of this channel, I need to make a change. See, I got into this business to help people, plain and simple. It started off with video game reviews and has evolved over the years. And when I have lost my way from that ethos, you guys have been disinterested. And right now, I feel like something needs to change.

I’m not going anywhere… I’m still going to create new videos for you every week… but I’ve learned quite a bit about what works and what doesn’t on YouTube.

So the plan is, I want to focus on what works. More tutorial-style content. More focus on Linux content. And you guys really seem to like the Steam Deck News videos. So more of that, too.

But the biggest change I’m going to make is that I’m never going to do a Sponsored Segment or Integration again. You know what I’m talking about:

“I want to say thanks to this video’s sponsor <brand-x>. Brand X makes shopping easy by…”.

Yep. I’m giving those up completely.

Firstly, because they’re usually irrelevant to what I’m talking about.

Secondly, because they interrupt the flow of the video.

But thirdly, because I hate making that kind of thing. I want to have fun and help people. Integrations are neither of those things.

From my end, I’m almost never dealing with the brand directly. It’s usually “Influencer Agencies” who have ridiculous demands and they’re almost never worth the amount of work and annoying crap you have to deal with.

But from your perspective, integrations are boring and—worse yet—irrelevant. As evidenced by the 90% of people who skip them. That has a negative effect on the video’s performance, but that video also becomes a drag on the channel. Thus helping fewer people!

So I just updated the Code of Ethics if you want to take a look at them.

Needless to say, this will be a big loss of income for the channel. Last year we made five figures from integrations. With that said, if you believe in the work I’m doing and want to help support this show, you can make a pledge on Patreon or Ko-fi.

It’s much appreciated. But not matter what.. whether you’ve been a subscriber for a day, a year, or you’ve been along for the entire ride: thank you. Here’s to another ten years.