I’ve had several occasions in my life where I’ve tried to switch to Linux only to run into hardware incompatibilities that would have taken me man-months to solve. Thanks to GPT my primary personal PC, home media and project server is now running Linux and fully functional. I’ve got Jellyfin, NextCloud, Navidrome and Joplin all happy. I’ve also been able to wipe an obsolete MacOS off my 2017-era Macbook Pro and it’s happily running Mint.

There’s a deep irony in Windows being enshittified by AI, while the same AI makes Linux about a billion times more usable. Now I have a leftover Windows micro-PC running a local LLM model, so I can be less dependent on GPT, as long as time isn’t a factor…

  • Kyrias@lemmy.ca
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    21 hours ago

    Yeah. I’m not pro-AI by any stretch but internet searching powered by AI has made it MUCH easier to tinker and troubleshoot. The Linux community can be pretty awful when you’re new to Linux and trying to make things run.

    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      4 hours ago

      The Linux community can be pretty awful when you’re new to Linux and trying to make things run.

      My experience, particularly on Lemmy, has been the exact opposite of this. Everyone is more than happy to help, the only unhelpful replies you get usually are memes.

      • [object Object]@lemmy.ca
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        20 hours ago

        Sorry, that guide was written for systems running systemd and the install manual you followed was a from an opinionated Arch user for SysVinit.

        Oh, this guide is 11 years old written by someone who hated Wayland, so no, modern KDE won’t work with it.

        Just use Arch Wiki, it’s the best for beginners, but also don’t install Arch unless you know what you’re doing already because it’s the worst for beginners.

        • trojanbark@lemmy.world
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          18 hours ago

          Yeah, any time someone tells me to just read the arch wiki for something unrelated to arch I automatically know they will never provide anything valuable to humanity

          • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            4 hours ago

            Oh ok so you’ve literally just never read the Arch wiki at all then huh? It’s absolutely helpful for non-Arch distros in many many cases.

      • Otter@lemmy.ca
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        19 hours ago

        I suspect that LLMs do pretty well with troubleshooting Linux thanks to those manuals and old forum posts. After using them to troubleshoot Linux based devices, I tried the same thing on Windows and it struggled to figure out what commands to run.

        Windows is a mess to configure and troubleshoot, even with the help of LLMs. Microsoft could have spent their investment trying to fix that, but I don’t think they have.

        “Copilot can troubleshoot your computer” could have been a selling point, but they’d have to admit that windows 11 is a buggy mess

    • LazerDickMcCheese@sh.itjust.works
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      19 hours ago

      Agreed. The only advice people gave me with issues on Windows as “just use Linux!” OK, I switched…here’s my hundreds of issues, suddenly no help from them. ChatGPT made it possible for me to build a server and switch to Fedora. Not how I wanted to switch, but it worked