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…
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I feel you. This really resonates with me cuz I have 100% the same story. I had been trying to switch to Linux from Windows pre-AI and it was good, but a really steep learning curve, with everything taking 20+ internet searches to accomplish basic tasks. The thing that finally forced my hand came at just the right time. I had lived the last 10 years of my life using OneNote as my second brain. When I saw Windows 11 and Copilot coming, I knew I had to get out fast. I bit the bullet and paid OpenAI to vibe code my Ubuntu server, which is now self-hosting over 20 different services, including my new Obsidian-based second brain. I’m 100% off Windows, 98% off corporate cloud infrastructure and onto my own self-hosted services, canceled my OpenAI account, and fully on Linux-based PCs. I have a subpar privacy-based AI service (really a fair trade) that enables me to keep it all up and running. I’m no Linux expert and I have to rely on AI a lot, but man, life has just been so much better, and I couldn’t have done it without the AI that both pushed me to it and enabled me to do it.
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.
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.
Just RTFM!!!
*reads the manual and there’s nothing about this*
…ok. Now what?
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.
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
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.
Haha well that reveals that you just never read it then.
Archwiki is pretty good, it has a lot of breadth, but it’s not a manual and it’s not easy.
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
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
I have used AI a little for Linux adaptation but I do want to caution overuse since it’ll sometimes give you really bad advice, like regarding important dependencies and such. Sometimes it cites info for a wrong distro or outdated info, so it’s not so much made up BS, just bad search results essentially.
Drop chats, use a harness. Include somewhere the procedure instructions to always look up documentation before crafting the command. Add instructions somewhere what dependencies you tolerate. Then it’s really good.
Once your tasks get larger, you need additional checks.
I have Bazzite and couldn’t be happier. Hate that I didn’t switch sooner lol
Took me a week or two to understand the basics. Really isn’t much, tbh.
Got a buddy that has essentially the same story as you… he’s now running Linux as a primary and jellyfin + like 10 other containers in docker.
This time last year he was a Windows guy because he was scared of Linux.
Fast forward to ai being a thing and he’s all about it.
Ai has absolutely made it easier for folks to transition into Linux.
Hell I’ve been on it for like 20 years at this point and I still run into stuff I’ve not seen before. So I use it when ever I need to do so.
Handy.
AI is good at RAG tasks. When you’re asking it questions about text that is in the context window, the hallucination rate is significantly lower.
It can fill that gap between documentation and implementation that isn’t always obvious to someone who is new and answer question that they may not be able to form into a search string. The kind of simple questions that, in some Linux communities, would invite assholes (like ‘how do you set permissions’ or ‘I want to add my user to a group’) to tell them to RTFM. Now TFM can answer their questions directly.
Pretty much the same experience here. During my first week of full-time Linux I managed to break KDE Plasma with a widget IIRC and AI was able to tell me which file in .config I needed to delete to restore to default.
Man, this makes me very proud of myself. I switched to Linux 10 years ago when it was really rough to maintain. Oooofff the sleepless nights I’d spent hunting for fixes that AI now can fix in mere seconds. I use ChatGPT a ton now to fix issues and my distro has been solid ever since.
Was about to say now you should look into self-hosting AI, but you’re already on it. 😄
I was never really against AI, and used the free things for most of the time. I moved to paying for AI once I started homelabbing, I have saved so much money with being able to move my things to my LAN. If I could afford a computer with a strong enough GPU it would be great.
I was able to setup a firewall running OpenWRT that I had tried searching the internet for help but it was always way over my head.
So, word of caution. Be careful. I tried using Copilot to open a connection for a single port between two LANs on my network in pfsense, as I didn’t know pfsense. It happily recommended opening 0.0.0.0/0 on the first LAN’s gateway address. It worked!.. By opening everything on the whole network up to anything at all. The problem with AI: you can only use it if you already know enough to catch its horrible screw ups.
Yeah I do know a little bit of networking and I would have definitely looked up opening 0.0.0.0/0. Not saying you did a bad or anything dergatory but I do double check things I am uncomfortable with.
Yeah, I know enough too, but I worry about the sneaky details I don’t know.
