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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Using AI is generally a bad idea
It will bite you if your not careful
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.
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…
Might as well go all in. LM Studio, Stability Matrix, Comfy UI, Ollama - everything’s native on Linux.
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.
Just RTFM!!!
*reads the manual and there’s nothing about this*
…ok. Now what?
Now search for a stack overflow comment, with one answer that’s not relevant and doesn’t work anymore and 30 “this is a duplicate it’s already been answered in a post 10 years ago”, and 1 niche forum with someone who had the exact issue, followed with “Thanks I figured it out”.
“Thanks I figured it out”.
That’s probably the worst part…
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
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
Yeah that’s the proper way to do it.
There’s a guy at work constantly asking AI everything on his second screen. He came to me after failing to figure out an issue using it. I said “oh yeah let’s look at the documentation, I bet there’s an example for this exact scenario” and sure enough there was. Made the change, tested and working.
On the other hand, any time I want to do something with Ansible, I start off reading the docs, can’t find what I need, scour a bunch of search results, and when that fails somehow AI can produce a working example of what I need in a few tries.
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 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.
The problem with AI is that it doesn’t push back. It is fantastic at manipulating your emotions.
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.
Great call out on the irony. So true. Welcome to the future.
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.
Welcome to the other side. I highly recommend checking man pages when looking up commands to start getting a feel for how to use them, also I recommend getting tealdeer (TLDR, get it?) It’s a TLDR of man pages that shows you how a package is usually used. I’ve often found that it bridges a syntax gap that is often missed in man pages.
Learning how to navigate and use man pages saved my ass when I was screwing around with my network.
thank you! I’ve been on linux for years but somehow hadn’t heard of these
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.
Good for you. The only two times I decided to glance at the AI overview of a search cause I wasn’t finding anything, it wasn’t useful at all. So yeah, I’m gonna save the planet a little more.
Was about to say now you should look into self-hosting AI, but you’re already on it. 😄
