I have never cared what work wanted me to use. It's their computer, not mine. They can use a potato for all I care. As long as I can do my job, and I can just fine with windows. Collecting my package is what I most care about.
this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2025
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Unironically AI is pretty good at helping linux noobs.
Honestly it's really helped me with spreadsheet formulae and more complex regex search and replace terms. And it's so pleasant and patient about all of it. So many of those spaces are DEEPLY toxic to noobs and when I paste the error back to it it's like oh it looks like the regex you're using doesn't support that! Let's try...
it helped me to remove kde, gnome, unity environment when i installed them all, just for testing and after its advices os stopped to launch
It figured out the issue with my front panel 3.5 audio jack not working when I plugged in headphones in my Mint desktop pc.
AI is decent at combing through all that documentation and forum posts and getting to a sensible approach.
Even people who've been at it for years. I am skeptical of the AI hype bubble as much as anyone here, but it's been very useful for fixing things in Linux. Just in the past years it helped me (among others):
- Find an obscure bug that was reported that same day in the kernel, and helped me switch to the LTS kernel to prevent these issues.
- Help me setup up a random 35mm film scanner that I found with cups, and then help me set up a win XP VM when that didn't work out
- Help me fix bluray playback yesterday after VLC suddenly randomly started to refuse playing it.
I doubt anyone here hates AI other than for the big companies pushing it constantly. ML and language models have been a thing since the last decade but we only hate them now cause of how desperate the corpos are about it and oh the data scraping too but that's expected.
For me it helped with:
- Fixing electron apps not launching in wayland
- Fixed my ignis shell code(ricing, these shells keep changing and it's a burden maintaining them)
- automating my system with a few systemd timers.
Albeit I could do these myself by looking at docs but it's not worth the time. Now it just works instead of "maintaining my arch setup".
I'm in my 50s, I've been in IT professionally for 30 years, using Linux for 25 of those.
I hate AI.
I don't hate the technology, but I hate the culture of "ez learning" and the marketing. Literally people who have no clue about technology openly saying "wanna bet?" when I say it doesn't always have the right answers.
Sure, 19 of 20 chatgpt answers are great, but that 20th answer is dangerously wrong. Like, wreck your infrastructure wrong.
I also hate what it's doing to young minds the most, though: the 20 something techs I hire will lean on AI so hard, they have no sense of what to do if the answer isn't forthcoming, just ¯\(ツ)/¯.
AI is killing problem-solving.
Edit: I'm distinguishing AI from ML here, which I do use as a pattern recognition tool.
Yes, exactly. Its killing problem solving ability and learning. Taking the extra time to search around and figure things out helps you learn. Not to mention its poisoning its own well, making legitimate answers harder and harder to find on the web.
I completely agree. In the current context it's important to note that I have a cs degree and you too probably and way better than me. But some people don't know how to use computers and that's fine. They just like to surf or play games. I think when you are troubleshooting your pc, it's fine. That's my position.
What you are saying I think is completely different discussion. I know people that you are referring to and you cannot change them. Some people love ignorance but yeah I agree it's impacting a lot of people but I don't think it's a ai issue, it's a people issue.
It's a great tool for the right tasks. What's annoying is that it's marketed as being a great tool for tasks it can barely do.
It has really sped up the process of writing things in languages I'm unfamiliar with. All the stupid little mistakes it will find much faster than trying to google them. As long as you're critical of the answers I also found it pretty good at explaining how to do things. It will often get some details wrong but as long as you have general programming ability and access to documentation you can usually figure those out somewhat easily.
All the best tasks for an LLM are basically unmonitizable. That's the problem.
I felt the same way regarding AI. I always felt like it was too unreliable, and while you obviously shouldn't trust it blindly, it has been doing a pretty good job explaining things to me. I've been using a local model with ollama, i think it's called qwen2.5 coder or something, and it has been helpfull explaining some NixOS stuff to me, where i couldn't find it myself (cause NixOS documentation is all over the place). I also use it for explaining some bash stuff to me sometimes when i'm writing a script. Usually i don't just care about the answer but i also want to learn why something works if it isn't clear to me, and so far it also has done a good job explaining how it works when i ask it a follow up question.
True, there's endless data of how to use linux, just not organized in a way new users would want, and LLM can help reword them that way.
Indeed, it helped me a lot when I didn't know when to start. Searching on the web can yield very old results, and you simply don't know what is outdated and what's not.
Ultimately that’s what most agenic “AI” is doing these days. Literally just hitting the top few results of Google or Bing and plopping it into the text context.
In other words, if web search is returning very bad results then the LLM will too, if that web search option is enabled. You have to be careful.
I mean. It did offer to help you pick out a distro. Imagine your soon to be ex offering to make you a tinder profile.
That's actually a really good response.
Ironically, it’ll just ape back what you want to hear by being sympathetic towards my concerns, addressing nothing.
So, standard customer support
I mean, I would argue it's better than standard tech support because I don't get disconnected and it sometimes actually solves a problem
Whenever copilot tells me I can't do something I tell it how much I think Microsoft is a bunch of losers for the restrictions they've put in.
It doesn't solve anything but I feel a little better after.
You can always ask them for a Linux distro. When I was an intern, I asked the IT team to preinstall some flavour of Linux. And they did. They installed Ubuntu on that laptop.
I've been holding off on upgrading my work computer to W11 for as long as I can. It's already slow as shit with all the MS bloat (along with another required spyware program we have installed for one of our vendors), I can only imagine 11 will make that much worse.
so you can keep Windows for work but use Linux for everything else
LOL