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
Comment on Finally escaping Windows, ironically thanks to AI
Kyrias@lemmy.ca 2 weeks 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.
LazerDickMcCheese@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks 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.
Seralth@piefed.seralth.com 2 weeks ago There’s decades of information to shift though and AI knows just enough to shift though the chaff.
Its honestly likely going to slowly become one of the few real use cases for the tech for the avg person. But from a local perspective. Needing a centralized search engine is likely going to become iffy and lower quality even if they shove ai into it.
redballooon@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
For how to use bash, you can easily resort to local models with LMStudio. No internet search needed.
fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Just RTFM!!!
*reads the manual and there’s nothing about this*
…ok. Now what?
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 2 weeks 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.
trojanbark@lemmy.world 2 weeks 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
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Archwiki is pretty good, it has a lot of breadth, but it’s not a manual and it’s not easy.
I have made the completely opposite experience. I tried so many distros and every single time some non-trivial issues came up my search ended in the arch wiki finally explaining stuff and writing out available options in config files instead of just telling my what option in what GUI config tool (that might or might not exist in my distro) I should click, then pray it works.
So I wasted years listening to the “No, Archlinux is a meme and totally unusable for inexperienced people” before installing archlinux, which is now running for more than 9 years without problems, and will happily point people asking questions for other distros to the relevant parts of the arch wiki that actually spell stuff out properly.
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Haha well that reveals that you just never read it then.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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
TheFogan@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
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”.
N0x0n@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
That’s probably the worst part…
frongt@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
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.