I totally agree with the rant, and a big issue is that the Linux community specifically consists to a large part of technicians and not users who then go full *surprised pikachu face* when they see a user who is not a technician.

But seriosly, how would a (to quote OP) “total beginner” know that AI is not a good place to look for help?

And, tbh, it sometimes does actually help. AI lies more often than it doesn’t, but it at least tries to help, which is more than I can say of most members of the Linux community.

I had an issue on Fedora 42 where the performance of my games would randomly be abysmal. One day I can play current AAA titles without issue on my Nvidia 4070, the next day I have to measure performance in “Seconds per Frame” even on 15yo indie titles. This issue only affects game started from Heroic, all other things I try including all debugging stuff works fine.

I’m not a new Linux user. I’m a developer and I’ve been using Linux for about 20 years. So I get to debugging, googling, reading bug reports, all that, and can’t find anything. I ask on StackExchange, Lemmy, even Reddit, no result. Most people are like “Works on my machine, noob”, and a handful people are like "I have the same issue and no solution.

So after a year or so I swallow my pride and ask ChatGPT. The first answer is correct: Heroic (and thus all proton/wine games it spawns) runs in Flatpak. Flatpak has its own version of the Nvidia drivers, and if that version doesn’t exactly match the OS driver version it falls back to software rendering. So if I do dnf update and it updates the Nvidia drivers this breaks my performance until I do flatpak update. I often ran flatpak update before dnf update and thus my performance sucked.

Yes, the majority of the answers I get from AI are lies. But without AI I would still not be able to game on my system.