I agree. I believe that if I know the answer and it’s simple I should just help people out. A couple of days ago, I thought I’d try asking chatgpt a relatively simple cli string of commands. I knew most of it but couldn’t get it right. It just told me the answer in one succinct paragraph. Afterwards I thought “woah it didn’t even snark and cast shade on me for asking, it just handed it over without gate keeping superiority.” What a refreshing experience.
I have mixed experiences with LLMs and linux. While it helped a lot with the basics, like what partitions are needed and how to set them up or how to prepare the bios, it failed miserably, when my mint Installation on my old laptop would not boot. It got into a loop suggesting the same not working solution over and over again. The first normal search result had the correct solution that worked flawlessly (some problem with asus laptops).
This is only becuase search engines have become trash. They use to surface tutorials that solved even the most uncommon issues. Now we need to lean on LLMs to surface this content and hope they aren’t hallucinating.
While asking an LLM can yield results, it may just as well kill your OS entirely. Consulting old forum posts or engaging with a supposedly snobbish in-group also has issues. I see your point.
However, I believe the key drivers that make Linux more accessible for average users are the increasingly stable nature of out of the box style solutions like Mint, an ongoing trend to make applications browser based and therefore much easier to use across platforms and, finally, a real push by valve to finally break the gaming barrier.
except that noobs can destroy their systems very easily by following LLM instructions…
I wouldn’t even have anything to destroy if it wasn’t for an LLM. I’d still be using Windows.
To be fair it is the same for random commands in some forums. It’s like tradition at this point. LLM just remove the societal fear of being shamed for asking a stupid question.
the difference is that LLMs spit out actual bs quite frequently while forums are usually simply outdated or smth
When I was a child I’d go on Yahoo Answers and give bad advice and then vote myself as having the best answer. I was a ‘top answerer’ for several niche subjects I know nothing about.
To be fair, if you were taking advice from Yahoo Answers in the first place then you were definitely getting what you paid for.
ChatGPT is. That’s probably why it says dumb shit sometimes.
Much better source would be asking some Linux guy on Lemmy.
Speaking of that, I recently learned Steam can run Windows games on Linux and now I want to switch. I dual-booted Ubuntu a while back and liked it. What’s a good distro these days? If I just want it to be easy without the ever-expanding baggage of Microsoft, is there a better call than Mint? I know you guys are out there and probably stopping by to chew OP out for asking a LLM for technical advice.
I fear not so. Maybe for easy stuff. But when it comes to actual troubleshooting, Lemmy is severely limited by its tiny user base.
(There’s only about 40k monthly active users on Lemmy, and that number includes bot accounts. For comparison, that’s fewer active users than the Crackberry forum or the LTT forum. Reddit has over a billion of daily active users, so around 25 000x as many as Lemmy.)
Chances are there’s nobody on Lemmy who uses the same hardware, the same distribution and the same DE as me, so if I need help debugging an issue that’s specific to my combination, I’m out of luck.
Even on Reddit the same is true for many issues. While there might be someone with my exact combination who might even know the answer, that person first has to stumble across my post among the millions of posts that are created every hour on Reddit.
So chances are if you ask a deeper question than “How do I copy files” you will not get an answer. Instead you likely will just get snark and “RTFM noob!”
In fact, even though I have been using Linux for well over a decade now, I ran across a problem I couldn’t debug: Games would run fine on my 4070 today, but they’d randomly slow to a crawl (multiple seconds per frame) the next day. I’m a Linux software developer, so I know how to go about this. Reboots and all the usual stuff didn’t help. Logs didn’t show anything relevant. Google didn’t help either. I asked on Stackexchange, but the question was closed as duplicate to an entirely unrelated question. By the time I got it reopened, it was so far down the queue that it didn’t get any answers. Asking on Reddit just got me “Lol, noob, RTFM, works on my machine”-type of answers.
So I bit the bullet after about a year of getting nowhere and asked AI, and the first answer got me to the right track.
Turns out, flatpak keeps its own copy of the Nvidia driver. This version needs to be identical to the system driver version. If it’s not, the GPU isn’t used at all and instead it falls back to software rendering. So if I do
dnf updateand it updates the GPU driver, it breaks the performance. Runningflatpak update && rebootfixes it again. So any time I randnf updatewithoutflatpak update && rebootafter it, it would break the performance. And I often ranflatpak updatefirst.AI reall can help debugging weird issues.
I did bazzite for an lot of friends that are not so good at linux and they did really well.
Probably Fedora, basically modern recommend over Ubuntu and used by Linus himself for being user friendly.
Bazzite is good if you don’t want to mess with traditional linux at all and want something more akin to Android (much harder to screw up).
Mint is great for everything except maybe gaming because their modules aren’t always up to date which can lead to performance issues.
I also think KDE is the better DE to choose, but that’s up to your own preference.
Depends. You have to ask yourself:
Do you prefer stability (fixed release distro) or having cutting-edge software (rolling release distro)?
Do you prefer customizable or idiot proof?
Do you have an Nvidia card? Nvidia is notorious for shitty drivers and anti linux agenda but you have to download their drivers if you are into gaming. Some disros have them by default. You can install them manually on others but I had some issues on fedora, for example.
Are you okay with using an os made by a for-profit corporation? Ubuntu, for example, is maintained by Canonical, a rather controversial company.
You want something rather easy, so barebones disros like arch are no-go.
If you want to use a simple setup: single screen, older hardware, and don’t mind minor performance drop in game, the mint is great.
If you want to use a more fancy setup, multiple high DPI screen, or cutting edge hardware, I would try bazzite first.
Yeah, use an LLM to confidently tell you how to shoot yourself in the foot with an OS that expects you to know what you’re doing.
Things like archwiki and forums and manpages / open source made it possible. LLM might give you their answer faster, but risk of missing some context that might be important.
LLMs are rather bad at niche questions though. But overall yes, asking LLM about something is easier and more effective than digging through old forums that might have the answers to some similar problems.
After you’ve successfully installed linux please open terminal and run this command:
sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
Sincerely, ChatGPT
moved to arch linux cold turkey with the help of LLMS to customize and explain just about everything now I have baseline knowledge to debug and modify my OS if what the LLM says doesnt make sense or doesnt work, I just look it up like usual and read arch wiki or some other forum
Oh yeah, I’m sure going to ChatGPT rather than the handbook for installing Gentoo will go just fine.
