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.

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.

I wouldn’t 100% trust ai to blindly copy paste whatever it gave me into my terminal, but one of the beautiful things about Linux is the ability for you to get tech help via cli.

I have older relatives that ask me for their problems with windows and I’m actually hitting dead ends with them more and more where due to lack of vocabulary on their end and suffering through windows GUI you can’t really guide someone through a fix. That and more and more I’m becoming alienated from windows and don’t know what’s going on as much anymore.

If they had Linux I could just message them and give them terminal commands and it would be a lot easier for me to diagnose and give them a handful of terminal commands to copy paste. I’d still end up googling it but I could at least make it soooo much less painless then a face call/meeting app interaction where we both don’t know what windows did on the newest update.

Also unrelated side note windows shouldn’t allow refurbishers to sell old outdated laptops with windows 11 licenses if it breaks every update due to windows shitty hardware restrictions. Its like four times a year their laptop breaks and I forget how we fix it everytime.

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.

I feel you. This really resonates with me cuz I have 100% the same story. I had been trying to switch to Linux from Windows pre-AI and it was good, but a really steep learning curve, with everything taking 20+ internet searches to accomplish basic tasks. The thing that finally forced my hand came at just the right time. I had lived the last 10 years of my life using OneNote as my second brain. When I saw Windows 11 and Copilot coming, I knew I had to get out fast. I bit the bullet and paid OpenAI to vibe code my Ubuntu server, which is now self-hosting over 20 different services, including my new Obsidian-based second brain. I’m 100% off Windows, 98% off corporate cloud infrastructure and onto my own self-hosted services, canceled my OpenAI account, and fully on Linux-based PCs. I have a subpar privacy-based AI service (really a fair trade) that enables me to keep it all up and running. I’m no Linux expert and I have to rely on AI a lot, but man, life has just been so much better, and I couldn’t have done it without the AI that both pushed me to it and enabled me to do it.

I have used AI a little for Linux adaptation but I do want to caution overuse since it’ll sometimes give you really bad advice, like regarding important dependencies and such. Sometimes it cites info for a wrong distro or outdated info, so it’s not so much made up BS, just bad search results essentially.

I have Bazzite and couldn’t be happier. Hate that I didn’t switch sooner lol

Took me a week or two to understand the basics. Really isn’t much, tbh.

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.

Nothing ironic about that. Thanks to OpenClaw and open weights AI models I started self hosting and figuring stuff out that would have made me frustrated and quit years ago. I have home assistant running on bare metal on a mini PC, a NAS with custom bios, migrated everything away from windows, Kavita for ebooks, jellyfin for music and video, nightscout to ingest my wife’s insulin pump data, and some fun custom sidecars that tie together some nifty automations like automatically diarizing and transcribing voice notes of meetings from my phone without having to pay a subscription fee - latest projects have been a local sync point for logseq, kitchenowl, and nextcloud - super productivity android app and caldav and the to-do lists in home assistant. I never would have had the time to figure all this out with my full time job and parenting but I can cut the cord to all my subscription services and I look at things a new way now. I solve my own problems now when before I would just look for a way to buy a solution. I bought bunk beds for the kids but the bottom bunk didn’t come with slats and I couldn’t find the right size so I went to home Depot and built my own with instructions from my ops agent. I had a fun idea to make an e-ink display sign for my office door that shows what town I’m currently in and what my current MS outlook calendar block is and when it’s over. I never played with Arduino before and now I’m hooked. It gets me over that first execution hump. Sure I break stuff and have to figure out how to put it back together again but that’s part of the fun. I finally found a way to learn stuff that works for me, you know, comes naturally. It’s like I’ve been waiting my whole life for this ever since growing up seeing people using computers via natural language in Star Trek. It extends to my work. The data I need is gated behind ticketing systems of business intelligence professionals who don’t have the time or inclination to give me what I need so hey looks like copilot basic is great and m-code, guess I don’t need BI analysts after all. Sucks for them.

Was about to say now you should look into self-hosting AI, but you’re already on it. 😄

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.

Using AI is generally a bad idea

It will bite you if your not careful