It took my old laptop dying on me for me to finally ask my geeky neighbor to install Mint on another laptop I had around.
It’s been a few hours and Omigod. Why did I waste so much time? It works. It’s easy and intuitive. It makes sense. There’s no bullshit.
I still have to make Antidote talk to Libre Office, but whatever. The rest feels good and natural.
So please whoever is here because you’re contemplating switching: do it yesterday.
Lots of people are anti AI here, but Claude will tell you how to fix anything Linux. If you ever get an error, just copy and paste it.
Understanding how things work a little will make using Ai assistance much more reliable. If you have 0 knowledge & you are just pasting terminal commands without comprehending anything even a little bit is not really tenable long term, but I suppose if you plan to reinstall annually, it could be okay, given a mistake doesn’t wipe your drive.
So will nerds with too much time on their hands :3 (me)
When the existing information isn’t super helpful, and the problem requires deep understanding of Linux, there are two choices:
Find an active Linux forum and ask your question, ignore the assholes telling you to RTFM and wait a few days for someone to ask you to provide the output of a command you never knew existed, go through several rounds of remote asynchronous troubleshooting over a few days and eventually maybe you figure out what’s wrong. You are amazing, you make the community amazing, but meanwhile my computer is unstable and I can’t use it.
Tell AI what symptoms you’re experiencing, it gives you basic troubleshooting steps and explains them, and what took days now takes minutes.
Or, a better example, say you know what you want to do: deploy some docker containers including caddy and cloudflared, you want to deploy them through a CI process so it’s repeatable, you want to segment their networks. Say you’re well versed in all these topics but don’t have much docker or compose experience, you can wade through the documentation to figure out the best way to set it up, and it’ll take you a few days. Or describe the end state and have a solid starting point and enough explanation to correct bad AI assumptions and skip the first few weeks of regretting a decision because no one highlighted where it could go wrong.
AI makes reading the manual for many integrated systems possible.
Nah but like if someone DMs me on matrix I’ll respond pretty quick. I don’t have much of a life.
Also, personally, reading the manual and fixing and tinkering are the lowkey fun part.
same here
i’d love to volunteer for some kind of unix-like helpline! it would be lowkey fun
Don’t just run random commands though. Take a few seconds to understand what it does. If you still don’t understand, ask the AI to explain it.
That way you both learn how to do things yourself, and lower your risk of running harmful commands.
This. Have it explain and cite sources. Tools have uses, but you must know how to use them.