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Comment by int_19h | Hacker News Reader

AI is the best thing that happened to desktop Linux!

This actually. AI is dramatically better at helping users deal with perennial issues that Linux gets, and using the command line to fix them, compared to Microsoft's fresh new bug introduced last Tuesday or navigating anti-user GUI.

You’re absolutely correct what used to take me hours reading docs and googling now takes minutes to find an answer to. Just this week my new beelink I couldnt get hardware acceleration working for transcoding. A couple prompts lead me to the fact the gpu was new and I needed a newer Linux kernel. I probably would have spent hours and hours fiddling with device drivers and configs in the past.

That is true but I believe he meant it as Microsoft shoving AI down your throat in every part of Windows driving people away into Linux.

That sounds... quite bad, to be honest. I never met one single Windows issue that can't be answered by simple google search for years. A desktop expecting the user to ask AI(!) for solutions that require command line(!!) is definitely not for average users.

Because hacking the registry or installing 3rd party de-bloat tools is for average users? You only think so because you've done it a bunch of times.

High user count will make much more information available, but once in a while you will hit one bad issue that is niche enough, and your only hope will be to reach MS.

At that point I'd rather deal with an LLM that know the insides of my open source OS than MS support. Have you seen their community answers on the web? I'd rather deal with Arch wiki and the command line even without an LLM.

I've been amazed at AI's usefulness for Linux sysadmin tasks.

Last week I installed KDE on a new computer with two identical SSDs. One I wanted to wipe for the OS and the other I wanted to keep the data on.

Unfortunately I couldn't tell which one to install the OS on! ChatGPT helped me open a terminal and run the correct udevadm and lsblk commands to see what files existed on each disk.

Good use case and an example of brokenness of UX on Linux in many small and subtle ways. It frustrates me to no end that GNOME, Nautilus, etc. will truncate or hide information in many places. I don't think this has been fixed but the launcher will truncate names with ellipsis. So analyzer will appear as "anal..."

>AI is dramatically better at helping users deal with perennial issues that Linux gets

This was my first thought. All Linux troubleshooting with AI resulted in hallucinatory commands that don't exist or work on this version of the OS, and managed to help me trash one system installation.

Has anything changed?

A lot has changed since ChatGPT 2.0. You could give it a go again :)

AI for help figuring things out and Timeshift for when you accidentally break something. One reboot and it’s fixed.

given that:

- AI is what gave Nvidia reason to finally work on GPU drivers (Linux is premier environment for AI/ML workloads)

- LLMs are more useful on Linux than on Windows (although manuals are still unbeatable)

- Windows users are sick of Copilot bullshit

...yeah, I almost agree. the best thing that happened to Linux is Valve consistently pouring a ton of resources into open-source Linux projects, but AI bubble firmly holds the second place position.

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