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Comment by phowat | Hacker News Reader

Tangentially , I was a heavy used of wsl and moved to linux a few months ago and LLMs made most of the downsides of using linux as a desktop go away for me. I chatted with claude about the migration to find the best distro, decided on Fedora. After the install I asked everything I wanted to configured and got straight answers. In 3 or 4 hours I had an even more comfortable experience than I had on windows. AI made the annoying parts of trying to figure out how to edit all the config files to have linux behave the way you want very easy. I also had claude code write a bunch of scripts that I could have done but would probably never bring myself to actually do it . WHen you have a coding agent readily available , having an open source desktop environment makes a lot more sense. I encourage everyone to try it.

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I also did this as well as learned pfSense then OPNSense when pfSense went bad. Also made a pretty complicated XCP-ng setup. Learned all this with the ancient ChatGPT 3.5-4.0 models.

I can hear a subset of people cringe saying "but LLMs are BS machines and you aren't learning anything!" I heartily disagree on both fronts. The main thing holding users like me back from linux was always the snarky RTFM community and the fact that everything has 25 different answers (depending on distro, window manager, and many other factors). LLMs take care of all this friction for you very nicely.

This. It is hard to exaggerate how easy Claude Code (or, I'm sure, any number of other harnesses of choice) makes it to migrate to a new operating system.

It is truly a Star Trek-level experience. Nobody who doesn't want to run Windows (and who isn't forced to run it) needs to run Windows anymore.

On the other side, I am a lifelong Linux user, and even with advanced LLMs, trying to get Microsoft Windows to behave sanely takes hours every month for years on end (thanks, day job). Things Linux figured out in 2003 are still magic or completely undoable on Windows.

Not my experience. I installed the IoT version of Windows 11 and have changed exactly one setting (put the start menu back on the left where it rightfully belongs). Nothing else has required any changes at all to get sanity, which is more than you can say for Mac (which requires half a dozen extra apps to make it same - SteerMouse, Karabina, Spectacle, etc.), or Linux, where the UI is mostly sane - if you're using KDE anyway - but you're beset by bugs and jank.

And don't say "it works for me". We know some people get very lucky with Linux and stuff just works. In my experience the typical experience is that stuff works much better on Windows than Linux.

E.g. something Windows figured out in 2000 - what happens when your system is low on ram or overloaded? Simple! Press ctrl-alt-del, it will pause other apps and allow you to open the task manager and choose one to kill.

On Linux? There's no task manager in the ctrl-alt-del menu (on KDE anyway), and even if there was it isn't a specially privileged UI so it wouldn't respond. Running low on RAM? No problem we'll just kill a random process and if that doesn't work (it usually doesn't), completely freeze and then hard-reboot. Yeay.

The Task Manager that many times also stopped responding or was permanently stuck behind a frozen full screen game?

On Linux, KDE has the plasma System Monitor, and if you can't use it for some reason you can switch your entire session to a TTY with CTRL+ALT+F2 and kill any process you want.

> you can switch your entire session to a TTY with CTRL+ALT+F2 and kill any process you want.

How intuitive. That's often disabled, and I've definitely had machines that were so frozen even that didn't work. I guess sysrq keys might have worked but if you're seriously going to suggest that you haven't understood the problem.

> The Task Manager that many times also stopped responding or was permanently stuck behind a frozen full screen game?

Hasn't happened once for me for as long as I can remember.

In fairness Linux has been pretty solid for me too after upgrading to 128GB of RAM and 64GB of swap. But I never needed to do that on Windows.

> Hasn't happened once for me for as long as I can remember.

I've had it happen to me, but the last time it did was probably around ~2017 or so on spinning rust. Fast SSDs make it a non-issue now.

Linux has a lot of inherent advantages here, like much deeper terminal support that let an agent make changes to practically any system setting on your behalf. Most importantly, if all else fails, the LLM agent can always check the source code to debug what's going on at the root, if you're using Linux. They don't have the option in Windows or MacOS.

This could mean that at some point, ironically Linux becomes the most user-friendly operating system for regular people as their AIs can diagnose and fix system issues and problems for them more easily than they can with proprietary operating systems.

I did this too, made switching my desktop to Linux so much smoother. I have a Windows laptop for my Windows needs and most of my gaming is fine on the Steam Deck, so I realized I didn't need to always boot into Windows only to use WSL.

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