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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, LLMs are not great at resolving linux issues, but they are better than what we've had in the past. Trying to use forums and web searches was exhausting, and you'd often deal with people who were trying to show how smart they are and rather than answering your questions they demand to know "what are you really trying to do?"

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> you'd often deal with people who were trying to show how smart they are and rather than answering your questions they demand to know "what are you really trying to do?"

In over 30 years of using the Internet I have seen this question form countless times, and I have posed it myself countless times.

I have never had it in mind to "show how smart I am", and cannot recall ever walking away with the impression that someone else was doing so.

The goal is to solve the other person's problem; the rationale is a genuine belief that the other person has an https://xyproblem.info/ . This belief is, often, motivated by confusion over the description of what's happened so far, or by the OP taking actions that seem inconsistent or needlessly convoluted.

Getting help from other people, as a beginner in a field (any field) requires accepting that you might not yet know the right question to ask, or how to ask it. That's just how knowledge works.

The worst thing about forums in my experience, by far, is people who pose as wanting help but who really just want to rant. Specifically for Linux forums, rant about Linux because it doesn't work like Windows.

Hard disagree. Claude with full access to a system is an amazing forensic, digging through obscure dumps, configuring tracing and measuring results, fast. It's also an amazing interface, from setting up environments, tweaking hidden parameters and everyday operations. I don't have such a customized (and functional) system since I was a way more energized teenager with plenty of time to fiddle around. Now it's instant.

I do think llm assisted linux has a bright future. It feels like scifi using a system with them, gluing all the power scattered in small tools.

They do pretty well at this, and like I said they're better than what we had before. But I've spent hours with LLMs trying to figure out kernel errors and going down rabbit holes that lead nowhere. Fortunately I've gotten pretty good at recognizing when this is happening.

LLM's also came at a time of search decay. Getting google to surface good results was approaching impossible, (although the new ai categories somehow are even worse as they are adding strange terms or location data to create new unrelated searches.)

Hopefully there is a middle ground, where I can explain to my crawler which results look good, which dont, what it got wrong, and it adapts. A return to crawler/surfacer agents that work to find and retrieve would be a step in the right direction.

I dare say LLMs were one of the things that finally pushed me over the top to be a full time Linux user. For a lifetime Windows user Linux novice like me they really helped me get unblocked on basic stuff like installing Nvidia drivers and setting up a samba share.

I totally disagree there. My medium-technical non-programmer friend completely installed set up Linux without my help using Claude. As the resident IT person among my friend group this blew my mind.

I’ve noticed that it’s helped me as well, because it’s able to give me diagnostic commands that I can run and report back with the results. For example, I fixed/set up a virtual machine with libvertd and I just wouldn’t have gotten that far without it, especially for when I broke the setup later.

> medium-technical non-programmer friend completely installed set up Linux without my help using Claude

I mean, not to do the HN thing, but I feel like if anything that's a bad sign for Linux that Claude was needed? Basically any desktop distro from the last decade has a simple GUI installer, if anything it's genuinely easier than installing Windows. I'd expect a medium-technical person to be able to handle it just fine, what did Claude help them with?

I do use LLMs for random debugging questions (most recently laptop dual graphics for instance) but the base install has always worked fine for me

> what did Claude help them with?

https://askubuntu.com/

There's decades of this stuff.

Conversely, my windows 11 has fundamental issues that neither google nor claude can find solutions to.

I wonder if AI recommends regular full reinstalls?

It’s like this on a fresh install too

This reminds me of how my journey from Windows 11 to CachyOS on my gaming desktop happened because of something like this.

I started getting driver crashes in certain games with my AMD 9070XT graphics card. Everything I tried didn’t work: DDU, reinstall, settings changes, etc.

I don’t know if it was AMD or Microsoft’s fault, but I don’t really care, because everything is more stable on Linux and I’ve been able to run 100% of what I want to run.

The Windows 11 ISO on a two year old Lenovo laptop did not have the Ethernet or WiFi driver. “Have Disk” also did not work for whatever reason when I downloaded the driver to a USB drive. I had to open up a command prompt within the Windows installer and run the GUI driver installer.

In Linux, I now have a custom Arch install which Gemini did help with a lot. It helped unblock significantly where I wanted to get fundamental understanding. A Debian installer will just work though (ironically, some years ago, I had issues with Ubuntu working out of the box but not Debian).

Mostly it was needed to help with stuff like making install USBs and helping with disk partitioning.

Like I said, this person is not really technical.

I don’t consider it a very bad thing in the sense that it’s not high friction to have to ask a question.

Also, more and more preinstalled options are available as time goes on. You can just order a framework laptop and have it come preinstalled with Ubuntu and everything will be working. You can buy a Steam Machine or Steam Deck and they have Linux preinstalled.

Linux Desktops are having a moment this year, but there are still all sorts of sharp edges that a user has to navigate.

Getting a laptop to properly hibernate such that the battery life is usable on the road is a whole roll-your-own-adventure.

WirePlumber apparently mis-classifies some headphones resulting in only input or output working in web meetings.

I've worked with Linux on the server side for over 20 years and these were just two Fedora issues that LLMs helped me sort out recently. If I had to spend a whole day debugging these items, I would likely be drifting back towards macOS or WSL2.

Getting Linux installed has always been the "easy" part. It's everything after that in daily operations that has been hard.

On the contrary, LLMs such as Claude Sonnet have been great for diagnosing complete system freezes that aren't logged, and handling iptables.

LLMs are fantastic for helping with Nix stuff. Particularly the error logs, because Nix errors are atrocious to read. Being able to throw the error at an LLM and have it get to the point of what I need to fix is nice.

I've also had it build me a nix flake for a piece of software that wasn't in the repo and save me a ton of effort running it.

If it can solve Nix issues that well, given how relatively obscure Nix is, I don't think it'll struggle with most topics. Though the entire Nix repo being written in Nix and on GitHub might give it a huge boost in training visibility. It's not like other Linux topics aren't also very well represented though.

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